Harvard's 250,000 Artworks

Thomas Lentz, the new head of the Harvard University Art Museums, has a portrait by British artist Lucian Freud and a large Franz Kline, one of his signature slashing black abstractions in his office. He doesn't have much time for gazing at art these days. He's in one of the greatest - and one of the toughest - positions in the museum world. He's taken charge of the university's art collection of 250,000 objects, a stunning total outnumbered in the United States by only three institutions: the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn Museum, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The storerooms are stuffed. Less than 1 percent of what the museum owns can fit in the galleries. And the small scale of the rooms dramatically restricts the ability to show contemporary art. For the full story - click the title Irish Art