More on Tom Krens from James Russell (and me) UPDATED

An early model of Frank Gehry's planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

A kinder, gentler assessment of Tom Krens' reign at the Guggenheim is provided today by James Russell of Bloomberg. Russell has approving words for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (and the rest of the proposed development in the Saadiyat Island Cultural District) and also praises what Krens did in New York:

Before Krens, the New York building was regarded as a curatorial black hole. He and savvy curators have shown that a wide variety of works not only can be displayed well in the space, they can thrive....Krens' view is not for everyone. Yet, at its best, it's amazing how alive his approach to art can be. Returning to the sleepy pre-Krens past is not an option for the Guggenheim. His high-wire act will be an extremely hard one to follow.

It figures that this would come from an architecture critic. Krens was not only adept at convincing others to buy into his out-of-the-box, ultimately unrealized schemes. He was also the perfect creative client, working closely with a variety of architects to coax from them some of their best work. As I wrote here, Krens once proudly showed me a breathtaking model of the now abandoned Guggenheim Rio project, designed by Jean Nouvel, and confided that he wasn't yet satisfied with a tall, silo-shaped structure that was part of the design: Its skin was completely opaque. "I have to tell Jean that I need more transparency here," he then told me.

Somehow the international reputations of architects who worked with Krens, like Nouvel and Zaha Hadid, were significantly burnished, not burned, by the association, even if (as usually happened) the designs remained unbuilt. What other museum director can boast not one but two museum shows displaying models of his (mostly failed) architectural ventures? The second link is to a subsection of the Guggenheim's own current Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective, which includes "designs that have been developed by Thomas Krens [not developed by the architects?] for Guggenheim museums."

As I said yesterday on New York Public Radio, Krens also daringly pushed the envelope in engaging Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda as a breathtaking venue for site-specific installations. These worked brilliantly when overseen by an artist installing a one-person show (as in the current Cai exhibition); not so well when the "intervention" was designed for a broad-ranging exhibition (think Jean Nouvel's paint-it-black concept for "Brazil").

UPDATE: Kate Taylor in today's NY Sun mentions no less than 12 imagined candidates for the Guggenheim directorship. I make it so much easier for search firm Phillips Oppenheim by choosing only one---Michael Govan. But Krens' former protegé is not an "outside of the box" choice, as the Guggenheim Foundation's president, Jennifer Stockman, indicated that she may prefer.

Still, we can all take some comfort from this passage in the Sun's article:

Ms. Stockman said that the board is not looking for someone to expand the museum's global network further. "We want to get back to our mission of being first and foremost an art museum," she said.