New Getty President and CEO: James Wood

UPDATE: A MAN Q&A with James Wood should be online by 2:45pm ET.

We had an inkling... First on MAN: The new president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust is James Wood. He'll start work in Los Angeles in February. UPDATE: Read MAN's Q&A with James Wood here.

Wood, 65, ran the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1980-2004. Prior to directing the AIC, Wood was the director of the St. Louis Art Museum for five years. He has maintained his St. Louis ties by chairing the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

Interim president/CEO Deborah Marrow will return to running the Getty Foundation in February.

What we think: Wood is a first-class choice. I wrote back in February that it was important for the Getty to hire an art person to run the Trust, and Wood has strong art world credentials.

I also wrote that I hoped that the Getty would hire someone with Los Angeles ties. Wood has none. He sits on the boards of the Clark Art Institute, the IFA at NYU, HUAM, and the RISD museum. Oh well. There's no question it's more important that the Getty be run by an art guy.

In addition to the issues discussed here ad absurdem for several years, one of the Getty's biggest problems in recent years has been a brain drain, an exodus of top-notch talent. Expect Wood to be a stabilizing force. I think the staff would have loved anybody with an art background, but Wood's background should be especially appealing.

Finally: The flow of Easterners heading to Los Angeles continues. New Yorkers Annie Philbin and Gary Garrels went to the Hammer. New Yorker Michael Govan runs LACMA. Michael Brand went from Virginia to the Getty Museum. And now Wood to the Getty Trust. (And who could forget: MOCA's Jeremy Strick is an ex-AICer. So with Wood at the Meier-on-the-hill, maybe we're one step closer to Michael Kimmelman's fantasy of the Getty buying MOCA, ha ha.)