FREE and Open to the Public

Sponsored by Northern Trust

This impressive series features some of the world’s foremost art historians, curators, artists, and collectors. A cocktail hour for Collectors Circle members only, also sponsored by Northern Trust, will be held one hour before the lecture. Seymour Gordon is President of the Collectors Circle.

Thursday, April 3, 6:30 p.m.: This lecture provides an opportunity to meet Dr. Kenneth Wayne, the guest curator for the MFA’s impressive 50^th anniversary exhibition in 2015. That show will spotlight art created on the French coasts by Monet, Matisse, Raoul and Jean Dufy, and Renoir, among others, and will complement the Museum’s own superlative collection of French art.

On this visit, Dr. Wayne will take “A Fresh Look at the Art and Life of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920).” While Curator of Modern Art at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, he organized Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse. This was the first major U.S. show on the artist in more than 40 years and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The Toronto Globe and Mail named it one of the top 12 exhibitions in the world in 2002-2003 and Jed Perl of The New Republic called it “an unforgettable museum-going experience.”

Now an independent curator and consultant, Dr. Wayne has served as the Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Senior Consulting Curator for The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City and Chief Curator of the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York. He has also been the Joan Whitney Payson Curator at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where he specialized in nineteenth to mid-twentieth century European art.

Several of his past exhibitions relate directly to the MFA’s new one: Impressions of the Riviera: Monet, Renoir, Matisse and their Contemporaries; Raoul Dufy; and Monet to Matisse: The Origins of Modernism. Dr. Wayne is one of nine advisory board members of the Musée Rodin in Paris, has lectured around the world, and is widely published. He holds his PhD from Stanford University and his BA with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley, both in art history, and his MA in modern art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.