Colin Bailey (museum director)


Colin B. Bailey is the director of the Morgan Library & Museum. He has previously held directorial and curatorial posts at a number of North American art museums, including The Frick Collection and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He is a scholar in 18th- and 19th-century French art, especially that of Pierre-August Renoir.
One of his books, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, was awarded the Mitchell Prize for best art history book of 2002-2003.

Education

Bailey received his doctorate in art history from Oxford University. Shortly thereafter he was awarded a fellowship at the Getty Museum's paintings department. He found the experience so significant that he decided to pursue museum work instead of academic work.

Career

Bailey started his curatorial career as an assistant curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he worked from 1985 to 1989. In 1989 he began working as curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Kimbell Art Museum and he was appointed to senior curator there in 1990. In 1995 Bailey began working as chief curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and was appointed Deputy Director and Chief Curator in 1998. In 2000 he became the Chief Curator of The Frick Collection where he would later be promoted to Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Alongside his curatorial posts he taught graduate seminars in art history at Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
While at the Frick, Bailey was an inaugural fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership beginning in 2008. Bailey credits this program with shifting his aspirations from the curatorial to the directorial. The Center exposed him to his first formal training in management techniques and to the idea that active curators with skills in management, finance, strategy, and diplomacy could play important roles in the future of their institutions. Near the end of his program at the center, Bailey held at a residency at the Louvre, closely observing its director, Henri Loyrette.
From 2013 to 2015, Bailey was the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, overseeing both the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. In August 2015 Bailey was appointed director of the Morgan Library & Museum.

Awards and honors

As author

As editor