Like many a careerist taking a new job, Minneapolis Institute of Arts architecture curator Christopher Monkhouse is most distressed at the thought of having to sell his house to move to Chicago. By coincidence, he accepted a new post at the Art Institute of Chicago just when William Griswold, director of the Minneapolis museum, announced that he'll be leaving early in 2008 to head the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. The two departures are "completely unrelated," Griswold said, adding that Monkhouse was a "great curator" whose departure will be a huge loss. Designed in 1962 by Hungarian-born New York architect Marcel Breuer, Monkhouse's house is a flat-roofed modernist masterpiece nestled into a bluff with a spectacular view of St. Paul. Monkhouse, 60, who joined the museum's staff in 1995, bought the house six years ago and wanted never to move again. Breuer (1902-1981) is internationally known as the architect of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and as creator of a clever concatenation of bent-steel tubing and leather called the Wassily chair (1925). In Minnesota he is remembered as the designer of the campus, chapel and a half-dozen buildings at St. John's University in Collegeville. In fact, Breuer originally designed Monkhouse's home for Frank Kacmarcik, an ecclesiastical designer who advised the architect on the St. John's project. "I love it here. I truly do. I love my house, my department and my wonderful staff at the museum," said Monkhouse recently as he took a break from writing an essay on "Weather vanes and whirligigs. What else, my dear?"
A magpie for factoids and never wont to overlook a detail, he immediately launched into an impromptu history of Minnesota roof ornaments, the subject of his next exhibition, "Wind and Whimsy," running Nov. 17 through April 13, 2008. "It is the 150th anniversary of the Archangel Gabriel weather vane that sat atop the Winslow House Hotel in Minneapolis and is on loan to the institute from the Hennepin County Historical Society," he explained, adding in a breathless rush, "It was the first outdoor public sculpture in the Twin Cities and is, you could argue, where the Walker Sculpture Garden and the institute's Target Park, to say nothing of those sculpture parks in St. Paul, all come from." As much as Monkhouse loves his current post with its lavish title - he's the James Ford Bell Curator of Decorative Arts, Sculpture, Architecture, Design and Craft - he could not pass up Chicago, where he will have a more streamlined but no less grand moniker: Chairman and Eloise Martin Curator of European Decorative Arts. (The names refer to people whose bequests or endowments pay the salary.) He previously curated decorative-arts and architecture departments at the Rhode Island School of Design (1976-1991) and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1991-1995). In Minneapolis he developed an architecture program and wooed collections of modernist design, turned-wood sculpture, Chinese export porcelain and 20th-century ceramics. He also bought World's Fair items for the museum, co-organized a show themed to the Mississippi River and helped install four historic rooms. Monkhouse's new job in Chicago starts in October. He'll have the chance to reinstall one of the country's top decorative-arts collections in a museum that is adding a wing designed by Renzo Piano. The museum's former board president, John Bryan, is also a serious architecture buff and generous patron of the decorative-arts department, which means that Monkhouse can anticipate significant support for ambitious projects.
"When you turn 60, unlike 50, you're looking at the last decade of your professional career and you say, `Have I done everything I want to?' " said Monkhouse, who flipped the calendar this spring. "This is a chance to work with an extraordinary collector in a great museum. Who could ask for anything more?"
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