Cheat Sheet on Timothy Potts, New Director of the Getty Museum

WIKILOOT,caccia alle antichità saccheggiate nei Musei del Mondo

On Feb 14th, Getty CEO James Cunoannounced to staff that Timothy Potts had been named as the new director of the Getty Museum, the wealthiest art museum in the world. He will start in September.

Potts comes with an impressive provenance. He was trained as an archaeologist at the University of Sydney and Oxford, where he received his doctorate in Near Eastern art and archeaology. He dug for several years at Pella in Jordan, where he was co-director. And after a stint at Lehman Brothers, Potts directed the National Gallery of Victoria (1994 – 1998), the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth Texas (1998 – 2007) and most recently the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Despite his background in field archaeology, Potts has more recently held some controversial views on the collecting of unprovenanced antiquities. Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

As director of the Kimbell, Potts helps build the antiquities collection of the Ft. Worth museum, which…