Sacred and Stolen: Confessions of a Museum Director

From Meryl Moss Media:

Gary Vikan is an Ivy League scholar of late ancient and medieval art who has collected priceless artworks while dealing with shady dealers and duplicitous government officials, reminiscent of the adventures of Indiana Jones. Vikan’s amazing career and its impact on the art world is recounted in his riveting and often amusing memoir, SACRED AND STOLEN: Confessions of a Museum Director (SelectBooks, September 20, 2016).

He'll be discussing the international market in stolen and forged antiquities at the Chappaqua Library Nov. 4.

Vikan, who retired after 19 years as the director of the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore, had a career more adventurous than most fiction novels. From his beginnings as a printer’s devil at his father’s tiny weekly newspaper in northern Minnesota, to his unlikely calling as an art historian, to his ascension at the Walters as an internationally renowned expert in medieval art, Vikan’s career was as Byzantine as the art period he loves.

To the public, his career seemed to be about carefully lit exhibits, opening-day press conferences and glittering donor dinners. But what went on behind the scenes would shock his traditional patrons. Forgeries, thefts, black market dealers, political intrigue and cash incentives were par for the course as Vikan grew the Walters into a major player on the international stage. His dream was to create a transcendent sense of wonder, or what he refers to as “the numinous,” for the average museum visitor. “Great art should make you feel as if you are in the presence of the divine,” Vikan says.

From the prairies of the Upper Midwest, to Princeton, to the legendary Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, to the Menil Collection, to the Walters, Vikan traced a path that was simultaneously that of an art historian, a theologian and a small-town kid from Minnesota. How he lived this adventure and reveled in its chaos is a tale that is at once shockingly revealing of the art world, and has no fictitious equal.

GARY VIKAN was Director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore from 1994 to 2013; from 1985 to 1994, he was the museum’s Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Medieval Art. Before coming to Baltimore, Vikan was Senior Associate at Harvard’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. A native of Minnesota, he received his BA from Carleton College and his Ph.D. from Princeton University; he is a graduate of the Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors and the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program.

Photo Courtesy of Meryl Moss Media, INC.