Douglas MacAgy
Douglas Guernsey MacAgy Canadian-born American curator, museum director, art historian, author, and academic administrator. He served as the director of the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco from 1945 to 1950.
Early life and education
Douglas G. MacAgy was born in 1913, in Winnipeg. He attended the University of Toronto, the Barnes Foundation, the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London, the University of Pennsylvania, the Cleveland School of Art and Case Western Reserve University.His first marriage was in 1941 to art historian Jermayne Noble for a number of years, and ended in divorce. MacAgy was remarried in 1955 to Elizabeth Tillett.
Career
In 1941, he worked as an assistant curator to Grace Morley, who was the director of the San Francisco Museum of Art. He was later promoted to curator. From 1945 until 1950, MacAgy served as the director of the California School of Fine Arts in North Beach, San Francisco, succeeding William A. Gaw. MacAgy transformed the school through his promotion of Modernism. When he resigned from the role at CSFA in 1950 he was succeeded by Ernest Karl Mundt, and MacAgy started a new role as the executive director of Orbit Films.MacAgy was a special consultant to the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; and also worked as director of research for an art dealer in New York City, Wildenstein & Company.
MacAgy served as the director of the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts from 1959 to 1963. Under his leadership, the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts had merged in 1963 to form the Dallas Museum of Art.
MacAgy was the director of national exhibitions at the National Endowment for the Arts, from 1968 to 1972. In 1972, he was selected as the curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Death
MacAgy died at age 60 on September 6, 1973, at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., after suffering from a heart attack a month earlier. He is buried at Hillside Cemetery in Deer Isle, Maine.Posthumously the book, Douglas MacAgy and the Foundations of Modern Art Curatorship by David Beasley was published.