Xavier Salomon


Xavier F. Salomon is a British art historian, critic, curator, and museum director. Until November 2025, he was the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick Collection in New York. In 2026, he will become the new Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, succeeding António Filipe Pimentel, who will retire at the beginning of the year.

Education and career

Salomon was born in Rome, to an English mother and Danish father. He completed his BA, MA, and his PhD in art history at the Courtauld Institute in London, writing his dissertation on the artworks commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini.
He previously served as the Curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was responsible for organizing and overseeing important exhibitions that highlighted key works of European art. Prior to that, he was the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery, where he curated several notable exhibitions.
He is particularly well known for his expertise on the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Veronese.
From April 2020 through July 2021, he hosted an online program, "Cocktails with a Curator", with fellow Frick curators Aimee Ng and Giulio Dalvit. The program examined artworks at the Frick and had 66 episodes, which are available on YouTube and are the basis of a book by Rizzoli Electra.

Works