Jean-Luc Bordeaux

Board Member Emeritus

Jean-Luc Bordeaux, Ph.D. UCLA in 1969. Samuel H. Kress Fellow in 1971 (a grant of $10,000 in 1971-1971, the largest in the US ever at that time). Charge de Mission at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu from 1969 to 1978, Charge de Mission, the Musee de La Legion d’Honneur in San Francisco in 1975, and Charge de Mission, Musee du Louvre, Dept. of Paintings, 1979 and 1980. Former Head Expert and Director, Christie’s France & Monaco, OMP & OMD, 1988- 1994. Published scholarly essays in the Burlington Magazine, La Gazette des Beaux Arts, The quarterly J. Paul Getty Journal, Artibus et Historiae, Connaissance des Arts, International Art magazine, Art in America, L’Objet d’Art, Apollo, etc… Organized, curated and/or co-authored numerous exhibition.

I was the first art historian from Southern California to have implemented at the university level a real Museum Studies Program for CSUN in 1973-1974 (three courses: History of Museums and Collecting, Conservation and Restoration Techniques at the Getty, Graduate courses in Connoisseurship of specific fields (taught by local museum and/or university experts). Both LACMA and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu helped us at that time with some part-time faculties and internships. Exhibitions like “Baroque Paintings from the J. Paul Getty Museum,” “Roman Portraits from the J. Paul Getty Museum,” Selections from the Heeramaneck Collection in LACMA, “The Callahan Retrospective” with MOMA in New York were organized and curated by CSUN Art History students under my leadership during the 1970’s. When I left CSUN in 1979 to work in Paris at the Louvre as a Charge de Mission, the entire program collapsed and never recovered even after I came back, simply because our deans and other faculties did not understand the academic and publicity, and fund-raising potential of the program.

Much later CSU Long Beach and USC run and develop their own Museum Studies Programs along with granting official Museum Studies Certificates at the end of their student’s successful and completed internships in our West Coast museums. Laurie Fusco from the Getty and later Selma Holo at USC established and developed a more formal MS program – modeled after my original program – between their universities and both the Getty and LACMA.