Thomas Messer, longtime director of the Guggenheim Museum, has died

Thomas M. Messer in 1985 (photo: nytimes.com)

New York - Thomas Maria Messer, the former renowned director of the world-famous New York Guggenheim Museum, passed away on Wednesday in New York at the age of 93. This was announced by The New York Times. A native of Bratislava, who grew up in Prague during the interwar period, came to the USA under dramatic circumstances just before the war in 1939. He began working at the museum in 1961 and led it for 27 years.
    The New York Times described Messer in his obituary as one of the most respected figures in American modern exhibitionism. The Czechoslovak-born director elevated the Solomon Guggenheim Museum among the most significant cultural institutions in the USA, expanded its collections, and transformed it into a global institution. He trained a whole generation of curators, and his management methods were always accommodating and non-confrontational.
    "He brought charm and the values of the old world into the American institution," said Lisa Dennison, head of Sotheby's American office and former colleague of Messer, to the American newspaper. "He managed to foster an incredible dialogue between post-war American and European art."
    Messer was born into a family of an art historian; his mother came from a musical background. His journey from Prague to the world began dramatically when, at the start of the war in September 1939, the ship Athenia, on which he was traveling to Britain, was sunk by a German submarine. Messer saved himself and made it to the USA. During the war, he served in Europe as an interpreter for American military intelligence.
    After the war, he worked in a small museum in Roswell, New Mexico, and later at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He left the position of head of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan in 1988, the same year he also left the Guggenheim Foundation, which he had managed since 1980.
    Whenever Messer traveled to Europe after 1989, he always tried to visit Prague, which he considered his favorite place in Europe.