After 17 often tumultuous years as director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold L. Lehman announced on Tuesday that he is planning to retire around June of next year.
“This has been something I have been thinking about for a while,” Mr. Lehman said by telephone. “I turned three score and 10 this summer. It’s time.”
Mr. Lehman explained that the museum was about to embark on a major capital campaign drive aimed at beefing up its endowment. It is also planning further substantial renovations to the infrastructure of its Beaux-Arts building, which include redesigning more galleries and upgrading them. “Both of these projects could go on for at least five or six years,” he said. “A new pair of hands and a new brain will be good for the museum.”
Elizabeth A. Sackler, chairwoman of the board, said a committee is being formed to find a successor. “Arnold has had a tremendous run,” Ms. Sackler said by telephone. “He had a vision for our collection and our community and he bridged both those things beautifully.”
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Mr. Lehman made many attempts to reinvigorate the museum. But he will most likely be remembered for being at the center of one of the most bitter public fights in recent museum history when, in 1999, he presented “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” a show of art from the holdings of Charles Saatchi, the British advertising magnate. Although the show was widely popular and attracted some 170,000 visitors, Mr. Lehman was attacked by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Roman Catholic leaders for including an artwork by Chris Ofili depicting the Virgin Mary, decorated with elephant dung.
The mayor threatened to cut the city’s funding to the museum and accused it of colluding with Mr. Saatchi to inflate the value of his art. The museum faced scrutiny for financing the exhibition largely with donations from those who stood to profit from it. Adding to the protests was the revelation that Mr. Lehman had lied about having seen the show himself in London. Still, it was the first time many Americans had seen the work of a generation of British artists, of whom many, like Damien Hirst, Mr. Ofili and Tracey Emin, have gone on to be superstars.
“It was through that show that all those artists were introduced to an American museumgoing public,” Mr. Lehman recalled.
The “Sensation” brouhaha was just one of his struggles. Shortly after he arrived in Brooklyn from the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he had been director for 18 years, Mr. Lehman started making what at the time were considered audacious managerial decisions, ones that made him a kind of lightning rod. In 2006 he shook up the curatorial staff by replacing traditional departments like Egyptian art and European paintings and created two teams, one for collections and one for exhibitions — prompting the resignations of three longtime curators and two board members.
Still, over the years, Mr. Lehman increased the museum’s annual attendance to 558,788 visitors from 247,000. He also more than doubled the institution’s endowment, which is now $123 million, but was $55 million when he arrived in 1997. Since 1998, with the introduction of programs like First Saturdays, when the museum is open free until 11 p.m. on the first Saturday of almost every month, he has transformed the place into a kind of nightclub, with food, wine and live music. This popular event has helped turn the place into a hangout for Brooklyn residents and attract a significantly younger crowd.
“The average age of visitors in 1997 was around 58,” Mr. Lehman said. “A couple of years ago, it was about 35. Now, when I look around, I feel like everybody’s great-grandfather.”
He also made significant architectural changes to the museum’s classical McKim, Mead & White home, the most instantly visible being the redesign of its entrance, with a modern glass canopy. The design, by Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects LLC) included a newly conceived lobby and public plaza as well. He has also started systematically renovating the galleries to make them more coherent and climate-controlled.
Many exhibitions on view during Mr. Lehman’s tenure received significant international audiences, including “Monet and the Mediterranean,” in 1998, which drew 225,000 visitors; a show on Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2005 that attracted 184,000; and a show devoted to the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, in 2008, which drew 133,000. He also created a pioneering online presence around 2006, with crowd-sourced exhibitions that included public participation and have engaged thousands of new visitors.
But his goal, he said, was to attract “visitors from across the street as well as around the world.” To do so — often to the consternation of some curators and critics, who thought the institution was presenting too many lightweight shows rather than scholarly ones — he presented populist exhibitions like “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage,” in 2000, and “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” a 2002 show of costumes and drawings from the movies.
“For me, those Brooklyn shows fell under the category of material culture, a legitimate candidate for art museum display, though not necessarily approachable by traditional formalist critical standards,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in 2009. “I saw the hip-hop show twice. It was packed. Being a greenhorn, I asked my fellow viewers questions — who’s this, what’s that — and learned a lot. It was a great museum experience.”
It was also one that slowly started changing the demographics of the institution’s visitors. An audience survey conducted this year showed that members of minority groups made up more than 40 percent of the museum’s visitors. Seventeen years ago, it was a little more than half that figure, Mr. Lehman said.
Although some critics have said he has not taken advantage of the institution’s world-class permanent collection, which includes extraordinary Egyptian and American art, Mr. Lehman has presented more than 200 shows since 1997 that focused on museum holdings. He has also emphasized the work of local artists and feminist art. And, in 2007, he opened the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the only center of its kind in America.
Mr. Lehman informed the institution’s board of trustees at a meeting on Tuesday afternoon that he intended to leave around June 2015. When asked what he plans to do next, he paused and said: “Having time to read the piles of books and journals at home would be a great luxury. But really, I’m not going to think about it yet.”