My friend Richard Verdi, who has died aged 81, had two roles at the University of Birmingham – as a professor of fine art and as director of the university’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
The Barber Institute had been opened in 1939, but until the arrival of Richard in 1990 had been treated as a kind of private club, reserved mainly for students and lecturers for research purposes and largely unknown to the wider world.
Richard changed all that. Ably assisted by the institute’s senior curator, Paul Spencer-Longhurst, and its administrator, Sophie Wilson, he began to open up its core collection to the public by mounting a series of exhibitions based on individual masterworks within the archive, plus loans from around the world.
He also made acquisitions of new works of art for the Barber, including Rubens’ Portrait of a Carmelite Prior, Derain’s Portrait of Bartolomeo Savona and Matthias Stom’s Isaac Blessing Jacob. In addition he introduced a public engagement programme featuring open days, set up a Barber Friends organisation and created workshops for families and schools
The reputation that Richard developed at the Barber Institute also led him to be commissioned to curate exhibitions at other places, including Cézanne and Poussin (Scottish National Gallery, 1992), Poussin (Royal Academy, 1995) and Art Treasures of England: Regional Collections (RA, 1998).
Richard was born in New York to Frank and Anne. He went to the Paul D Schreiber high school before taking a degree in music at the University of Michigan, followed by a master’s in art history at the University of Chicago.
In 1967 he moved to London to take up a fellowship at the Courtauld Institute, where he gained a doctorate and his supervisor was the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, Anthony Blunt. When Blunt was later exposed as a Soviet spy, Richard helped to protect him from press intrusion by allowing him to stay for a time at his home. He regarded Blunt as a special influence on his life and was therefore happy to provide him with some protection.
After his doctorate Richard became a lecturer in the history of art at the University of Manchester (1968-71) and at the University of York (1972-89), where he rose to be a senior lecturer. His move to Birmingham as professor was followed a year later by his appointment as director of the Barber Institute. In 2007, the year of his retirement, he was appointed OBE.
In his private life, Richard shared his love of art and music with his long-term partner, John Brooks, an army officer, and enjoyed looking after their two parrots, Lilli and Lotte. The last exhibition he mounted at the Barber Institute was The Parrot in Art in 2007.
John died in 2004. Richard is survived by his brother, Robert.
