Xavier F. Salomon, the current Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator of The Frick Collection in New York, has been chosen by the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Board of Trustees, following an international recruitment process, as Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. Salomon will succeed António Filipe Pimentel, who will retire at the beginning of next year.
Xavier F. Salomon was born in Rome and grew up between Italy and the United Kingdom. He was educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he received his BA in art history, his MA and his PhD with a thesis on “The Religious Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571-1621)”. He has worked at the British Museum and at the National Gallery in London, before joining, in 2006, Dulwich Picture Gallery as the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator. At Dulwich, Salomon curated many exhibitions on artists such as Guido Reni, Paolo Veronese, Salvator Rosa, Anthony van Dyck, Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly.
In 2011, he joined the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as Curator of Southern Baroque, in charge of Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th century, French 17th-century and Spanish paintings.
In 2014, he curated the monographic exhibition Paolo Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice at the National Gallery in London. Since 2014, he has been Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection in New York where he curated exhibitions on artists such as Guido Cagnacci, Paolo Veronese, Antonio Canova, Giambattista Tiepolo, Luigi Valadier, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. He also worked on projects with contemporary artists such as Doron Langberg, Salman Toor, Jenna Gribbon, Nicolas Party, and Flora Yukhnovich. In 2022, he curated the exhibitions James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Chefs d’oeuvre de la Frick Collection, New York at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Polish Rider. The King’s Rembrandt at the Royal Łazienki Museum, Warsaw and Wawel Royal Castle, Kraków.
In recent years, he supervised the renovation of the galleries at the Frick, moving them first in 2021 to Frick Madison and then back to the historic location of the museum, which reopened in April 2025. He is the author of the acclaimed online series Cocktails with a Curator and Travels with a Curator and of the book thereon (2022). He is widely published and his scholarly articles have appeared in The Burlington Magazine, Apollo, Journal of the History of Collections, Master Drawings, Metropolitan Museum Journal, and the Boletín del Museo del Prado, among others. He was a Rome Scholar at The British School at Rome in 2002–03, a Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, Virginia in 2017, and a Leigh Fermor House Fellow, at the Benaki Museum, Athens in 2024.
His main areas of expertise are art and patronage in 17th– and 18th-century Rome and Venice, and the painters Paolo Veronese and Rosalba Carriera. He is currently working on a new catalogue raisonné of Paolo Veronese’s drawings and one of Rosalba Carriera’s works, while working also on the catalogue of the Spanish paintings at the Frick Collection. In 2018, Salomon was nominated Cavaliere della Stella d’Italia by the Italian President of the Republic.
About the Museum
The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum houses the collection gathered by Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian throughout his life (1869-1955). The collection includes more than 6,000 pieces from antiquity to the early 20th century, including Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Islamic and Far Eastern art, as well as European numismatics, paintings and decorative arts. Currently closed, the Museum will reopen in the summer of 2026, after the extensive renovation of the air conditioning, lighting and security systems in its galleries.
