This was the most volatile year in memory for the visual arts in Boston. Institutions changed course. Museum curators and directors departed; some were replaced. Shows varied from superb to shoddy, new public art from triumphant to disastrous.
Ellsworth Kelly's murals for Boston's new federal courthouse are the principal public-art triumph, with the Irish Famine Memorial in Downtown Crossing the main disaster. Kelly's bold monochromatic rectangles define a vast space that might otherwise feel bleak and blank. The Famine Memorial, meanwhile, reduces a great tragedy to a sentimental cartoon - and a badly designed one, at that.
The Museum of Fine Arts made news that affected its oldest art and its newest. The new galleries for Egyptian and Near Eastern art offer a handsome setting for some of the museum's most popular treasures, a list topped by its world-class mummies - which were formerly confined to quarters that suggested ''The Mummy's Curse.''
After two years without a contemporary curator, the MFA finally named Cheryl Brutvan to the post. Brutvan, who spent the last 15 years at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., organized the splendid Sylvia Plimack Mangold show that came to the MFA in 1995. Her ability to function as a champion of contemporary art in a major encyclopedic museum remains to be seen. Her arrival came not a moment too soon, in the wake of slick commercial exhibitions including ''Wallace & Gromit,'' a show-cum-shop dedicated to the Brit claymation figures. ''Wallace'' was a new low for the MFA.
In her brief tenure at the Worcester Art Museum, contemporary curator Jessica Morgan demonstrated how new work ought to operate alongside older art. The ''Blurring the Boundaries'' installation show she oversaw was a brilliant case of integrating new work with old: Anish Kapoor's red gash in the wall in the same room with Early Italian paintings featuring stigmata; Tony Cragg's beige wall relief made of plastic junk parked near Egyptian sculpture in beige stone.
Morgan announced her departure from Worcester less than a year after she arrived. She's taking a curatorial post at the Institute of Contemporary Art, a chronic underachiever on the Boston scene. New ICA director Jill Medvedow is changing that. She's already increased the ICA's visibility with this fall's inaugural round of her ''Vita Brevis'' temporary public art projects. Best of the first four - collectively called ''Let Freedom Ring'' - was Krzysztof Wodiczko's Bunker Hill Monument projections of bereaved mothers whose sons had been killed in Charlestown's street wars.
Stats to impress and depress: The DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park in Lincoln has had 125,000 visitors this year; the Institute of Contemporary Art, 21,000; the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, 9,000, despite having the most comprehensive collection of contemporary art in New England. Gallery space is part of the problem for the Rose and the ICA, both architectural nightmares with prominent staircases slicing through their centers. The Rose has no dedicated gallery to exhibit its fine holdings, a problem that Joseph Ketner - the Rose's new director, who replaced the much-loved Carl Belz - will have to tackle.
With a handsome new $6 million wing that opened this year, the DeCordova has become the region's big museum success story. It's also the DeCordova's clarity of mission that distinguishes it: The museum focuses on contemporary New England art. That new space has already seen stellar shows, including retrospectives by painter Michael Mazur and holographer Harriet Casdin-Silver. The Casdin-Silver show includes 30 years' worth of work by a pioneer in the field, an artist who has demonstrated that holography goes beyond gimmickry, that it can be as expressive as conventional sculpture or painting.
Among the most significant of the many comings and goings in area museums this year was the departure of Katy Kline and Helaine Posner from MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Kline, the List's director, became director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine; Posner is an independent curator in New York. MIT has yet to name replacements.
Phillips Academy in Andover named former Whitney Museum of American Art curator Adam Weinberg as director of its Addison Gallery of American Art. Weinberg replaces John M. ''Jock'' Reynolds, who left to become director of the Yale University Art Center. The Addison had a banner year in exhibitions, with solo turns by Frank Stella and Hans Hofmann and a landmark examination of Arthur Dove. The Dove show's curator, Debra Bricker Balken, offered more than 80 ravishing and revolutionary paintings, which successfully argued that Dove is as good as - or better than - more famous peers including Georgia O'Keeffe.
Like the Dove show at Andover, other 1998 standouts appeared in the region's many school-affiliated museums. Harvard's Sackler Museum presented ''Princes, Poets & Paladins,'' exquisite little paintings from Iran, Turkey, and India, dating from the 14th through 20th centuries, all owned by Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan. And the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College presented a superb show of the looming, ragged, complex wooden sculptures of Ursula Von Rydingsvard.
Most of what I saw in 1998 was in museums rather than commercial galleries, but, in the latter category, Paul Stopforth's ''Essential Gestures'' was an exemplary instance of an artist's successful transformation. Once a painter of politically charged themes, Stopforth is now a sculptor of enchanting little Everymen, whom he placed on poles and scattered around the room.
At the MFA, guest curator and Monet scholar Paul Tucker pulled off the nearly impossible feat of a relevant, necessary exhibition of work by the painter who now ranks as the most overexposed in history. Tucker's ''Monet in the 20th Century'' showed the master reinventing himself as a modernist, expanding his canvases both in scale and daring. One painting in the show turned out to have a shaky provenance, with evidence pointing to its having been looted from a Jewish collector by the Nazis. If that turns out to be true, the story may have a happy ending, with the painting restored to his heirs.
