AMSTERDAM.- The Rijksmuseum announces that Jane Turner will become Head of the Print Room as from 1 September 2011. She is the fourteenth international expert to strengthen the Rijksmuseum in the run-up to the reopening in 2013. Turner (1956, US) is an internationally renowned art historian and specialist in Dutch 16th and 17th-century drawings with an impressive career to date. At this moment she is editor of New York journal Master Drawings, the most important journal in the field, a position she has held since 2004, and she is also working for London’s Victoria & Albert Museum on the catalogue of Dutch drawings to be published at the end of this year.

Taco Dibbits, Director of Rijksmuseum Collections commented, “It’s fantastic news that Jane has agreed to become head of the Print Room in this exciting run-up to the reopening of the Rijksmuseum in 2013. She is very driven and an expert in her field with a passion for drawings, prints and photography. She also brings her large international network with her. We can look forward to an active and original programme of exhibitions from the Print Room.”

Jane Turner
Having studied art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Jane Turner started her career at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, where she was one of the three authors of the permanent catalogue of Netherlandish and Flemish drawings (1991) and the main author of their catalogue of Dutch drawings (2006). She developed her extensive knowledge and demonstrated her excellent organisational skills as editor of the 34-volume art encyclopaedia Dictionary of Art. Turner will continue her job as editor with the journal Master Drawings, based in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, besides her new job in the Rijksmuseum.

The Print Room
The Rijksmuseum Print Room is one of the top five in the world. The collection is internationally oriented with a focus on prints and drawings from the Dutch Golden Age. Over the past few years, great efforts have also been made to establish a representative overview of 20th-century Dutch prints and drawings. The collection includes many important examples of 19th and 20th-century photography. In total, the collection comprises more than 800,000 paper-based works. Turner succeeds Ger Luijten, who has been director of the Fondation Custodia in Paris since 2010.