Richard Oldenburg, who served as the Museum of Modern Art’s lengthy director and oversaw acclaimed shows by Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne as well as a groundbreaking expansion that doubled the museum’s exhibition space in the 1980s, passed away in April 2018 at his Manhattan home. He was 84.
Mary Ellen, his wife, claimed that heart failure was to blame.
When MoMA hired Mr. Oldenburg to lead its publications department in 1969, he was a publishing executive.
Mr. Oldenburg’s older brother is the Pop Art sculptor Claes Oldenburg.
He had the opportunity to collaborate directly with curators and artists on publications and catalogs, which was a valuable experience for when the board of trustees named him director three years later.
“What I hadn’t realized when I went there was how central the publishing job is,” he told an interviewer in 1999 for the museum’s oral history project, “and that certainly was what led to everything else.”