Jon Seydl

Director of Curatorial Affairs, Worcester Art Museum

Jon Seydl directs the Curatorial department of the Worcester Art Museum, as well as the Conservation, Registration, and Collections and Exhibition Services departments. He is also the Museum’s curator of European art. Recognized for his specialty in 17th and 19th-century Italian art, Seydl last served as the Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos, Jr., Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Seydl’s other former positions include Program Specialist at the National Endowment for the Humanities Program, followed by Research Coordinator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He joined the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2002 as Assistant Curator of Paintings before becoming an Associate Curator of Paintings in 2006. He came to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. Since then, he has reinstalled and thematically reinterpreted Cleveland’s entire collection of European Art as part of the Museum’s renovation and expansion project. Seydl has curated and co-curated many major exhibitions, including Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile (2005), Tiepolo Oil Sketches (2005), From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Painting from Dresden (2006), Rembrandt in America (2011-12), and The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection (2012-13). Seydl wrote the catalogue for Tiepolo Oil Sketches (2005), which he curated at the Getty, and has co-edited two volumes of essays: Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951-1972 and Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 2013, the Association of Art Museum Curators awarded him the Outstanding Catalogue Essay prize for “The Last Days of Pompeii.” Seydl completed his BA in art history at Yale University and received his MA and PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. He specialized in 17th and 18th-century Italian Art and wrote his dissertation on images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the 18th century.