Fine Arts Faculty Selects Modernist For Professorship

The Fine Arts Department has offered Jean Sutherland Boggs, director of the National Gallery of Canada, a full professorship. If Boggs accepts, she will be the department's only modernist and its second tenured woman.

Boggs said yesterday she will decide on the offer the next few weeks. She said she will visit Cambridge this week to "discuss everything with the administration."

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is seriously considering Boggs for the directorship of the museum, along with two other candidates for the position, a spokesman for the museum said before vacation.

But Boggs said yesterday, "The Boston Museum won't really offer the position unless it will be accepted," but she added, "it does hinge on my decision about the Harvard professorship."

John M. Rosenfield, Rockefeller Professor of Oriental Art and chairman of the department, said yesterday, "We're very hopeful, but not certain, that she will be coming to Harvard."

Rosenfield said before vacation, "almost half the concentrators in Fine Arts specialize in modern art. There has not been a tenured modernist on the department's faculty since Frederick B. Deknatel died three years ago