What do you do when your museum director leaves after a short three-year stint just as you’re opening a major expansion of the institution with a new wing designed by a world-famous architect? If you’re the Cleveland Museum, you ask the director and the museum that hired him away to have the decency to delay the announcement until after the opening of the new wing:

“It was a total surprise,” said Alfred Rankin Jr., president of the Cleveland museum’s board of trustees. “Surprise is probably an understatement.” […]

Timothy Rub, who has led the Cleveland Museum of Art since 2006 and who just finished guiding construction of the museum’s gleaming new East Wing, has decided to leave his post in September to direct the Philadelphia Museum of Art. […]

“These are both great, great institutions,” Rub said. “For me the decision came down to was this something that personally I would really, really love to do. And the answer I concluded was yes.”

Art was the deciding factor. Rub said the Philadelphia collection “has strengths that are really aligned with my interests. Its holdings of early 20th-century art are unparalleled in this country.”

Director Timothy Rub leaving Cleveland Museum of Art to head Philadelphia Museum of Art (Bloomberg)