What would you do with 250,000 pieces of art?

One of the perks of directing an art museum is getting to root around in storage for a little something to decorate your office. What directors have hanging on their walls acts as something of an introduction.

In the case of Thomas Lentz, who arrived in Cambridge one year ago this month to become the head of the Harvard University Art Museums, it's a portrait by British artist Lucian Freud, on loan from a collector. From Harvard's own collections there's a large 1950 Franz Kline, one of his signature slashing black abstractions, and an Iznik tile, made about four centuries earlier, and, in Lentz's opinion, clearly drawn by a royal artist.

Lentz, 53, specializes in Islamic art, hence the tile. Patterned in vivid blue, green, and red, the tile is about a sixth the size of the Kline. ''But I think the Kline is overpowered by it," he adds.

He doesn't have much time for gazing at art these days. He's in one of the greatest -- and one of the toughest -- positions in the museum world. He's taken charge of the university's art collection of 250,000 objects, a stunning total outnumbered in the United States by only three institutions: the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn Museum, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

The collections are extraordinary, but the three museums that Lentz oversees -- the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger, and the Sackler -- weren't built to house the tens of thousands of objects Harvard now owns, all of which are stored on-site. The storerooms are stuffed. Less than 1 percent of what the museum owns can fit in the galleries. And the small scale of the rooms dramatically restricts the ability to show modern and contemporary art.

''Physical expansion," says Lentz, ''is my number one priority."

But lack of space is only one of the challenges facing Lentz. The share of Harvard's priceless holdings that lives in the Fogg Art Museum is endangered by the very architecture it inhabits, which lacks the climate control and other basic conditions expected in museums of the 20th century -- never mind the 21st. Most of the Fogg isn't air-conditioned. It's sweltering in summer. The electrical wiring is the original, from 1927. Lack of other basics, including a loading dock for ferrying massive artworks in and out of the building, only adds to the problem.

''The infrastructure is so poor," Lentz says, ''that it's beginning to impact our operations." Asking other museums for loans is difficult when you can't match the conditions the works enjoy in their home institutions.

Not that Harvard has great holdings in 20th and 21st century work. ''The collection thins out in those areas, and if we don't have them, our teaching is severely compromised," he says. ''We're forced to present a selective art history, while our own art history department is comprehensive."

Transitioning from selective to comprehensive involves real estate -- major real estate, either by expanding to cover every square inch of the Fogg's land or with a new museum, possibly on the new campus Harvard is considering in Allston, or both.

The first thing Lentz did on arriving at the Fogg was to launch an intense planning process to figure out what the new museum should be, and given the enormity of the project, he's taking his time. The Fogg has been added on to here and there over the decades -- the Busch, a wing for drawings, and the conservation center on top of the building are relatively recent examples -- without any grand vision. Lentz has to formulate one. And he has to get it right. ''We have to build a museum," he says, ''that will function through the 21st century and beyond."

A massive undertaking
That kind of planning is a meticulous, methodical process involving endless meetings with curators, donors, and the Harvard administration.

''You don't see progress immediately when you're facing the kind of major strategical and logistical issues that he is," says George Abrams, a collector and major donor to the Fogg who has sat on its visiting committee for 36 years.

Moving 200,000 objects out of the Fogg -- the other 50,000 or so are in the Sackler -- and finding a temporary home where at least a hefty selection of them will be accessible to students and the public is just the beginning of the project. Without that accessibility, it's possible that during the three to four years the Fogg will be closed for its makeover, an entire undergraduate class of Harvard students could miss the Fogg experience that has turned out hundreds of museum professionals.

Another of Lentz's goals, to ''move the art museums from the periphery of the university to its center," will be especially difficult to achieve while the Fogg is shut.

The building headache isn't Lentz's only problem. He must tackle the competition for real estate and attention among Harvard's many departments and institutions and among the three art museums themselves. He must address the history of acrimonious town-gown relations with the City of Cambridge.

Can Lentz transform the Fogg?

''Yes," answers James Cuno, his predecessor, who directed the museums for 11 years and is now director of the Art Institute of Chicago. ''He has all the patience and gravity that I lack."

However similar their ultimate goals for the Fogg, their styles are opposite. Cuno was the hare, bursting with ideas he wanted to implement speedily. Lentz is the tortoise who will see the immensely complex rebuilding through.

Cuno's ambitious plan for a riverside museum designed by Renzo Piano was ultimately defeated by objections from Cambridge neighbors and lukewarm support from Harvard itself after the departure of Neil Rudenstine, the Harvard president who championed Cuno. Rudenstine's successor, Lawrence Summers, was not in Cuno's camp.

''Tom has the advantage of being the choice of the current university administration," Cuno says. ''It's in their interest that he succeed. And he has an appropriate skepticism about the place. For a lot of people, Harvard is so seductive they overlook the reality that the place has ordinary problems on an extraordinary scale. Tom won't."

Exploring the unfamiliar
Lentz's path in the museum world was a straight shot. He was studying art history at Claremont Men's College in California. ''I was bored with school and curious about the wider world," he says, ''so I dropped out for a year and went to Egypt and Turkey, which presented this whole swath of history, art, architecture, and culture that aren't part of the grand Western tradition. It was compelling, something I didn't understand, and I like exploring the unfamiliar."

Tall, lanky, and fit from his daily early morning swim at a Harvard pool, Lentz looks like a perfect example of California cool. He slouches. His facial expression seems chronically calm. But the laid-back facade is just that, says Cuno, who has known him since their graduate-school days at Harvard.

Lentz has already endeared himself to long-term Fogg staff members who had wondered who could possibly replace Cuno. The buzz in the Fogg these days is that Lentz can.

''The Harvard Art Museums have been enormously lucky to have had two leaders in succession who are both phenomenal," says Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a longtime Fogg supporter. ''Tom's planning skills and his ability to think about the big picture are extraordinary."

He doesn't advertise them, though. His wry reply when asked if he has children is, ''No. My wife says I can hardly take care of myself."

Lentz doesn't come from a heavyweight art background. His father's career as a corporate executive took the family all over the country, to Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia. His mother, meanwhile, gravitated toward the art world.

''My mother was a museum docent," he says. ''But beyond that I don't have any special museum genes. I'm not the illegitimate grandson of Paul Sachs or anything," a reference to the legendary associate director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum in the early 20th century with the deadpan wit that's a Lentz trademark. (''Many people miss it at first," says Cuno.)

Lentz's resume, which includes both master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard, suggests that his dropout year was the last free time he's had in a museum career that has gone from one coast to another, from the Rhode Island School of Design to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Along the way, he began to realize that not everyone shared his passion for the unexplored. At LACMA, he says, ''I'd ride the public elevator and people would get off on the floor where the Islamic art was and say, 'Hmmm. There's no Impressionism here,' and get back on the elevator."

Lentz's adventurous spirit came in handy at his last post, as director of the International Art Museums Division at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. That job put him in charge of the National Museum of African Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Freer Gallery of Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Christraud Geary, curator of African art at the Museum of Fine Arts, worked with Lentz at the Smithsonian.

''He had a real vision for the place," she says, ''for bringing those museums together. At Harvard he has a chance to do something similar, to get the museums working together."

Artistic gifts
Whatever the shortcomings of the Harvard museum buildings themselves, objects, both gifts and purchases, keep arriving. Lentz, a consummate diplomat, declines to name a few of his favorite new acquisitions lest he offend any curatorial departments or donors whose works weren't on his list.

Given that his field is Islamic art, Lentz is surprisingly knowledgeable about 20th-century art, says Harry Cooper, the Fogg's modern curator. Lentz was enthusiastic about the museum's recent purchase of a 1958 Frank Stella drawing that Cooper will include in a show slated to open at the Sackler in February 2006. The show will focus on Stella's paintings from 1958.

''Tom said, 'Oh, yes, one of those works is at Princeton,' which astonished me," Cooper says. ''Nobody knows about those paintings."

The Stella show, says Lentz, ''represents the kind of exhibition we do best, built on careful research of a small number of objects. Harvard doesn't do blockbusters."

It will come pretty close, though, with ''Degas at Harvard," opening in July. Recent and promised gifts of Degas works added to the surprising number Harvard already owns means a display of around 70 works -- all from the museums' own stores. The exhibition is a natural: The Fogg was the first museum to give Degas a solo show, and it happened during the artist's lifetime, in 1911, when his work was ''contemporary art."

Pulitzer, whom Lentz recently appointed chair of the museums' visiting committee, an independent advisory group, is giving several Degas works to the Fogg, partly because of this exhibition. ''It's a very smart show," she notes, ''a good way to tie down promised gifts."

A museum's roleLentz has strong opinions about how art museums operate. He is adamant about Harvard's great collections being used -- both by the public and students. The general public, he notes, make up half the visitors to the Fogg's Mongan center, where they're free to examine drawings at close range. As for students, ''There are things that can be taught better through objects than any other means. That's why we want to involve science majors, economists, people in all kinds of different areas."

''When I was a student here, I'd go up to the Islamic Department and open the drawers and take out objects and handle them. There's no substitute for that, and not just in Islamic art." He offers Chinese jades as an example. ''You have to feel and touch them," he says. ''Otherwise, you can't really know them."

Giving his predecessor his due, Lentz notes that Cuno ''bulked up the curatorial and conservation departments hugely." But Lentz isn't in complete agreement with the views on museums in Cuno's recent book ''Whose Muse?" The book was unapologetically one-sided, with essays by leading museum directors who are against the current trend of museums becoming market-driven intersections between entertainment centers and malls.

''Museums are contested landscapes these days," Lentz says, adding, ''I don't agree with the notion that museums are aesthetic temples. I don't completely write off the Guggenheim model." New York's Guggenheim Museum, with its pop culture shows on motorcycles and fashion designers, is what the contributors to Cuno's book oppose.

''I like the fact that the Guggenheim has introduced new subjects," Lentz says.

While he's not about to park a Harley in the Fogg, he's got ideas about expanding the museum's range.

''I'm uncomfortable with the fact that we have entire continents not well represented in the art museums at Harvard now," he says, mentioning South America and Africa.

The museum world is debating whether objects outside the traditional European-Asian-American canon belong in ''fine" arts museums or ethnographic ones. Lentz is in the camp that sees an increasing blur between art and ethnology. ''Often, the more interesting ideas about objects come from the anthropological side," he says. Coming back to that Iznik tile, he says, ''Here, many people would categorize this as decorative arts. In Turkey, it's not."

''There is no single way," he concludes, ''to read an object."