Behind the Facade: Moguls and Money at the Met

A Book Review

by Lita Solis-Cohen

Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum
by Michael Gross
Broadway Books, 2009, hardbound, 545 pages, $29.95

This unauthorized book about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "the most encyclopedic, universal art museum in the world," takes the reader behind the façade. On the first page the author announces that the Met was hostile from the inception of his project, making one want to read on. "Ever since its founding," writes Gross, the Met "has bred arrogance, hauteur, hubris, vanity, and even madness in those who live in proximity to its multitude of treasures and who have come to feel not just protective but possessive of them." Gross describes the Met as a "huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of man's attributes-extravagance, lust, gluttony, acquisitiveness, envy, avarice, greed, egotism and pride-into the very best, transmuting deadly sins into priceless treasure."

The Met, the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere, has grown in fits and starts since 1880. Its first director, Italian-born Luigi Palma di Cesnola, looted, plundered, and pillaged objects and carried off bounty from destructive excavations. Over the years the Met has sold off most of his collection. In 2000 the Met put 600 of Cesnola's finds on display for the first time in half a century. A Cypriot archaeologist, Anna Marangou, published a scholarly book about Cesnola and his collection, but she told Gross she was not allowed to use the Met's archives in her research.

Gross credits John Pierpont Morgan, the greatest art collector of his day and chairman of the Met's board of directors, with turning the museum from the plaything of a handful of rich amateurs into a professional operation with scholarly curators. Using previously published sources such as the centennial history Merchants and Masterpieces by New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins, Gross gives us short, enlightening profiles of donors such as Benjamin Altman and Judge Irwin Untermyer.

Altman, of B. Altman & Co., "was probably the most fastidious collector who ever lived," the New York Times wrote at his death. Petrified of publicity, he never let strangers see his collection. In 1912, a year before he died, he willed to the Met 50 paintings, 429 Chinese porcelains, enamels, rugs, tapestries, furniture, and sculpture, more than 1000 pieces in all, valued at $20 million (equivalent to $432 million in 2006).

According to Gross, Untermyer's collecting obsession drove his wife and a daughter to suicide. He collected embroidery and needlework, English furniture and silver, English and German porcelain of the 18th century, and medieval and Renaissance bronzes. Untermyer, described as "frightfully mean" by a former assistant, "decided to create and donate a collection to guarantee his immortality, choosing to buy objects the museum needed to fill out its collections."

Gross unmasks the collectors, benefactors, curators, presidents, and directors who helped shape the Met as we know it. Among them are the collectors Robert Lehman, and Charles and Jayne Wrightsman; curators Henry Geldzahler, Theodore "Ted" Rousseau, Francis Henry Taylor, and James Rorimer; and museum presidents Roland Livingston Redmond and C. Douglas Dillon.

Thomas Hoving, the director in the 1960's and '70's, and his wife, Nancy, cooperated with the author. A large part of the book incorporates stories first told in Making the Mummies Dance (1993), Hoving's breezy memoir of his years at the Met. Gross credits Hoving with revolutionizing museums around the country, developing new ways to pay for parties and improvements, and inventing a new style of museum show, the blockbuster.

Hoving acquired the Temple of Dendur (called the "Temple of Din-Din" by trustee Frederick Rose "because donors who pledged $25,000 or more to the museum could buy the chance to host parties there") and the Rockefeller collection of primitive art. Hoving saw himself as "a Grand Acquisitor," but he hid the provenance of the Lydian Hoard and the Euphronios krater. (Both would be repatriated during Philippe de Montebello's time at the helm.) Hoving was accused of mortgaging the museum to buy the Velázquez painting of Juan de Pareja for $5,592,000 and was severely criticized by the press for a program of deaccessioning to pay for it.

In 1969 Hoving put on the controversial Harlem on My Mind exhibition. To celebrate the museum's centennial he oversaw 12 exhibitions, including New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, which offered 408 works by 43 artists, only 12 of them owned by the museum. It drew flack by omitting Cy Twombly, Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, and Louise Nevelson; the show's curator, Henry Geldzahler, was burned in effigy outside the museum the night of the opening. When Hoving's Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries show had to use only works owned by the museum because insuring objects loaned from abroad was too costly, the Arts Indemnity Act was introduced into Congress and later signed into law by Gerald Ford. This act made blockbuster shows with international loans possible. Hoving's team also introduced corporate sponsorship.

Hoving resigned in 1977 at age 46 to run a proposed Annenberg center at the Met as a branch of the Annenberg communication schools. This branch was to be dedicated to the visual arts with the aim of recording in a permanent way every work of art on earth. Annenberg later withdrew the offer. Many today see the center as "a good idea expressed too soon," writes Gross. He adds, "None consider Hoving's later jobs in television and magazines, his books, or his role as a perennial gadfly anything more than anticlimax."

The book's last chapter, "Arrivistes: Jane and Annette Engelhard, 1974-2009," is even more gossipy than the rest of the book. It brings the Met's history up to the present with the story of Jane Engelhard, who joined the board in 1974, and her daughter Annette de la Renta, who took her mother's seat on the board in 1981. The stories about the mother and daughter team and their cohorts, Brooke Astor, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, Met lawyer Ashton Hawkins, and museum president C. Douglas Dillon, mix art with politics.

In the last part of the book Gross focuses on the substitutions of public capital by private funds. In the 1980's the Met, dubbed "Club Met," emerged as New York's "social center of gravity." Diana Vreeland and the Costume Institute attracted the international café society to the Met and at the same time brought the Met closer to commerce with corporate underwriting by the fashion trade. The Met got the image as a party place when new donors celebrated their birthdays, weddings, and triumphs there. (In 1991 the museum banned weddings from the premises.)

Annette de la Renta was named a vice chairman of the museum in 1993, and Gross suggests she and her husband, Oscar, turned the museum into a vehicle for their social ambition. "Following the stock market crash of 1987, economic fear and bad publicity drove New York Society underground, and by 1991, when the New York Times asked who might succeed Brooke Astor at the top of the city's philanthropic pecking order, the answer was no one. The live wires of the 1980s—the Kravises, Trumps, Steinbergs, Perelmans, and Gutfreunds—had lowered their profiles…But still, there was Brooke Astor. And always nearby was Annette de la Renta."

Philippe de Montebello succeeded Hoving as director and stayed until 2008. Gross acknowledges that de Montebello's last years as the Met's director were immensely satisfying. De Montebello acquired around 84,000 works of art during his tenure, more than doubled the museum's endowment to $2.9 billion in 2007, and completed the master plan when he presided over the restored Greek and Roman galleries in 2007. He finished what Hoving had left undone and added to it. When it emerged in late 2007 that de Montebello's $4.7 million compensation made him the highest-paid nonprofit executive in America that year, "few blinked," writes Gross. "He'd earned it." When de Montebello announced his retirement in January 2008 he said, "[T]he time is right… There's an old adage that before you flub it, get out, so I'm following it." Annette de la Renta and Parker Gilbert headed the search committee for a new director.

The fact that they chose Thomas Campbell, an expert in Renaissance tapestries, previously curator of European sculpture and decorative arts, suggests that the Met is committed to cultural education and to preserving and helping people understand the art of the past. But Gross says the Met cannot afford to be hostile to new art. When the Met began to court potential patrons like hedge fund operator Steven A. Cohen by exhibiting Damien Hirst's Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a dead shark in formaldehyde for which Cohen paid $8 million, the museum drew criticism. A New York Times editorial in July 2007 pointed out that the deal was not about art but rather about "money and reputation." Gross suggests that Annette de la Renta was ill disposed toward Gary Tinterow, who had campaigned to be de Montebello's successor, because she did not appreciate his taste in art. Tinterow was the curator who invited Cohen to exhibit the shark.

Just days after Thomas Campbell's appointment, Wall Street swooned, and the world economy collapsed, taking museum patrons with it. The Met's endowment is down by a third, and the fund-raising pitch is for unrestricted gifts to pay for operating costs, according to a profile of "Tapestry Tom" Campbell in the July 27 New Yorker magazine.

On the last pages of his book Gross empathizes with Campbell, saying he must "make visitors want to walk through the always-empty permanent galleries as well as the crowded one-season-only ones, not by shocking with sharks, but by luring them on the more difficult but rewarding journey through culture into history. Campbell must also reinvent patronage for a new breed of wealth, uninterested in the well-trod bridle path of American upward mobility." Gross says the board now is inclusive of members of all ethnic backgrounds and all parts of New York.

Throughout the book Gross finds it necessary to point out every drop of Jewish blood in the veins of the Met movers and shakers who he intimates would prefer to ignore it. For example, brilliant Met board president and former secretary of the treasury C. Douglas Dillon's grandfather Sam Lapowski ran a department store in Texas and in 1901 changed his son Clarence's name to Dillon, the maiden name of his French Catholic mother. Director and curator James Rorimer's father, Louis Rohrheimer, was a prominent interior decorator, architect, and furniture designer in Cleveland who changed his name after World War I, and like many assimilated Jews raised his son with no religion. And financier George Blumenthal, the first Jewish Met trustee, had an Episcopalian funeral.

Gross sees the Metropolitan Museum of Art as "proof that the highest social power in New York derives from the ability to raise and spend money for the public good." He hopes that "the New Moneyed will see this and support the museum through the next phase of its evolution, rather than destroying it in a misguided attempt at reinvention." His last words are, "Some institutions deserve the chance to be as eternal as great art."

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