ART MUSEUM CONFIDENTIAL

Fine art has always been coupled with depravity, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is no exception. Avis Berman reviews "Rogues' Gallery", Michael Gross's exposé of the museum ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Well before record-keeping began in mediaeval Europe, merchants who paid for church altarpieces made sure their portraits accompanied the donation. The determined rich have traditionally sought grace through the purchase and support of art. Pride, egotism, social striving and the appeasement of posterity have always coupled with the most transcendent expressions of human creativity.

No art institution is exempt from venial transgressions, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has hosted more than its share of chicanery and snobbery. So contends Michael Gross in "Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum", his enlightening and off-kilter social history of the museum. As the subtitle of his book announces, Gross concentrates on how various trustees, donors, directors, curators and other officials governed or exploited the institution for their own ends rather than the connoisseurship they may have nourished.

A journalist who has catalogued the peccadilloes of the rich and objectionable for decades, Gross tends to view the museum and its personalities in the harshest light. For example Sir John Pope-Hennessey, who headed the Department of European Paintings from 1977 to 1986, is mainly presented as a sexually unscrupulous boss who installed a “harem” of young, gay and suspiciously attractive curator-courtiers on staff. Yet Pope-Hennessey raised the calibre of exhibitions and was responsible for bringing spectacular masterpieces into the museum (all as gifts from Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, trustees notorious for their avarice and status-seeking). These include Jacques-Louis David’s "Lavoisier and His Wife" (1788), Lorenzo Lotto's "Venus and Cupid" (mid-1520s), Johannes Vermeer’s "Study of a Young Woman" (1665-67) and Peter Paul Rubens’s "The Painter with His Wife and Son" (1630s).

Pope-Hennessey was certainly a more than worthy successor to the lightweight Theodore Rousseau, a curator who figures largely in the narrative for his womanising, social connections and loose ethics. Yet Gross skips over Rousseau's more significant professional deficiencies–his nonexistence as a writer or scholar, his laziness, his ignorance of important artists. In 1948 Rousseau, in Holland with a curator from the Art Institute of Chicago, said that he’d never heard of Mondrian and couldn’t imagine any reason why he should have.

Gross acknowledges that “the Metropolitan…is a huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of man’s attributes into the very best, transmuting deadly sins into priceless treasure. So the museum must be seen as something separate from the often-imperfect individuals who created it.” This provides a plausible raison d’être for his concentration on those imperfect souls, or rogues, who somehow managed to preside over one of the worthiest collections of art. But to consistently disbar achievement in favour of foibles and frailties offers distortion and caricature rather than more searching evaluations.

Gross is more persuasive when he targets the Met’s attitude toward its larger ethical and cultural responsibilities. He portrays a nominally public institution that proclaims itself blameless in its means and purposes and is loath to admit mistakes unless absolutely pushed to it. The museum, he notes, occupies a state-owned building on public land, with many of its expenditures paid for by taxpayer dollars, but it acts like a fiefdom run by and for a private social club. Its “arrogance has been toned down, but it has never been entirely abandoned.”

The Met is notoriously secretive about its history, and Gross makes hay about being denied access to museum’s archives and staff members. Such intransigence dates from its 19th-century beginnings, when the museum stonewalled a scholar delving into the life and career of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, its first director. A shady civil war veteran and a supposed archaeologist, Cesnola sold what he looted from tombs in Cyprus to the museum and became director as part of the deal. He died in 1904, and the museum has slowly cleansed itself of his crudely restored and inauthentic pieces over the years.

Gross pursues the hot-button issue of archaeological depredations and the stealing of cultural patrimony in Europe and the Middle East. Such looting went on into the 1970s, sanctioned by the museum’s most controversial director, Thomas P.F. Hoving. (Now one of the Met’s biggest bashers, Hoving was a prime source of information for the author.) It was left to Phillippe de Montebello, who became director after Hoving’s departure in 1977, to return stolen and smuggled antiquities.

Finagling extended to more modern art too. In 1971, with the approval of the trustees, Hoving, Rousseau and Henry Geldzahler, a contemporary art curator, voraciously sold off or traded dozens of works of art in the permanent collection, including “fourteen routine Monets”. The Met's officials compounded the mess by secretly unloading no-longer desired objects through the corrupt Marlborough Gallery, whose proprietors would soon be convicted for their notoriously criminal mishandling of the estate of Mark Rothko. A spirited campaign by several New York Times reporters, who found out about the clandestine deal-making, and a rebuke from the attorney-general's office stopped the excesses of the museum's deaccessioning.

Gross is to be congratulated for the ingenuity of his research. Blocked from using the Met’s archives, he discovered other repositories with portions of the same material. The Rockefeller Archives yielded rich correspondence about John D. Rockefeller’s building of the Cloisters, and the Municipal Archives of New York City contained papers documenting Robert Moses’s perennially peeved accommodation of the trustees. These aspects of the museum’s history had not previously been written about in such detail. (In the interests of disclosure, Gross praised my biography of the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in his account and cited it several times.)

Given that "Rogues’ Gallery" is so methodically biographical in intent, the book’s one unforgivable fault is the complete lack of photographs of any character in the story. I particularly wanted to see Cesnola, Rousseau and the Wrightsmans, as well as directors Francis Henry Taylor (who had the profile of a Borgia pope and the body of Sydney Greenstreet) and James Rorimer, and prominent donors such as Robert Lehman, and Charles and Jane Engelhard.

Gross predicts a worrisome future for the museum now that its once-natural constituency, the current crop of new millionaires, is “uninterested in the well-trod bridle path of American upward mobility.” This remains to be seen. But on the whole and within the limits he sets, Gross gets it right. After 140 years in existence, the Met was due for an exposé. Yet its gravitas and gorgeous objects have ensured the museum a position that no scandal is likely to destroy.

"Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum" (Broadway Books), by Michael Gross, out now

Picture credit: Monica Arellano-Ongpin (via Flickr)

(Avis Berman, an independent writer and art historian, lives in New York.)