The New York Times

July 29, 2007

ART
Twilight of the Sun King

By CHARLES McGRATH

Correction Appended

PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO — or, to give him his full Gallic handle, Guy-Philippe Henri

Lannes de Montebello — has the most sonorous baritone in New York, with the mellowest

vowels, the most sibilant s’s. What to most people is a lozenge, he calls a “lo-SONJ.” He

pronounces “Renaissance” in a way that practically re-enacts it: “hhren-ay-SSAHNSSS.” And he

sounds just as good in French, Italian, Spanish and German. You can hear him in all five

languages, holding forth on Monet, Mantegna and Mayan sculpture, simply by renting an audio

guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he has been the director for the last 30 years.

This is an eternity in the museum world, where directors seldom last a decade anymore, and some

observers thought that the April opening of the Met’s splendid new Greek and Roman galleries, a

project in which Mr. de Montebello had taken great interest, might be his swan song. In January,

Mr. de Montebello, who is 71, had both knees replaced, and his recuperation was longer and more

difficult than he had anticipated. People who know him say that, out of frustration, he began to

talk more frequently about retirement. But he gave a heroic performance at the opening dinner for

the new galleries, standing on his feet for hours before being whisked away, ashen faced, in a

wheelchair, and since then he has ramped up to full speed. In an interview last month he insisted

he had no plans to step down. “I still enjoy my job,” he said, “and I still think I have something to

contribute.”

But if his impending retirement really isn’t on Mr. de Montebello’s mind, it’s on the mind of just

about everyone else at the Met, including the trustees and curators, who are powerfully aware that

he is the last of a breed. During Mr. de. Montebello’s tenure the Met has almost doubled in size,
and the budget has grown astronomically; the museum is now the biggest tourist attraction in

New York, visited by 4.6 million people annually. But Mr. de Montebello is in many ways closer

in spirit to a 19th-century connoisseur than to the kind of apparatchik so often in charge of

museums nowadays, obsessed with revenue and head counts. He is the sort of director who

believes in the Enlightenment notion of the museum as a temple. To his detractors, very few of

whom want to go on the record criticizing either him or an institution as influential as the Met, his

old-fashionedness is exactly what’s wrong with him. They see him as a fogey, a Europhile, an

elitist.

Mr. de Montebello’s desk at the Met is an ormolu-encrusted French antique, and hanging across

from it is a landscape painting by Claude Lorrain. There is also a conference table that appears to

be School of Ethan Allen, and sitting there one morning, he talked about how running a museum

had changed in three decades.

“The job doesn’t even resemble what is once was,” he said, listing all his increased bureaucratic

responsibilities: dealing with the legal and human resource departments, overseeing publications

and, more recently, negotiating with foreign governments that demand the return of artworks they

argue were acquired illegally. (A trustee said that the 2005-6 discussions with the Italian

government over the return of the Met’s Euphronios krater were so stressful they caused Mr. de

Montebello to break out with shingles.)

“If we were to project forward the person I was 30 years ago, that person wouldn’t remotely be

qualified for this job,” he said. “I wouldn’t want the job either, because frankly I wouldn’t want to

spend so much of my time on nonartistic matters.”

Mr. de Montebello succeeded Thomas Hoving, who awoke the Met from decades of near-ruinous

slumber and changed the way it — and every other museum in America — saw its role. Mr.

Hoving, who helped invent the blockbuster exhibition, was a brilliant showman and popularizer.
He was also mercurial and autocratic, and by the end of his 10-year tenure, had succeeded in

alienating just about everyone.

Mr. de Montebello, a Hoving protégé, was meant to be his opposite: an anti-Hoving, who would

calm the roiled waters. But just to be safe the board installed a president and chief executive who

was technically his superior. This arrangement never worked very well, and in 1999 the board,

finally acknowledging that Mr. de Montebello and the Met had become almost indistinguishable,

made him chief executive while he remained director. He now runs the Met the way the Sun King

ran Versailles, and the museum during his reign has in many ways exceeded Mr. Hoving’s vision

for it.

The trustees originally turned to Mr. de Montebello partly because he was already doing a lot of

Mr. Hoving’s job and partly, presumably, because he is a casting director’s dream of an Old

World European. He was not a wildman, but a bespectacled, nicely tailored aesthete. In addition

to his accent, he has looks, manners, wit and a touch of hauteur. He also has a lengthy cultural

and literary pedigree. His father was a fighter in the Resistance and a French count, a direct

descendant of Marshal Jean Lannes, one of Napoleon’s favorite generals. His great-grandmother

was a model for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, and the art historian John Richardson

speculates that another ancestor was a model for Proust’s playwright character Bloch. An aunt,

Marie-Laure de Noailles, was a friend of Picasso and a patron of the Surrealists.

Some of his critics complain that Mr. de Montebello’s Frenchness and his air of Old World

cultivation are by now a bit of an act for someone who has lived in this country since he was 13, a

role he plays to intimidate trustees and charm rich donors. (Mr. de Montebello spent his

adolescent years in New York, went to Harvard and did his graduate work at New York

University’s Institute of Fine Arts. His wife, Edith Myles, is the director of financial aid at the

Trinity School in Manhattan, and they have three children.) Yet Gary Tinterow, the Met’s curator

in charge of 19th-century and modern art, said he thinks the public and private de Montebellos
have almost completely merged. “Many of us think that if you woke him up in the middle of the

night, you would still get perfectly formed paragraphs replete with recondite vocabulary,” he

wrote in an e-mail message recently.

George R. Goldner, chairman of the department of prints and drawings, said: “Yes, Philippe can

be very witty and charming, but that’s not why he’s successful. It adds to it. It gives him a certain

luster among people who think that money means anything. But the real reason Philippe has

succeeded is that he has a clear sense of the values that should govern this institution. He

understands that a museum doesn’t exist just to make a profit or to please the trustees.”

Mr. de Montebello’s persona has nevertheless proved to be a powerful fund-raising tool. E. John

Rosenwald Jr., an emeritus trustee of the Met and also the chairman of its apparently boundless

capital campaign (the goal has ballooned to close to $1 billion from $300 million in 1994), said

that a crucial part of wooing a major donor is knowing when to wheel out the director for a lunch

or even a visit to the donor’s home. “Until fairly recently the Met didn’t have a culture of fund-

raising, and Philippe has had to adapt,” he explained over lunch. “But he’s done it brilliantly, and

he has come to be extremely effective. I think he even enjoys it. He’s a living brand.”

Mr. de Montebello is also a performer who doesn’t mind showing off a little. At a press luncheon

this spring to announce the next season’s exhibitions, he warned his audience that he was about to

take them on a slide-show tour “so vertiginously fast you will be buffeted,” and speaking without

notes he raced all over civilization, managing to sound as if he knew every detail by heart: 19th-

century British photographs, Chinese paintings and calligraphy, Baroque tapestries, Egyptian

temple images, Central African reliquaries, Ghiberti’s gates.

He faltered only once: When showing a slide of Rembrandt’s portrait of a contemporary, the

painter Gerard de Lairesse, he remarked that the Met didn’t own any of Lairesse’s own work.

Walter Liedtke, a curator of Dutch and Flemish painting, was sitting at one of the tables and
corrected him. “And you all thought I was infallible,” Mr. de Montebello said, smiling. Afterward

he added: “We may have a Lairesse, but I suspect it’s not hanging in the galleries. He’s a minor

artist, but you know scholars. There’s no minor for them.” (The Met does own a Lairesse,

“Apollo and Aurora,” but it’s so big that it’s seldom on display.)According to most accounts Mr.

de Montebello has mellowed considerably over the years, but he is still prickly about criticism.

The most common complaint is that he has no liking for or understanding of modern and

contemporary art. In 1999 he dismayed even some friends when during the controversy over the

“Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum (the one featuring Chris Ofili’s dung-embellished

portrait of the Virgin Mary) he took Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s side, declaring of the

exhibition, “I think the emperor has no clothes.” While he was at it, he also took a whack at the

artist Kiki Smith, one of whose pieces the Met happens to own.

But during the interview last month he said: “Really, does it strike you looking in the museum’s

program that its director is not interested in modern art? We have an exhibition of Neo Rauch, a

young Leipzig School painter. We have the latest works by Stella on the roof. Those follow an

exhibition of the works of Kara Walker, etc., etc., etc.” He added: “In a funny way the greatest

museum of contemporary art in New York is not a museum. It’s about 200 commercial art

galleries. So New Yorkers are not bereft. You spend a Saturday going to 57th Street, SoHo and a

lot of other places, and you can see not a biennial but daily what is happening in art today.” (That

he didn’t mention Chelsea, which has long since replaced SoHo as a center of the contemporary

art scene, suggests that he probably doesn’t spend his own Saturdays gallery-hopping.)

Nor does Mr. de Montebello have much patience for the idea, sometimes voiced by purists, that

the Met has turned itself into a circus and a mall, with satellite branches in suburban shopping

centers, raking in millions of dollars by selling not just books and posters but high-end

tchotchkes. “There’s less of that here than anywhere else,” he said. “There are museums where

you cannot get to the galleries without walking through gift shops. There are museums devoted
almost entirely to blockbuster exhibitions and who take down their permanent collections to put

them up.”

Mr. Goldner, the prints and drawings curator, said, “I won’t say Philippe hasn’t made

compromises, but he’s allowed us to hold our head up.” He added: “You know, he’s really the

antithesis of what the management types look for. He hates meetings, he makes decisions on the

spur of the moment. His whole style is to stimulate ideas and creativity.”

People who know Mr. de Montebello frequently remark on how much he loves art objects, loves

to look at them, exhibit them, acquire them. One that he is proudest of acquiring is the Duccio

“Madonna and Child,” which the Met purchased in 2004 for more than $45 million, the most it

had ever spent on an artwork. Mr. de Montebello was so taken with the painting that after looking

at it for an hour or so in an office at Christie’s in London he made an offer on the spot, without, as

he is technically required to do when that much money is at stake, consulting his trustees. He said

recently that he could have gotten out of the deal if he had had to, but it was also clear that he

never seriously entertained the possibility.

The Duccio “Madonna” is not a showstopper in the way of, say, the Velázquez portrait of Juan de

Pareja, Mr. Hoving’s great acquisition. It’s tiny, and done in a gilded, Byzantine style that for

viewers used to later art takes a little getting used to. Mr. de Montebello bought it not because it

would attract more visitors but because he thought it was something the Met should have, and

that if people looked at it enough they might come to love it the way he does. He is an unabashed

believer in the old idea that the purpose of a museum is not to entertain but to enlighten and

instruct.

“I think dumbing down is not something that the Met has ever been guilty of,” he said recently.

“Certainly not in my years. I have the greatest respect — and it is continually reaffirmed by my

observation — for the public. The public is a lot smarter than one gives it credit for.”
“Philippe’s an old-school person,” Keith Christiansen, a curator of European painting at the Met,

said. “The Met is not a cutting-edge institution.” And curators like Mr. Christiansen and Mr.

Goldner, who has a dim view of most museum directors, calling them “pipsqueaks” and “a

lamentable lot,” would like to keep it that way. They worry that Mr. de Montebello’s successor

will turn out to be a slasher like Arnold L. Lehman of the Brooklyn Museum or Malcolm Rogers

of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, who completely reorganized their museums, cutting lots

of curatorial jobs in the process, and then went on to mount exhibitions based on “Star Wars” or

Ralph Lauren’s car collection. They also dread someone in the grip of trendy sociological ideas,

the kind of director who might have made sure that the Greek and Roman galleries included an

exhibition about, say, the role of slavery in creating classical art or about the second-class status

of women.

Mr. de Montebello’s successor is a topic endlessly gossiped about in the museum world. Among

the names most frequently mentioned are Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum in

London; Timothy Potts, who will step down in September as director of the Kimbell Art Museum

in Fort Worth and later take over at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England; and William

M. Griswold, currently the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, who is to become the

head of the Morgan Library and Museum next year.

James R. Houghton, the chairman of the Met’s trustees, keeps a list in his desk drawer of people

who might take Mr. de Montebello’s place. “It’s in case Philippe gets hit by a bus,” he explained

recently, adding that the list keeps changing and is a lot shorter than it used to be. “I’m very

nervous about the idea of his leaving,” he said. “Life goes on of course, and I think he’ll handle it

very well. I don’t think he’ll crowd the new director. But the Met is such a huge public asset. You

have to have people around who really understand that.”

Correction: August 12, 2007

An article on July 29 about Philippe de Montebello’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

misstated the title the museum’s board granted him in 1999. While retaining the title of director,

he was named chief executive, not president.