July-August 2009

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

In many ways, 1977 was a dreadful year for New York. That summer, the city suffered an electrical blackout that led to rampant looting and disorder. The Son of Sam, a serial killer, rampaged through the streets. Not all of the news was quite so bad, however. The Yankees won baseball’s World Series in October, brightening the spirits of a beleaguered town. And, in a triumph of perhaps even greater significance – especially when viewed in hindsight – Philippe de Montebello was named director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now, with the news that one of the museum’s own curators, Thomas P. Campbell, will take over the reins of power on 1 January 2009, many people are wondering what the future holds for the Met, while others are seizing the opportunity to celebrate de Montebello’s 31 brilliant years of acquisitions, exhibitions, publications and renovations. The museum’s curators, for instance, have been working feverishly to pull together what promises to be a truly splendid show, ‘The Philippe de Montebello Years’, which will highlight some of the significant objects acquired during his directorship and attempt to illustrate how the character of the collection, and indeed the museum itself, has developed since the fateful change of regime in 1977.

De Montebello was, in some respects, an unusual choice to head one of America’s pre-eminent cultural institutions. French born, of aristocratic heritage, he was not a populariser of the arts in the mould of his immediate predecessor and sometime mentor, Thomas Hoving, who had purposefully shaken up the once exclusive culture of the Met by reorientating the museum towards the needs of a broader audience. Hoving, however, was something of a mad genius, a flamboyant showman whose outsized personality made him a lightning rod for controversy. In selecting as his successor the smooth, sophisticated and eminently diplomatic de Montebello, who was then the Met’s chief curator, the museum’s board was opting to consolidate Hoving’s gains while discarding some of his baggage.

‘I had a mandate from the trustees to restore a level of sanity to the institution’, de Montebello told me in a recent interview, his voice marked by the sonorous timbre that has charmed millions of audio-guide listeners. ‘One of the things that I wanted to do from the very start was to give back to the academic staff – the curators and conservators and so forth – the standing that they had lost under Hoving, who treated them like carbuncles.’

Print this article   |  Email to a friend |  Subscription offers | Comment

1   2   3   4   5   6   Next