“Behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a
sin or a crime.”
With these words as a starting point, Michael Gross, leading
chronicler of the American rich, begins the first independent,
unauthorized look at the saga of the nation’s greatest museum,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this endlessly entertaining
follow-up to his bestselling social history 740 Park,
Gross pulls back the shades of secrecy that have long shrouded
the upper class’s cultural and philanthropic ambitions and
maneuvers. And he paints a revealing portrait of a previously
hidden face of American wealth and power.
The Metropolitan, Gross writes, “is 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 book covers the entire 138-year history of the
Met, focusing on the museum’s most colorful characters. Opening
with the lame-duck director Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s
longest-serving leader who finally stepped down in 2008,
Rogues’ Gallery then goes back to the very beginning,
highlighting, among many others: the first director, Luigi Palma
di Cesnola, an Italian-born epic phony, whose legacy is a trove
of plundered ancient relics, some of which remain on display
today; John Pierpont Morgan, the greatest capitalist and art
collector of his day, who turned the museum from the plaything of
a handful of rich amateurs into a professional operation
dedicated, sort of, to the public good; John D. Rockefeller Jr.,
who never served the Met in any official capacity but who, during
the Great Depression, proved the only man willing and rich enough
to be its benefactor, which made him its behind-the-scenes
puppeteer; the controversial Thomas Hoving, whose tenure as
director during the sixties and seventies revolutionized museums
around the world but left the Met in chaos; and Jane Engelhard
and Annette de la Renta, a mother-daughter trustee tag team whose
stories will astonish you (think Casablanca rewritten by
Edith Wharton).
With a supporting cast that includes artists, forgers, and
looters, financial geniuses and scoundrels, museum officers (like
its chairman Arthur Amory Houghton, head of Corning Glass, who
once ripped apart a priceless and ancient Islamic book in order
to sell it off piecemeal), trustees (like Jayne Wrightsman, the
Hollywood party girl turned society grand dame), curators (like
the aging Dietrich von Bothmer, a refugee from Nazi Germany with
a Bronze Star for heroism whose greatest acquisitions turned out
to be looted), and donors (like Irwin Untermyer, whose collecting
obsession drove his wife and children to suicide), and with cameo
appearances by everyone from Vogue editors Anna Wintour
and Diana Vreeland to Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten,
Rogues’ Gallery is a rich, satisfying, alternately
hilarious and horrifying look at America’s upper class, and what
is perhaps its greatest creation.