The announcement last month that Philippe de Montebello,
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1977,
planned to retire at the end of 2008 was not unexpected. But
it was nevertheless a sad event. For Mr. de Montebello, now
71, is not only the museum’s longest-serving director, he is
also one of the most distinguished museum directors
anywhere. Some of Mr. de Montebello’s accomplishment can be
measured in brick and mortar. During his tenure, the
exhibition space has nearly doubled in size (without
altering the footprint!). His latest triumph is the new
57,000-square-foot Greek and Roman Galleries which opened
last April to universal acclamation. Many museum directors
have a well-developed “edifice complex.” They seem to
believe that expanding their institution’s footprint is the
same thing as improving it.

Mr. de Montebello never made that mistake. Most of the Met’s
new galleries are splendid. But Mr. de Montebello’s lasting
legacy is something more intangible: his unwavering
commitment to artistic excellence. “I believe in good,
better, best,” he said in an interview in the September 2006
New Criterion, “and I believe the museum’s role is
precisely to help people make those distinctions. You know,
the term ‘masterpiece’ for a time was actually politically
incorrect?” In an age when museums have more and more become
politically correct purveyors of one or another form of
aesthetic pathology, Mr. de Montebello has courageously
resisted the blandishments of the socially enfranchised
pseudo-avant-garde that, for decades, has populated the
established art world with one repellent fad after the next.

Not only did Mr. de Montebello keep the Met on the high road
of artistic excellence, he also spoke out effectively at
critical moments when the tsunami of artistic garbage
threatened to overwhelm us. We think, for example, of his
1999 op-ed in The New York Times about “Sensation,” the
pathetic congeries of off-the-rack outrage that became a
momentary cause célèbre among the art ladies of both sexes
when Rudy Giuliani denounced it as “outrageous,” and full of
“sick stuff,” and threatened to stop city funding of the
Brooklyn Museum where this carefully calculated exercise in
naughtiness occurred. (Remember: pictures of the Virgin Mary
festooned with cutouts from pornographic magazines and some
clumps of elephant dung, pubescent female mannequins studded
with erect penises, vaginas, and anuses, fused together in
various postures of sexual coupling, etc., etc.)

Mr. de
Montebello had some appropriately tart things to say about
the objects on view in “Sensation,” but, as he noted, the
really disturbing thing about the exhibition was that people
were “so cowed by the art establishment or so frightened at
being labeled philistines that they dare not speak out and
express their dislike for works that they find either
repulsive or unaesthetic or both.”
Exactly right. But it almost goes without saying that Mr. de
Montebello was pilloried by the art establishment for
throwing his lot in with the philistines and daring to
criticize “Sensation.” What other major director would have
had the wit and the pluck to exhibit such independence of
mind? We can think of none.

What does the future hold for the Met? It is difficult to be
sanguine. Naturally, a “search committee” has been
organized, but what plausible candidates are there? One
person rumored to be on the short list is Gary Tinterow, a
longtime curator at the Met, and a talented one, too. But
in recent years Mr. Tinterow has gone out of his way to
demonstrate how tractable he is, how willing to compromise
aesthetic excellence for the sake of appealing to whatever
trashy “genius” the art market happens to favor this season.
As James Panero noted on our weblog “Armavirumque,”
Tinterow’s enthusiasm for and acquisition, on long-term loan, of one of
Damien Hirst’s dead-fish-in-a-tank-of-formaldehyde pranks does
not bode well for the Met should Tinterow step into the
director’s shoes. All in all, alas, the prospects that have been whispered
about so far are pretty discouraging. How disquieting it
must be for Mr. de Montebello, who has spent more than
thirty years holding the line and upholding high standards.
Like Louis XV, he has reason to mutter “apres moi, le
déluge.”