[MSN] Met Museum's de Montebello Is a Hard Act to Follow. It was the unflappable de Montebello who negotiated the return of antiquities including the Met's prize Greek vase, the Euphronios krater, to the Italian government, keeping an elegant demeanor during th

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Met Museum's Princely de Montebello Is a Hard Act to Follow 

By Linda Yablonsky

 Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- After 30 years as director of New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art, it's hard to imagine anyone except Philippe de
Montebello in the job. 

Unless, that is, Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn D. Lowry wants to fill
it. 

That could happen. If Lowry wants to step up from MoMA, the Met -- arguably
the leading art museum in the Western world -- would be the place to go.
First, of course, de Montebello would have to step down, and he has shown no
signs of doing that. 

``I'm not leaving,'' de Montebello told me last week at a preview for ``The
Age of Rembrandt,'' an exhibition opening tomorrow at the Met. 

Sometime in the foreseeable future, though, the 71-year-old Met chief is
expected to retire. And Lowry, 52, has emerged as a top name among possible
successors that art-world insiders have been secretly batting about. 

That is not great news, especially given the options. 

Look at Neil MacGregor, 61, director of the British Museum and another
obvious candidate -- urbane and intellectual. Or ambitious Michael Govan,
43, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Henri Loyrette, 53,
head of the Louvre in Paris, is also an attraction, while Gary Tinterow, the
Met's curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, seems the one
inside man capable of making the leap from scholar to showman. 

``There has been a lot of speculation,'' de Montebello acknowledged last
week. ``But 71 is not what it used to be. I have had both knees replaced,
and I played tennis every day this summer.'' 

Walker's Halbreich 

A few days ago, Kathy Halbreich, 59, who will leave her position as director
of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on Nov. 1, sparked a buzz when she
started making regular appearances at MoMA, where, I hear, she may be set
for a new post, deputy director. That could leave Lowry free to roam farther
afield -- say, to the Met. 

De Montebello, a French-born, American-educated art historian with a breadth
of knowledge that seems almost as encyclopedic as the Met itself, has served
as statesman, fund- raiser, curator, connoisseur and even docent. (His
mellifluous baritone is usually the voice on the audio guides accompanying
the Met's blockbuster exhibitions.) 

It was the unflappable de Montebello who negotiated the return of
antiquities including the Met's prize Greek vase, the Euphronios krater, to
the Italian government, keeping an elegant demeanor during this tiresome and
often grotesque negotiations. He kept his museum out of courtrooms that have
ensnared the Getty and preserved the Met's institutional dignity. 

Most recently, he oversaw the 10-year reconstruction of the grand Greek and
Roman galleries. 

Leading Attraction 

During his tenure, the museum, which has an annual operating budget of $193
million, became the leading tourist attraction in New York, with more than 4
million visitors last year. It has 18 curatorial departments, a publishing
division and more than 2 million works of art dating back at least five
millennia. 

Yet the director's chair at the Met should be easier to fill than any at the
24 other American art museums currently seeking chief executives. 

Former Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Director Lisa Dennison's recent
resignation after only two years, to become a vice president at Sotheby's
International, underscored a big problem facing American art museums today:
the difficulty of keeping administrative and curatorial talent within the
nonprofit realm. 

The Met, of course, can afford to offer its director a tempting pay package.
(Last year, de Montebello came into a $3.3 million award just for staying in
his job past age 70.) 

Such guarantees would be a draw for people like Loyrette and MacGregor,
whose jobs pay a civil servant's salary and who face mandatory retirement at
age 65. 

Louvre's Loyrette 

Loyrette, like de Montebello, has proven as much diplomat as historian.
Earlier this year, he made a deal worth more than $500 million with the
United Arab Emirates to build a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. That
definitely suggests someone more New World than Old, though the deal
provoked intense media scrutiny and much criticism. 

Yet Loyrette, an authority on Degas, may be too steeped in things French for
the Met. 

Then again, Lowry was an Islamist before taking over MoMA. He is also one of
the highest-paid museum executives in the world. For him, the main draw
would have to be the challenges of the job itself. 

They include public perception. 

No matter how storied a collection, the director is the face of a museum,
the person who determines our experience of it. 

Class Acts 

De Montebello has been a prince. MacGregor, Loyrette and Govan are equally
class acts -- and stiff competition for the relentlessly upbeat Lowry. The
MoMA chief may get credit for swelling his museum's coffers and attendance
figures, but he also raised nonmember admission to an unprecedented $20,
voiding any notion of a museum as a democratic venue for all. 

MacGregor, by contrast, fought hard to keep the National Gallery free during
the Thatcher years. He wanted people to have the option of dropping in, if
only for an uplifting few minutes. 

It was Lowry who embraced MoMA's hateful new building, an antiseptic mall
where obnoxious lighting and blinding white walls make masterworks like
Picasso's ``Les Demoiselles D'Avignon'' look fake and Jackson Pollock's
``One'' seem like a poster. 

London's MacGregor 

Before he left his job as head of the National Gallery in London, the more
senior MacGregor gave a popular series of televised lectures. He has since
put a shaky British Museum on firm financial footing, begun a
100-million-pound expansion of its galleries and successfully held off
demands by the Greek government to return the Elgin Marbles to the
Acropolis. 

Still, the Met's trustees may prefer a home-grown executive capable of
wooing potential donors bearing pots of new money, people like SAC Capital
Advisors founder Steven A. Cohen, the collector from whom Tinterow recently
wrested a yearlong loan of Damien Hirst's controversial preserved shark. 

Lowry is mighty good at that. 

So is Govan. With his youth, looks and ability to write or speak on almost
any issue in art, he is the Barak Obama of Met director candidates. 

A onetime protege of expansionist Guggenheim Foundation Director Thomas
Krens and former director of the Dia Art Center, Govan has worked on no less
than 10 different museum building projects. 

Now he's overseeing the construction of the Los Angeles County Museum's new
Renzo Piano-designed campus and the Eli and Edythe Broad Contemporary Art
Museum scheduled to open this winter -- a task even more Herculean than
remaking the Greek and Roman galleries at the Met. 

Govan also has attracted to the LACMA board deep-pocketed Angelenos who, not
so long ago, were focused on the entertainment business. 

All the Met has to do is persuade him to give up a chance to create another
metropolitan museum in his own image and move back to New York. 

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are her own.) 

To contact the writer on this story: Linda Yablonsky at fabyab at earthlink.net
. 

Last Updated: September 17, 2007 00:05 EDT