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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"If this were four years ago, we would be standing in thin air," Gary Tinterow said in one of the Metropolitan Museum's ten new galleries--making a total of thirty-one, spanning nearly forty thousand square feet--for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art, of which Tinterow is the curator in charge. Some of the space was a brainstorm of Philippe de Montebello, who is soon to retire as the Met's director after a glorious thirty-one-year reign. (How badly he will be missed we must wait to know.) As Tinterow told it, "Philippe looked up in the Oceanic collection"--a colossal first-floor space, which reopened last year and is still plenty lofty--"and thought, I can create more galleries." The extra galleries were needed for an abundance of new acquisitions, as well as for many treasures that have languished in storage, and were called forth by a chronic de Montebelloan itch, which is also apparent in the recently refashioned quarters for Greek and Roman art, French decorative arts, and Native North American art: make what's good better. The result displays the director's touch to a degree that is common among feats of his regime--which is not at all. It is the work of strong-minded curators, led by Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow, an associate curator, who have been given liberty and firm support to...
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