America’s major museums, now well over a century old, have only just begun to look at their histories to understand how they fit into a broader story. But the issue also concerns artistic authenticity, reputation and biography, and art as an aesthetic as well as commercial experience. A booming art market has fueled much of the popular attention on individual collectors, along with high-profile repatriation cases-of disputed classical antiquities as well as artworks confiscated by the Nazis. Some may ask why it matters what some wealthy magnate bought decades or centuries ago, but collectors are essential to understanding art because they determine what is deemed worthy, particularly in the United States where museums are shaped by private collector-patrons rather than by the state. Instead, he has chosen to take on an emerging field that many feel has been overlooked by art historians in the United States: the history of collecting-a tale driven by politics, religion, and culture that spans the ages. Nor is he teaching the management of museums, a topic he knows more about than perhaps anyone else alive. He is not returning to his original specialty, Netherlandish painting of the 15th and 16th centuries (“My scholarly expertise was rapidly extinguished after I…left my curatorial work,” he says). But in deciding to enter a second career as professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, or IFA, the 73-year-old has chosen no easy path. Discussions with the Italians were reportedly so stressful that de Montebello broke out with shingles.Ĭould teaching graduate students really be more difficult? It seems unlikely. He also doubled the museum’s physical size, steered the institution out of years of budget deficits, and negotiated an innovative landmark agreement that secured a series of major art loans from the Italian state in exchange for the return of almost two dozen classical artifacts of questionable provenance-including, most famously, the Euphronios krater, a Greek terra cotta bowl once used to mix water and wine. In 31 years as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, de Montebello increased the number of annual visitors by more than 30 percent-to 5.2 million people. “It’s just exhausting,” says Philippe de Montebello, Fiske Kimball Professor in the History and Culture of Museums, and special adviser to the provost at NYU Abu Dhabi. Graying, bespectacled, and wearing a tweed jacket over a V-neck sweater and tie, the teacher-despite his newness to the profession-is the very image of a professor of a certain age. His two-hour lecture ended some 20 minutes earlier finally, the last question has been answered and the last student has left the room.
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