Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum by Michael Gross

From the Publisher

“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., whonever 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.

The New York Times - Amy Finnerty

Michael Gross, a journalist and best-selling author, organizes Rogues’ Gallery, his tirelessly detailed and gossipy history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, not around its more than two million artworks - many gouged from tombs, many magnanimously donated; many venerated by humanity, many coveted by jealous curators - but around the handful of men (and rare women) who have run what may be America’s pre-eminent cultural institution.… Certainly, the Met has been used to launder reputations and fortunes, and in turn has used its supporters. But in this telling, sadly, its magnificent art is buried in lurid details.

Publishers Weekly

For more than a century, the coupling of art with commerce has made New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the world's most glamorous whore, according to this sprawling history. Gross, a veteran chronicler of the rich and beautiful (Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women), highlights the relationship between the directors and curators who amassed the Met's collection-fakes and questionably acquired antiquities included, he notes-and its patrons. In his telling, the exchange of money for prestige (contributor John D. Rockefeller wanted good publicity after striking workers were massacred at the family's Ludlow mine) is a tawdry business, with the museum's high-toned seduction of well-heeled egotists, who in turn felt betrayed when newer collections impinged on their own galleries. Not the best-curated of exhibitions, Gross's thematically unfocused chronicle is overstuffed with the details of fund drives, building plans and bequests; some figures feel like they were profiled mainly because there were juicy anecdotes about them-a rarity in tight-lipped Met circles-not because their doings are especially illuminating. Still, browse long enough and you'll find behind-the-scenes dirt and an intriguing look at the symbiosis of culture and cash. (May 12)

Kirkus Reviews

A behind-the-scenes history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Travel & Leisure contributing editor Gross has proven to be an able hand at chronicling the world of the moneyed elite (740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, 2005, etc.). His latest book about a New York institution, the Met-which counted as major donors such financial titans as J.P. Morgan (once a Met president) and John D. Rockefeller Jr.-digs deep into decades of infighting among the wealthy. Gross wrote the book without the authorization of the museum's current top brass-"The only kind of books we find even vaguely palatable are those we control," one Met official told him-and, given the unflattering portrayal of many of the players, it comes as little surprise. Gross portrays Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a Medal of Honor winner during the Civil War and the Met's first director (in 1879), as a wholesale looter of Cypriot antiquities, and Thomas P.F. Hoving, the director from 1966 to 1977, as a wild spendthrift, "a punch-drunk fighter lurching from crisis to scandal while driving the museum into the red." Gross also documents numerous instances of Met board members' anti-Semitism, homophobia and classism. For many years, he notes, the museum trustees refused to open the museum on Sundays, the only day that working-class New Yorkers could visit. The author clearly relishes dishing the dirt, but he also offers a supremely detailed history of the museum. However, he seems to have little interest in the actual works of art, which become mere pawns in a moneyed game. But that's a minor quibble. Gross's portrait of Met politics is sharp and well-constructed, and readers will marvel at how the institutiontranscended the bickering and backhanded power plays to become one of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world. A deft rendering of the down-and-dirty politics of the art world.

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