The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions

When Philippe de Montebello announced his retirement after thirty-one years as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curators of all seventeen of the Museum’s departments organised this tribute exhibition as a collective act of curatorial gratitude. Running from 24 October 2008 to 1 February 2009 in the Tisch Galleries, the show brought together approximately 300 works selected from the more than 84,000 objects acquired during de Montebello’s tenure, which began in 1977. Each department chose works that had transformed its holdings, filling gaps in existing strengths or opening entirely new areas of collecting. Helen C. Evans, curator of Byzantine art, coordinated the installation across departments. Because the range of objects, spanning ancient Mesopotamia to twentieth-century painting, made a conventional printed catalogue impractical, the Met published an online-only catalogue instead, the first time it had done so for a major special exhibition.

The Dutch and Flemish paintings section centred on Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman (c. 1665-67), the fifth Vermeer to enter the Met’s collection and one of the most significant Dutch acquisitions of the de Montebello years. The painting was given to the Museum in 1979 by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman in memory of the curator Theodore Rousseau Jr., and it arrived shortly after de Montebello assumed the directorship. Like Vermeer’s celebrated Girl with a Pearl Earring, it is a tronie rather than a commissioned portrait: a study of an intriguing face rendered with Vermeer’s characteristic luminosity against a dark ground, the young woman’s slightly turned gaze giving the canvas an air of arrested motion that has fascinated viewers since the 1696 Amsterdam auction at which it first appears in the documentary record.

The exhibition was conceived as a demonstration of curatorial stewardship rather than a display of directorial taste alone. De Montebello was known for insisting that curators remain the intellectual centre of a great museum, and the show reflected that conviction: each acquisition was presented with commentary by the curator responsible for it, tracing the arguments made for the purchase and the institutional context in which it arrived. The audio guide, in which de Montebello spoke about individual objects in conversation with curators, was widely praised for the candour with which it described the negotiation between personal aesthetic judgement and scholarly and institutional priorities.