About Philippe de Montebello

Born in Paris in 1936 and educated in French schools through the baccalaureate, Philippe de Montebello graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1958 and, after receiving a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, went on to earn an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

He began his career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963 in its Department of European Paintings and rose steadily through the curatorial ranks. Except for four and-a-half years as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1969–1974), he spent his entire career at the Met, returning in 1974 to assume the post of vice director for curatorial and educational affairs, and then becoming the Museum's director in 1977. He assumed the additional role of chief executive officer in 1998. Mr. de Montebello not only served longer than any other director in the Metropolitan's history, but for several years he ranked as the longest-serving leader at any major museum in the world. He led a professional staff of more than three hundred curators, conservators, educators, and librarians, as well as an administrative staff, reporting through the Museum's president, consisting of more than 2,300 full- and part-time employees in the fields of operations, construction, development, marketing, finance, visitor services, systems and technology, human resources, and merchandising. At the time of his retirement, the Museum's volunteers numbered 1,100—the largest such corps at any museum in the world.

Attendance at the Metropolitan increased substantially during Mr. de Montebello's tenure, rising from 3.5 million in 1977 to a peak of more than 5.1 million in 2000. Despite the inevitable decline that followed September 11, 2001, annual attendance soon resumed an upward trend, rising to 4.6 million at the time of his retirement.

The Building: Expansion and Enhancement

Throughout his tenure, Philippe de Montebello focused not only on providing access to and information about the Museum's collection to the public, but also on building the collection, expanding Museum programs, and enlarging and refining the institution's physical structure. Under his leadership, the Metropolitan Museum nearly doubled in size, vastly increasing its gallery space, first in the late 1970s with the construction of a series of new wings that marked the completion of a master plan for expansion, and, since the 1990s, under a new program of “building from within” that saw the creation and refinement of many additional galleries inside the existing structure. Notable building projects under his aegis that moved beyond the scope of the original 1970 master plan were the creation of both the 100,000-square-foot Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for twentieth-century art, which opened in 1987, and the light-filled Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court, which opened in 1990.

In April 2007, the Metropolitan Museum opened the final phase of its fifteen-year renovation and expansion of the Greek and Roman Galleries with the new 57,000-square-foot galleries for Hellenistic, Roman, and Etruscan art, including the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court. These were followed in fall 2007 by the 25,000-square-foot Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education, as well as wholly refurbished galleries for Oceanic Art and Art of Native North America. In 2007, continuing the commitment to consistently renewing and improving the presentation of its collection, the Museum unveiled significantly expanded and reconfigured galleries for its renowned holdings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European paintings and sculpture, including the new Henry J. Heinz II Galleries. All of these projects, along with the concurrent cleaning and restoration of the Museum's officially landmarked outdoor façade along Fifth Avenue, were accomplished without ever closing the building to the public.

Mr. de Montebello's other major building programs included the expansion and renovation of period rooms and galleries for the decorative arts (culminating in the November 2007 reopening of The Wrightsman Galleries); the 1993 opening of new permanent and special exhibition galleries for drawings, prints, and photographs—supplemented in September 2007 by the new Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography; the 1996 conservation and installation of the intarsia Renaissance studiolo from the palace of Duke Federico da Montefeltro at Gubbio, Italy; in 2000, the opening of the new Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine art with their evocatively designed crypt for Coptic art carved out beneath the Great Hall staircase; in 2008, the expansion of the galleries to include a Byzantine apse-like space at the end of the staircase, as well as the renovation of the adjacent gallery of the art of Medieval Europe to 1300; and the building of galleries for Cypriot art, ancient Near Eastern art, Korean art, and Chinese art (including the Douglas Dillon Galleries and the Astor Court, opened in 1981), as well as the Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for South and Southeast Asian Art, opened in 1994. In 2006, Mr. de Montebello launched the project to reconstruct, expand, and redesign the Museum’s entire American Wing, including The Charles Engelhard Court, and to begin the complete reinstallation of the Islamic collection.

Ever searching for refinements to the Museum's presentations of art, the director also initiated the installation of colossal statuary near The Temple of Dendur and initiated the lowering of the stone wall that previously blocked much of the view of the temple; oversaw the 2000 renovation of the sixteenth-century Spanish architectural masterpiece, the Vélez Blanco Patio; and in 1995, requested the removal of the lunette that had long obscured part of the entrance to the Tiepolo and European Paintings Galleries, making its monumental paintings visible from the Great Hall below.

Conservation and Scientific Research

Mr. de Montebello also led the effort to redesign and modernize the Metropolitan Museum's world-renowned conservation and scientific research facilities, each of which serves as a training ground for conservators from around the world. During his tenure, the Museum's four major conservation areas—the Antonio Ratti Textile Center (opened in 1995), together with centers for objects conservation, paintings conservation, and works on paper/photography conservation, each supported by and named for the Sherman Fairchild Foundation—as well as specialized studios for Asian art, costume, and book conservation, were established or thoroughly upgraded. In 2004, the director established the Department of Scientific Research, a core group of scientists who collaborate with curators and conservators throughout the Museum.

Libraries and Study Centers

The Museum's libraries and study centers—with a combined total of more than one million books and periodicals relating to the history of art—rank among the most comprehensive in the world. Under Mr. de Montebello's directorship, the Thomas J. Watson Library, the Metropolitan's main research library, was renovated and expanded, and since 1997 includes the Lita Annenberg Hazen and Joseph H. Hazen Center for Electronic Information Resources. This electronic resource center offers increased access to scholarly resources via CD-ROMs, the Internet, and other electronic media. And the Uris Center for Education, reopened in 2008, includes the large, technologically equipped Nolen Library, providing specially designed areas for use by families, students, teachers, and the general public. In addition to conceiving and managing this wide array of projects, Mr. de Montebello was deeply involved for more than three decades in the massive fund-raising efforts required to finance the Museum's acquisitions, construction programs, and day-to-day maintenance of its two-million-square-foot building.

Acquisitions and the Collection

Throughout Mr. de Montebello's nearly thirty-one years as director, the Museum placed a major emphasis on building the collection, successfully courting donors in an effort to enhance acquisitions funding to secure the collection. During this period, the Metropolitan acquired countless major private collections as well as individual masterpieces, notable among the latter: Balthus's iconic painting The Mountain in 1982; an eleventh-century gilt-bronze Cambodian deified king known as the "Golden Boy" in 1988, and Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses, purchased in 1993, all acquired through the generosity of Walter and Leonore Annenberg; the 1955 Jasper Johns masterwork White Flag, purchased in 1998; and in 2004 the much-applauded acquisition of an exquisite tempera-and-gold-on-wood Madonna and Child by the early Renaissance Sienese master Duccio di Buoninsegna.

Among innumerable additions to the collection of The Cloisters Museum and Gardens, the Metropolitan's branch museum for medieval art in upper Manhattan, were two of the rarest and finest sculptures of their kind—the incomparable, ca. 1300 English ivory Virgin and Child, acquired in 1979; and in 1996 the ca. 1470 carved boxwood Virgin and Child by Nikolaus Gerhaert von Leiden. Mr. de Montebello's tenure was also marked by the receipt of a number of masterpieces from the fabled Wrightsman collection, including singular works by Vermeer (Study of a Young Woman, a 1979 gift), Rubens, Guercino, and other artists.

The great collections that Mr. de Montebello helped acquire for the Met include such acquisitions and bequests as: the Jack and Belle Linsky Collection of European paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts in 1982; the Berggruen Klee Collection of some ninety works by Paul Klee, donated by Heinz Berggruen in 1984; the gift of ten paintings by Clyfford Still from the artist's widow in 1987; The Annenberg Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in 1991; the Florene M. Schoenborn collection of twentieth-century works in 1996; the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collection of modern paintings in 2001; the Gilman Paper Company Collection of nineteenth-century French, British, and American photographs; and in 2007, the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection of Abstract Expressionist and other modern works.

Special Exhibitions

Throughout this period, the Museum under Mr. de Montebello's leadership also mounted an ambitious, critically praised, and widely attended program of some thirty special exhibitions annually, involving not only all of the institution's seventeen curatorial departments, but also presenting celebrated works of art on loan from public and private collections around the world. Among them—in but the briefest summary—were such landmark exhibitions as: "The Great Bronze Age of China" (1980); "The Horses of San Marco" (1980); "The Vatican Collections" (1983); "Manet, 1832–1883" (1983); "Van Gogh in Arles" (1984); "India!" (1985–6); "Degas" (1989–1990); "Velázquez" (1989–1990); "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries" (1990–1); "Seurat" (1991–2); "Splendors of Imperial China" (1996); "The Glory of Byzantium" (1997); "Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids" (1999–2000); "Vermeer and the Delft School" (2001); "Tapestry in the Renaissance" (2002); "Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman" (2003); and "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings" (2005). He focused particular attention over the last decade of his tenure on exhibitions that explored and interpreted the Met's own collection, including "Goya in The Metropolitan Museum of Art" (1995) , "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt" (1995–96), "From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art" (1998–1999), "The Year One" (2001), and the showing of the Museum's entire holdings in Dutch paintings, "The Age of Rembrandt" (2007–2008), which coincided with the publication of a monumental, two-volume catalogue of this collection. See Special Exhibitions for a complete list of past, current, and upcoming exhibitions.

Met Publications

Mr. de Montebello's tenure was marked throughout by notable growth in the institution's publishing program. At the time of his retirement, the Metropolitan Museum had become the leading art book publisher in the United States, issuing between twenty-five and thirty lavishly illustrated, prize-winning collection and exhibition catalogues each year, along with an annual Journal containing scholarly articles written by both resident and outside authorities on works in the Museum's collection, and a quarterly Bulletin sent to its more than 130,000 Members, whose fall issues Mr. de Montebello converted into an annual survey of the year's most notable acquisitions. The Met also issues many publications specifically designed for students, along with boxed resource kits and other curriculum materials for teachers. See Met Publications for more information or to see a current catalogue.

Educational Programs and More

In addition to spearheading the expansion of the Uris Center, Mr. de Montebello saw to the unprecedented expansion of educational efforts at the Museum—welcoming at peak levels more than 250,000 school children, adult learners, student interns, and professional educators each year, as well as more than fifty doctoral and post-doctoral international fellows, the largest such program in the United States. This was accomplished while ensuring the continuing popularity of and critical acclaim for its annual roster of concerts, lectures, and scholarly symposia attended by more than eighty thousand people annually. As a special reflection of the director's goal of making scholarly use of the Internet , the Museum also established an unprecedented online resource called the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History—featuring works of art reflecting more than five thousand years from prehistory to the present day. This learning tool is now consulted by some twenty-four million people annually. Long the narrator of the Museum's Audio Guide programming—which now features a “Selections from the Director Emeritus” tour that he recorded in five of the eight different languages offered—Mr. de Montebello's has become one of the most instantly recognizable and respected voices in the cultural world.

The Met—and Its Director—on the World Stage

As the senior director among the world's major art institutions, Mr. de Montebello served as a global ambassador widely known for his impassioned advocacy of the encyclopedic museum. He was, for example, among the first in the art world to raise warnings about the threats to Afghanistan's now destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas, and generously provided Metropolitan Museum resources and expertise to crucial art preservation efforts throughout the world.

He was also a leader in an informal international museum directors' association, working with his colleagues at its annual summit meetings to codify and maintain the highest museological standards among institutions throughout the world. Mr. de Montebello lectured on the Met and museum issues not only throughout the United States, but also in Europe and Asia. Long active as well in creating coalitions among, and working to help craft standards for, all museums, he served as a leader within the museum community on issues of provenance, specifically in the areas of antiquities and of spoliated World War II–era art. An advocate of ongoing, transparent research into the ownership history of the Museum's collection, he served as chairman of the 1998 Task Force of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which drafted guidelines still governing museum-wide response to World War II–era art claims. And in 2006 he successfully negotiated a precedent-setting agreement with the Italian government ending years of disputes regarding the legal ownership of several works in the Museum's Department of Greek and Roman Art. Under the terms of the agreement, Italy provided long-term loans to the Met in exchange for the return of these works.

Over the years Mr. de Montebello has been awarded many honors, including Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1991 (he was promoted to the rank of Officier in 2007); Order of Isabel la Catolica, Encomienda de Numero; the Spanish Institute Gold Medal Award; Knight Commander, Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great; the 2002 Blérancourt Prize for contributions to the cultural bond between France and America; the National Medal of Arts from the President of the United States in 2003; the 2004 Amigos del Museo del Prado Prize; the 2005 C.I.N.O.A. (Confederation Internationale de Négociants en Oeuvres d'Art) Prize; and in 2007, the Mayor of New York's Award for Arts and Culture, as well as the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold & Silver Star, from the Government of Japan. He has received honorary doctorates from Harvard University, New York University, Dartmouth College, Lafayette College, Bard College, Iona College, and the Savannah College of the Arts. He continues to serve on the Board of Trustees of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, on the Advisory Council of Columbia University's Department of Art and Archaeology, and on the Board of Trustees of the American Federation of Arts.