My review of Michael Gross’s new book, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, has just been published on the website of Frieze magazine. It begins this way:
In September 2007, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened ‘The Age of Rembrandt‘, an exhibition presenting the museum’s entire collection of Dutch paintings made between 1600 and 1800. Included alongside Rembrandt were such acknowledged masters as Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer (of whose 35 known paintings the museum owns five). But rather than arrange the canvases by date of creation or by genre, the curator somewhat controversially chose to display the paintings in the order in which they entered the museum’s collection. The first gallery featured part of the fabled ‘1871 Purchase’, made the year after the museum’s founding, and subsequent galleries highlighted individual bequests, such as the one made by Benjamin Altman in 1913. Donors’ names, in block letters, hovered high on the wall above many of the works.
Michael Gross’s Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, published this week by Broadway, follows a similar logic. Rather than pay close attention to the merits of individual exhibitions or examine the public’s perception of the institution, Gross revels in the internecine squabbling among Met directors, board members, curators and New York City officials over the growth, acquisitions and public orientation of the museum. The book, akin to a 500-page Vanity Fair article, is an unabashedly unofficial history…
To read the rest, click here.
Elsewhere, the May issue of Artforum contains my review of “Regift,” a recent exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, and my essay on recent trends in New York’s art scene appears in the catalogue raisonné of The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, published by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany its exhibition “Compass in Hand.”
I am in the midst of having my personal website, BrianSholis.com, redesigned. When complete, the new site will contain both my archive of published texts (currently over there) and my blog (right here). This will hopefully coincide with the end of the academic year, and I will resume regular updates of both sites.
Tags: Compass In Hand, Michael Gross, Museum of Modern Art, Regift, Rogues' Gallery, Swiss Institute, The Metropolitan Museum
