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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 708.147109
EAN: 9780767924887
ISBN: 0767924886
Label: Broadway
Manufacturer: Broadway
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 560
Publication Date: May 05, 2009
Publisher: Broadway
Release Date: May 05, 2009
Studio: Broadway
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
“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., who never 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.
Average Rating: 
Rating: -
This is a fascinating glimpse into an amazing museum and into a life that most of us would have no chance to ever be a part of. What strikes me most is not the incredible amount of money and privilege but the owning of paintings that I know and have seen at The Met- the stories behind many of them having once been hung in someone's apartment. It's just hard to take in. The fact that someone needs generations of connections to be part of this world. The politicking makes politics look like nothing.
The details and stories are so rich. I can't imagine how long it took to research this book. Having just finished reading it last night I am dying to take a trip to NYC now.
Now, the Kindle version is very disappointing. There are countless typos and information left out. A painting sold for "%&@"... what does that mean?? How much did it sell for? Or someone is worth "si^*%^^" million dollars. Huh? Or a name will appear as characters I can't even find here on my keyboard. Or the new wing cost "-*^^" million dollars. It was incredibly frustrating.
Rating:  -
I am truly fascinated by who would find this book interesting or useful. I've worked with hundreds of museums for over 40 years (including The Met) and I'm finding the book very interesting but I can't figure out who the book's target audience is (if it in fact has one). New Yorkers? The reviews giving this book 4 and 5 stars seem to be primarily from New Yorkers. People who work/have worked/have worked with/for The Met?
I'm reading this book on the Kindle which I find makes reading a book seem much shorter than reading the print version. Yes, there are formatting errors but that's true of just about all of the books I've read on the Kindle. I really can't imagine reading this in print as the first couple of hundred pages (as other reviewers have noted) are endless lists of donors, new trustees, dead trustees, prices paid for things, annual budgets, etc.
If you're interested in reading this book, I strongly recommend reading it on a Kindle. Or, if you don't have a Kindle, get this through your local library.
Rating: -
I enjoyed the content of the book, but the Kindle edition is badly formatted and was clearly never proofread before release. Important information to the story, like amounts of money given or spent, come out garbled clumps of letters and numbers because the dollar sign threw off the Optical Chracter Recognition conversion program they were using. Other annoyances were the loss of footnote numbers, so that many of the footnotes were identified only as .'; this is critical since the footnotes are not at the bottom of the page, but at the end of the main text. Minor irritations, but indicative of a lack of proofreading, are all the German names whose umlaut became an apostrophe over empty space and other foreign words whose accent or circumflex caused them to come out as a string of cartoon profanity.
Rating:  -
The author has done much digging and come up with a lot of interesting information. Unfortunately, the great bulk of it concerns not substantive material about art, art history, the labors of the Met's curators, details of the museum's acquisitions, and the like. Rather, what you have here is essentially a compilation of trivia and gossip about the ambitions and maneuverings of the rich arrivistes and vulgar social climbers who populate the Met's board or seek to get on it. If you are the sort who enjoys People magazine or Vanity Fair, you will likely enjoy this tiresome book.
Rating: -
Does this book deliver the goods? Alas not. Let's face it, a biography of the Met could be, would be one of the most exciting biographies of an institution. However, in the hands of Michael Gross, the book reads like a series of gossip columns strung together. Some of the stories should be as exciting as anything...how Dietrich Bothmer was able to secure a priceless collection of Greek vases from the Hearst Corporation or how the Museum out-negotiated the Smithsonian in obtaining the ancient Dendur Temple from Egypt - while the 6 day war between Egypt and Israel was raging.
But what the book lacks is excitement for the art...why certain pieces meant "everything" to certain curators or industrialists. In so many instances, Michael Gross overlooks the critical issue - how owning and exhibiting certain masterpieces of mankind's most exhilarating artistic creations moves the soul, forces us to rethink the very meaning of human existence and importance. As an example, the book says almost nothing about the 'Unicorn in the Garden' tapestries in the Cloisters (The Medieval Branch of the Met in upper Manhattan), We get just a few words how John Rockefeller bought them for about a million dollars and then a sentence or two that suggests they were casually donated to the Museum. These are the same tapestries that are unmatched anywhere in the world but for Paris in the Cluny Museum - the "Lady and the Unicorn" set. People will travel from all corners of the globe to the Cloisters to get a glimpse of these, to be awed by these, to try to comprehend the symbolism of these. But that story seems unimportant to the author of this book.
I much preferred Thomas Hoving's "Making the Mummies Dance." Sure, this ex-Director of the Met is a controversial figure. I suppose he would beg, borrow or steal for the art. It means that much...to him...to offer art treasures to the public at large rather than have such wonderful pieces hidden away in private collections. Mr. Hoving's book makes us curious to go to the Museum, indeed compelled to go there, to complete our education in the humanities.
In contrast, Michael Gross seems more interested in the back-door deals and the ego driven curators and donors rather than the art itself.
For the facts...the book has a lot to say. For the passion...the book is empty.
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