Philippe de Montebello Retires

It's official. The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will be stepping down at the end of this year. He's 71 and came to the job 31 years ago.

The museum that de Montebello is leaving is one of the greatest in the world. It already was, of course, when he got there, but it has expanded enormously — to be precise, it nearly doubled — under his leadership. I was there again just a few days ago to say goodbye to the Euphronios krater, a Greek mixing bowl acquired by his predecessor Thomas Hoving, one of those disputed antiquities that has been successfully reclaimed by the government of Italy. In the space of just a few hours I wandered one more time through the magnificent new Greek and Roman galleries that were developed under his leadership and that opened last year, then jumped upstairs to look in on the newly refurbished galleries of 19th and early 20th-century European art, then stopped in at the new post-1960 photography galleries. Before the early 1990s there was no photography department at the Met at all. I made a mental note to hit the new galleries for Oceanic Art next week.

I had a talk with him in his office late last year about the antiquities disputes that involve so many museums in the U.S. and Europe. (You can find the second part of that conversation here. It's worth revisiting because it gives you some idea of how combative he could be in defense of the notion of the universal museum that he — and not just he — believes in.) It was de Montebello who personally negotiated the first settlement with Italy, which became a model that other American museums have looked to.

But the endless and complicated antiquities dispute in no way defines his tenure, the longest in the Met's history. The museum is forming a search committee for his successor. The usual suspects include Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, and Gary Tinterow, the Met's curator of 19th century, modern and contemporary art. This should be quite a search.