Rogues' Gallery

March 30, 2009
For more than a century, the coupling of art with commerce has made New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the world's most glamorous whore, according to this sprawling history. Gross, a veteran chronicler of the rich and beautiful (Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women
), highlights the relationship between the directors and curators who amassed the Met's collection—fakes and questionably acquired antiquities included, he notes—and its patrons. In his telling, the exchange of money for prestige (contributor John D. Rockefeller wanted good publicity after striking workers were massacred at the family's Ludlow mine) is a tawdry business, with the museum's high-toned seduction of well-heeled egotists, who in turn felt betrayed when newer collections impinged on their own galleries. Not the best-curated of exhibitions, Gross's thematically unfocused chronicle is overstuffed with the details of fund drives, building plans and bequests; some figures feel like they were profiled mainly because there were juicy anecdotes about them—a rarity in tight-lipped Met circles—not because their doings are especially illuminating. Still, browse long enough and you'll find behind-the-scenes dirt and an intriguing look at the symbiosis of culture and cash.

April 1, 2009
A behind-the-scenes history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Travel& Leisure contributing editor Gross has proven to be an able hand at chronicling the world of the moneyed elite (740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, 2005, etc.). His latest book about a New York institution, the Met—which counted as major donors such financial titans as J.P. Morgan (once a Met president) and John D. Rockefeller Jr.—digs deep into decades of infighting among the wealthy. Gross wrote the book without the authorization of the museum's current top brass—"The only kind of books we find even vaguely palatable are those we control," one Met official told him—and, given the unflattering portrayal of many of the players, it comes as little surprise. Gross portrays Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a Medal of Honor winner during the Civil War and the Met's first director (in 1879), as a wholesale looter of Cypriot antiquities, and Thomas P.F. Hoving, the director from 1966 to 1977, as a wild spendthrift,"a punch-drunk fighter lurching from crisis to scandal while driving the museum into the red." Gross also documents numerous instances of Met board members' anti-Semitism, homophobia and classism. For many years, he notes, the museum trustees refused to open the museum on Sundays, the only day that working-class New Yorkers could visit. The author clearly relishes dishing the dirt, but he also offers a supremely detailed history of the museum. However, he seems to have little interest in the actual works of art, which become mere pawns in a moneyed game. But that's a minor quibble. Gross's portrait of Met politics is sharp and well-constructed, and readers will marvel at how the institution transcended the bickering and backhanded power plays to become one of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world.

A deft rendering of the down-and-dirty politics of the art world.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2009
Gross, a well-published cultural journalist whose previous best-selling books have lifted the blinds on the inner sanctums of the very rich, now wheels out a big tell-all book about a big museum. Art has always inspired obsession and crime, and the movers and shakers at the helm of New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art couldnt have amassed its extraordinary collections without the shenanigans of art-world rogues, be they outright thieves, clandestine swindlers, or extreme egomaniacs. Gross relishes every nefarious or audacious episode as he marches through the museums fascinating history of curatorial excellence, social climbing, and skulduggery. Its a tale of elitists versus populists, of spectacular gifts and scandals, trustees refusing to consider art made by living artists and formidable innovators, especially Robert Moses and Thomas Hoving. Whether he is portraying the museums first director, the scoundrel Luigi Palma di Cesnola, John D. Rockefeller (the museums greatest benefactor), curator Henry Geldzahler, Diana Vreeland of the Costume Institute, or, in the most sordid chapter, vice chairman Annette de la Renta, Gross zestfullymixes factual reportage with piquantly entertaininganecdotes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)