Michael Gross brings us an unprecedented, unauthorized look inside 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 on the world of cultural philanthropy and paints a portrait of the hidden face of American wealth and power so frank and revealing that it provoked what Liz Smith called "a firestorm of controversy."

Provocative cultural journalist and New York Times bestselling author Michael Gross is currently a contributing editor at Travel & Leisure. He has previously held positions at the New York Times, New York, Radar, George, and Esquire. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Interview, Details, Elle, Architectural Digest, American Photo,
Town & Country, and Cosmopolitan, and he has also written for the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. He has profiled subjects from John F. Kennedy Jr. to Greta Garbo, from Richard Gere to Ivana Trump, and he has written on subjects such as divorce, plastic surgery, Greenwich Village, and sex in the nineties. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (1995), which was published in eight countries; My Generation (2000), a biography of the Baby Boom generation; Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (2003); and 740 Park (2005). He currently lives in New York City.

On a chilly winter day, early in 2006, I sat in the office of Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he would announce his retirement two years later). Montebello is generally considered, even by his most fervent admirers, a little arrogant, a touch on the pompous side, and his mid-Atlantic Voice of God (well-known from his Acoustiguide tours of exhibitions) does nothing to dispel the impression of a healthy self-regard. So I was nervous; I was there to discuss my plan to write an unauthorized book about the museum and to ask for his support, or, at least, his neutrality.

He wasn’t happy to see me.

Ever since its founding, the Metropolitan has bred arrogance, hauteur, hubris, vanity and even madness in those who live in proximity to its multitude of treasures and who have come to feel not just protective but possessive of them. “Being involved with it made you special to the outside world,” says Stuart Silver, for years the museum’s chief exhibition designer. “It was a narcotic. You were high all the time.”
The Metropolitan is more than a mere drug, though. It 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. So the museum must be seen as something separate from the often imperfect individuals who created it, who sustained it and who run it today, something greater than the sum of their myriad flaws.

Without taking anything away from The Louvre or the Orsay in Paris, Madrid’s Prado, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, The British Museum (which has no pictures), Britain’s National Gallery (which has only pictures and sculpture), the Vatican in Rome, the Uffizi in Florence, Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Berlin’s Pergamon, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian Institute and its National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Getty in Malibu or other vital New York museums like the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan is simply (and at the same time not at all simply) the most encyclopedic, universal art museum in the world.

In Montebello’s office that day, he’d been slumped sullenly in his chair as I made my pitch, but straightened up as I finished. “You are laboring under a misimpression,” he told me. “The museum has no secrets.”
 
From its inception, oversized personalities have dominated the Metropolitan; many loom large in American history, too. John Jay, grandson of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, first conceived of it. William Cullen Bryant, the orator, poet, journalist, publisher and club man was one of the most eloquent advocates of the museum’s creation. In recent times, its board heads have been some of America’s most powerful men: in the 1930s, George Blumenthal, who headed Lazard Frères; in the 1960s, C. Douglas Dillon, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury; in the 1970s, Robert Lehman, the head of Lehman Brothers and in the 1980s, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, the chairman ofThe New York Times.

Some of these characters defined distinct eras in the museum’s colorful history. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, named the first director by the mostly self-made founders, was an Italian count, a Civil War veteran given to inflating his rank, an American diplomat and an amateur archaeologist, some of whose finds from Cyprus remain treasures in the museum’s collections today; his excesses mark it still. J. Pierpont Morgan is credited with turning the Met from a semi-private clubhouse for the trustees into a professional operation.

Following Morgan and dominating throughout the mid-20th century,

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Excerpted from Rogues' Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Michael Gross
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