Charles de montebello

De montebello public speaking
Philippe de Montebello (born May 16, 1936 in Paris) is a French and American museum director.
Born in Paris in 1936 and educated in French schools through the baccalaureate, Philippe de Montebello graduated magna cum laude, Harvard class.

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When Philippe de Montebello (*) retired at the end of 2008 after 31 years as director of theMetropolitan Museum of Art, he found himself back where he started: in the classrooms of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, the very school where he had earned a master’s degree more than 30 years ago.

Now teaching the history and culture of museums, Mr. de Montebello reflects on how he ended up in the academic world, how things have changed since he was a student and on arts education in general.

Q.Why did you decide to teach?

A. I always figured I would. I’ve always been a bit of a didact; now the didact is let loose. I love working with ideas and putting them together; creating narratives and what I want to impart to students. And I have to say the students at a place like this — which is one of the top schools in the country and in New York — are very bright. They know a lot. I meet with them. We talk about their papers, assignments or about their careers, and I find that extremely stimulating. And you feel good.

You feel as if you are cont

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Philippe de Montebello

This statement will read rather differently from those of my colleagues as unlike them, my teaching is more experiential and heuristic than research and text based. That is because I do not teach art history as such, but rather examine works of art with an emphasis on their physicality and consideration of their existence within an autonomous category called “art.” As a result, I study their function as it varies depending on context, whether in museums, collections or in their original setting. My concern is on the one hand historical and on the other, focused on the contingency of response. In order to understand what follows, it is essential that I say something about my forty plus years of experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When I enrolled at the IFA in 1961, I concentrated on early Netherlandish and French painting, privileged to study with the world’s authority on the subject, Professor Charles Sterling. This led to a curatorial appointment in the Met’s Paintings Department. I wonder if that makes me the only facul

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Philippe de Montebello has been the most significant figure of the last half century in the museum world. At the helm of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than thirty years, he steered a path between populism and elitism, attracting both large audiences to the Met and burnishing a gold standard of quality. Along the way, he reinvigorated the museum’s traditional role and made the best possible case for the oldest values of art and humanism.

Born in France in 1936, he received his advanced education in the United States and arrived at the Met in 1963 as a curatorial assistant in the Department of European Paintings. It was a watershed year thanks to another visitor from France: the Mona Lisa. On loan to the Met for just four weeks, the famous Leonardo drew one million people to an institution that was used to about two million visitors annually. The long lines that formed daily pointed toward a new era for art museums, one in which the number of visitors mattered as much as the scholarship of the curators. It was this era that de Montebello came to dominate, not by