Personality of the year: Philippe de Montebello: Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Apollo, Dec, 2003 by David Ekserdjian

Awards of all sorts are as a rule either given for singular acts or for the accomplishments of a lifetime, and although there was something uncannily prescient about the tact that the Met had scheduled a Mesopotamian exhibition this summer that therefore coincided with the second Gulf War, it is above all for his years of service that we are honouring Philippe de Montebello. It is hard to think of anyone in the art world more deserving of the tired old accolade that he needs no introduction--or indeed of this particular award--than APOLLO'S Personality of the Year for 2003.

DE: I wondered what your first memory of being in a museum might be?

PdM: My first memory of being in a museum was when I was a schoolboy in St Martin in Pontoise, and on a school trip, it would have been in the late forties, we went to a Van Gogh exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. I was quite smitten, and I particularly remember one picture--it was that great bridge, Le pont de Langlois a Aries. I probably had also visited the Louvre, but that did not leave an indelible impression.

DE: I presume on that occasion at the Jeu de Paume you didn't realist you were going to spend yore life working in museums.

PdM: I suspect I did not.

DE: So when did you realise that you wanted to work in one of these strange places?

PdM: Really, not until the last year of the baccalaureat or my first year at Harvard, when I began to take art history, and realised that that really was what I liked doing best.

DE: Once you were smitten with the idea of art history, did you have a conception of where it might lead? Was that in terms of what period you would concern yourself with? Or, for instance, whether you would be a teacher, or ...

PdM: No, initially, I felt I had to make a choice between the academic world and the museum world, and I made it very rapidly, and decided that I wanted to be involved with works of art as objects. With regard to the period, I have always been--as someone famously once said--miscellaneous. I love almost everything, although I hate some things, which is why I was never a real scholar in any particular area, because I was just as fascinated with Egyptian art, Greek things, drawings, paintings, and loved going back and forth across civilisations. My own interest in those days, as it remains in a sense, was northern painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and I worked on Van Eyck, Rogier, Fouquet, the Master of Moulins, and so on. At the Institute of Fine Arts here in New York, I worked with Charles Sterling, who was the best teacher I ever had in terms of the combination of discipline, passion, and showing you how to look. He was still evolving towards Jean Hey from the Master of Moulins, and the three years I worked with him were fantastic, as I witnessed his growing certainty that Jean Hey was the Master of Moulins.

DE: Presumably, you had already been to Chantilly and seen the Fouquet Heures d'Etienne Chevalier there?

PdM: Aaaah, yes! I had seen all the miniatures, and I had been to Moulins and seen the heavenly triptych there.

DE: From the Institute, you crossed the road, basically, and came to the Met.

PdM: I crossed the road, actually, before I got my PhD. This was in 1963, and Ted Rousseau was looking for an assistant curator to replace Michael Thomas, who had left, and work on netherlandish and French art. I had worked a lot on Jean Cousin and French mannerism--the Sylvie Beguin field--and Ted had heard about me from Sterling, so he came and saw me, and we got along. When he asked me if I would like to come, I pointed out that I had not got my degree, but he was not deterred. Naturally I intended to pursue it, but I never did complete it, which worried me a little bit in 1977, when Thomas Hoving had left and the Trustees were looking for a new Director.

DE: Before getting on to 1977, I wanted to ask you about your move to Houston.

PdM: I was at the Met from '63 to '67, and became Associate Curator. Then, inexplicably and out of the blue, for no clear reason, especially since I was totally unqualified for the job, I was offered the directorship of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In view of the fact that Everett Fahy was very young, I realised that I wouldn't have any chance of being the head of the paintings department here for a long time, and anyway I was intrigued at the prospect of being the head of the don key as opposed to the tail of the lion.

DE: I imagine you didn't know Texas particularly well, if at all, so it must have been a real leap in the dark?

PdM: Totally. I had to run to an atlas to find out where Houston was.

DE: But it was a good experience, being down there?

PdM: I learned a great deal. I learned everything about how you run a museum: how you make decisions, how you deal with staff, how you mount exhibitions, how you draw up a budget. I wouldn't have done any of that here, and it was a real baptism of fire.

DE: How did you cope with the areas of the job where you had no experience?

PdM: I basically hired everybody there. When I started, there wasn't a single curator.