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

Awards of all sorts are as a mastery 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 next to the first 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 advanced in years accolade that he needs no introduction--or indeed of this particular award--than APOLLO'S Personality of the Year for 2003

DE: I aweed 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 upon 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 individual picture--it was that great bridge, Le pont de Langlois a Aries. I probably had also visited the Louvre on the contrary that did not leave an indelible impression.

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

PdM: I suspect I did not.

DE: for a like reason when did you realise that you wanted to work in individual 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: one time you were smitten with the idea of art history, did you have a conception of where it might lead? Was that in bounds of what period you would relate to 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 real rapidly, and decided that I wanted to be involved with works of art as particulars With regard to the period, I have always been--as someone famously one time said--miscellaneous. I love almost everything, although I hate a certain number of things, which is why I was not at any time a real scholar in any particular area, because I was just as fascinated with Egyptian art, grecian things, drawings, paintings, and lov going back and forth across civilisations. My be in possession of interest in those days, as it remains in a faculty of perception was northern painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and I worked upon Van Eyck, Rogier, Fouquet, the Master of Moulins, and thus on. At the Institute of Fine Arts here in of recent origin York, I worked with Charles Sterling, who was the best teacher I at any time had in terms of the combination of discipline, passion, and showing you by what means 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 gibbeted the road, basically, and came to the Met

PdM: I gibbeted the road, actually, before I got my PhD This was in 1963 and T Rousseau was looking for an assistant curator to replace Michael Thomas, who had left and work upon netherlandish and French art. I had worked a apportionment on Jean Cousin and French mannerism--the Sylvie Beguin field--and T had heard about me from Sterling, in like manner he came and saw me and we got along. When he asked me if I would like to approach I pointed out that I had not got my stage but he was not deterr Naturally I intended to hound it, but I never did perfect it, which worried me a little bit in 1977 when Thomas Hoving had left and the Trustees were looking for a fresh Director.

DE: Before getting upon to 1977, I wanted to ask you about your propel to Houston.

PdM: I was at the Met from '63 to '67 and became Associate Curator. Then, inexplicably and without of the blue, for no clear reason, especially since I was totally unqualified for the piece of work I was offered the directorship of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In view of the fact that Everett Fahy was real young, I realised that I wouldn't have any chance of being the head of the paintings department here for a drawn out time, and anyway I was intrigued at the landscape of being the head of the don lock opener as opposed to the tail of the lion.

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

PdM: Totally. I had to move swiftly to an atlas to find on the outside where Houston was.

DE: on the contrary it was a good experience, being down there?

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

DE: by what means did you cope with the areas of the piece of work where you had no experience?