Monument Man by Harold Holzer

Author:Harold Holzer [Hozer, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Official photograph of Daniel Chester French, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Little wonder that art historian and museum curator Thayer Tolles has described this metamorphic period of Met history as “The Daniel Chester French Years.”77 During French’s long and influential service as a trustee, the Metropolitan expanded its limited collecting ethos and introduced “blockbuster” exhibitions before the term entered the vocabulary. French helped build the institution not only into a world-class repository for masterpiece antiquities but into a showcase—and advocate—for contemporary American art. Such works never became the principal focus at the Metropolitan Museum, neither during the French years nor later. But within the so-called encyclopedia of world art meant at the Met to represent every culture, and every age, at the highest levels of creativity, American art finally took its rightful place.

Emboldened and empowered, French would later try widening his field of influence at the Met, no longer timidly, and not always successfully. Six days after the 1921 death of Abbott Handerson Thayer, French would propose a memorial exhibition of his pictures. French considered Thayer an artist who could “see nature with fresh eyes”—indeed, some historians credit Thayer with inventing camouflage—and believed him personally, though plagued by bipolar disorder, to be “as near to being an angel as it is given to mortals to be.”78 Thayer in turn considered French part of an “essential brotherhood” of like-minded artists committed to pure beauty.79

In an attempt to persuade Met director Edward Robinson, a specialist in antiquities, to commit immediately to such a show, French proved a bit heavy-handed, warning him: “I am sure some other museum will get ahead of us if we delay.” When the director dallied, French went over his head, writing board president Robert de Forest just a few days later to remind him: “I consider it a very important matter and I hope it may materialize.” French evidently got what he wanted, for just six days later he was asking Thayer’s widow for permission to stage the show. The Thayer exhibition opened less than a year thereafter, on March 29, 1922.80

Not all of French’s Met initiatives earned approval and approbation. After J. P. Morgan died, the trustees voted to erect a memorial to him inside the museum’s great hall. But the tycoon’s son, who had joined his father on the Met board, dismissed French’s initial sketch as “clumsy and somewhat meaningless.”81 Other trustees tried to shield French from the embarrassment of such criticism, but Paul Manship ended up producing the Morgan memorial.82 Even if disappointed by this rejection, French was not to be stalled from proposing new museum initiatives, though his approach became measured. When he suggested an exhibition devoted to the paintings of American impressionist painter J. Alden Weir, director Robinson put his foot down, insisting that such a project would “throw so much work in [at] the Museum that it will be impossible to do anything else until after that event.”83 This time French relented.

It is difficult to comprehend how French managed to make

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