Keeping all eyes on the long view

The Arts:After three decades as director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Frenchman Philippe de Montebello is to step down. Ahead of a trip to Dublin to share his thoughts on what makes a great museum, he talks to Belinda McKeon

AN ELEGANT VOICE sounds often in visitors' ears as they wander through the many rooms of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, past its many treasures. That voice carries the visitor forward, expands on the wonders of the museum's collection; a painting's provenance, a sculpture's setting, the relation of this tapestry to that torso, of this photograph to that print. And if it's a voice which gives the sense that it knows what it's talking about, then, well, it should.

The voice which greets and enlightens visitors to the Met, on the museum's audio guide, is that of a Frenchman, Philippe de Montebello, who will next year step down as director of the Met after 31 years.

That tenure has made him the the longest-serving director of any major art museum in the world, and his has been an extraordinary era at the Met. Since his appointment in 1977, the museum has more than doubled in size, has seen its attendance rise by more than a third to almost five million visitors a year, and has acquired a further 84,000 works of art (many of them currently on show in an exhibition dedicated by the museum's curators to de Montebello) to make up a collection of more than two million.

De Montebello has presided over 17 curatorial departments and over the creation of a number of major new galleries behind the Met's neoclassical facade. He has also managed and strengthened the complex network of philanthropic and corporate supports upon which the museum relies. Under his directorship, the Met has become the leading publisher of US art books, each year releasing dozens of lavish, serious, scholarly works exploring the nature and significance of aspects of the museum's vast collection.

Two years ago, he negotiated a crucial agreement with the Italian government, which resolved a long-standing dispute over the legal ownership of ancient artefacts in the Met's collection. These works now reside in the Met as long-term loans from Italy, an arrangement that sets an invaluable precedent for museums in an age of dispute over the rightful place of treasures claimed in archaeological digs (or long-ago looting sprees).

His reign, then, has been one of expansion, of elucidation and of action. Still, he makes time above all to find, quite literally, the ear of the public, making himself present among museum-goers not just as a voice in their headphones.

"I find that one of the most useful and pertinent things a museum director can do is to observe his public," de Montebello says, sitting in his book-filled office overlooking Central Park, surrounded by beautifully burnished furniture and watched over by a Claude Lorrain landscape. "Because why are we open? For the people who come. So, yes, we have the primary responsibility of the care, preservation, study, publication of these pieces of history that are the heritage of mankind. But when we open the doors, we make them accessible to as many people as possible. And accessible is far more than opening a door. I mean accessible intellectually, visually."

So the director will take note: do visitors pass a particular piece by? Do they gravitate towards a painting which is hung in a particular way? Do they seem unmoved by one bronze, inspired by another?

"We've reorganised things as a function of how the public reacts," says de Montebello.

DE MONTEBELLO HIMSELFfirst came to the Met as a visitor. Born in 1936 to an aristocratic family in Paris, he is, in fact, Count de Montebello and is descended from Napoleon on his father's side and from none other than the Marquis de Sade on his mother's. He moved to New York in the 1950s with his parents, who were artists seeking funding for a project of their own.

His grounding in the difficulties of fundraising, then, was an early one, but his first interest in art was purely academic. He studied art history at Harvard, and then began work on a PhD at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. His interest was in 15th-century Netherlandish and northern French painting, and his trips between NYU and the Met were frequent. He would drop in to the museum, he says, look at a few things, and drop out again. What happened next was unexpected, and ended his academic career abruptly: an assistant curator was needed at the Met, one with expertise in precisely de Montebello's field, and his teacher, Charles Sterling, recommended him. This was 1963, and except for a four-year stint at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, de Montebello has been at the Met ever since.

When he goes back down the museum's sweeping steps later this year after his last day as director, his career will be far from over, but it will, in a sense, have come full circle, as he returns not just to academia but to NYU and the Institute of Fine Arts, where he will teach aspiring collectors and curators about the realities of running a museum. Unsurprisingly, the international lecture circuit is also calling, with museums and universities around the world wanting a glimpse behind the scenes of the Met. The voluntary body, the Irish Museums Association, has gotten the early bird, and brings de Montebello to Dublin this week to give its annual James White Lecture at the National Gallery.

That same National Gallery comes up in conversation as de Montebello, discussing the merits and difficulties of the funding model on which museums such as the Met exist, expresses his relief at never having had to direct what he calls a "government-fed" museum. He is aware that his successor at the Met (British tapestries expert Thomas Campbell) will have to work in far more constrained financial circumstances. The economic crisis means that there are certain donors and philanthropists to whom there is scarcely any point in making a phone call. "You will hesitate to call up someone whose company stock is down 80 per cent," de Montebello points out. "You just don't want to hear the answer." But he believes that the European model is more constraining still, and as I tell him about the recent decision to amalgamate three major Irish galleries, he looks mildly appalled but certainly not surprised.

"See, that's the beauty of the American capitalist system," he says. "I don't have one master. I have thousands of donors. This gives me tremendous freedom. Nobody's going to say to me, as Mitterrand said to Michel Rocard when he built the Musée d'Orsay in a highly socialist government, you know, you've got to show all of the academic paintings, you've got to show everybody, nobody's better than anyone else, bring out everything you have of the 19th century."

DE MONTEBELLO'S METhas not marched to the beat of a corporate board hungry for blockbuster shows and sensational exhibits, as has been the fate of other American museums in the last 20 years. Certainly, there are headline-grabbing shows, often in the museum's Costume Institute and in the 19th- and 20th-century galleries, but, for the most part, the PR engine, with its greed for frequent temporary exhibitions of high-profile names, has been resisted.

De Montebello's emphasis has always been on the permanent collection, on the countless opportunities for exhibition and scholarship offered by its diverse spoils; on plunging again and again into its depths, rather than snatching at the short-term glitter of borrowed fineries.

By deciding that accounts should be kept for the museum as a whole, rather than for individual exhibitions, he has made it impossible for financiers to pigeonhole one type of show as more favourable for the Met than another. Twenty years ago, he did away with a practice which is today commonplace at museums: separate pricing for temporary shows. At the Met, one admission price covers all works on display, all galleries and all three inches of shoe leather it will cost the visitor to cover the museum's formidable square-footage in a single trip.

Despite his often vocalised belief in the intelligence and discernment of the museum-going public (and remember that the Met is the most visited attraction in New York), de Montebello is often accused of elitism. Much of the grist for this mill seems to derive from his indifference to certain contemporary artists and his disinclination to give large swathes of the museum over to contemporary art. But the perception that the Met does not exhibit contemporary art is an odd one, given past exhibitions of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Sean Scully and Tara Donovan, among others.

"I actually think, on contemporary art, we do too much," de Montebello says, shrugging. What interests him most about contemporary work, he adds, is how it looks in the context of work from across the centuries; how the exhibition of a young artist places that artist in an instant critical framework, performs a "litmus test" against the background of 5,000 years of art.

"Damien Hirst's shark - don't ask me if I like it or not," he says. "You see, it is irrelevant whether I do or not. It is a phenomenon of today, and why not have it here and let everybody look at it. Maybe we've arrived at allowing people to make a certain judgement about it, which they couldn't if it were not here."

The Met doesn't buy a huge amount of contemporary art, he says, because it is constrained by space. "That's in a sense a blessed thing," says de Montebello, "that we have to be highly selective and we can't suddenly have this great ship tilt from one direction to another."

His critics will point out that there was plenty of space when he decided to build the new galleries for Greek and Roman art, or to renovate the galleries for Oceanic and Native North American art, or to expand those for Chinese, Cypriot, Ancient Near Eastern, Korean and 19th- and 20th- century European art. But, in truth, de Montebello has few critics. His achievement at the Met, his preservation and deepening of the museum's integrity at a time of enormous commercial and cultural pressure, has been remarkable.

His approach has had many unusual facets, not least his decision to work without an exhibition committee or a chief curator. Instead, his curators, all leading experts in their fields, come to him with their ideas and usually the symbiosis is a fruitful one. Known as a risk-taker, he has been a director keen for many shows, many different and original uses, not to mention expansions, of that permanent collection which is the heart of his museum.

CURATORS THRIVE INsuch an atmosphere, among them Thomas Campbell, who came to de Montebello with ideas about tapestries in 2001, and who will soon occupy this office.

"My successor will have to say 'no' more often than I did," de Montebello says of the tighter financial climate in which Campbell will begin his tenure. "But we both think that's a great opportunity to retool, to be selective about priorities, to make better exhibitions by making them smaller. Scaling back certainly doesn't have to mean dumbing down."

•What Makes A Great Museum Great , the Irish Museums Association's annual lecture in memory of Dr James White, given by Philippe de Montebello is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin 2, on Thursday at 6.30pm