What’s Missing from the Met? Tinterow Exposes the Gaps

It was gutsy of Gary Tinterow, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catch-all curator of 19th-century through contemporary, to deliver a public lecture Tuesday on the hot-button topic of “the history of the Metropolitan’s involvement with contemporary art—its strengths and weaknesses—as well as the creation of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art.”
This merger of two chronologically sequential departments under the auspices of a 19th-century specialist raised fears that contemporary art would be marginalized—an impression strengthened by these recent comments by the Met’s traditionalist director, Philippe de Montebello. Tinterow’s talk did little to dispel those fears.
He began his discourse (the lead-off event in this year’s “ArtTalks” series sponsored by the American Federation of Arts) with a recital of the various bequests that had enriched the Met’s 19th- and 20th-century collections.
Then he jolted his listeners awake with a startling littany of the gaps in the collection of our nation’s premier “encyclopedic” art museum. The Met may have its Duccio, but its missing-in-action roster of modern and contemporary art includes:
—Matisse: “We have his early works and his Nice works, but few of the heroic years so well represented at MoMA—his work from the ‘teens.”
—Mondrian: “One small work from his high abstract period.”
—Surrealism: “We lack quite a bit in having a representive selection.”
—Duchamp: None.
—German Expressionism: A small number, including Dix and Beckmann.
—Russian Constructivism: “None at all.”
—Postwar European: “Very little.”
—Pop Art: “Weak, except for Warhol….Last year we made our first acquisition of a work by Rauschenberg, from David Geffen’s collection.”
—20th-Century Women Artists: “Insufficient….I wish we had a great early Frankenthaler to put with the big boys.”
—Important Contemporary Artists: Nothing by Beuys, Andre, Ruscha, Richter, Marden, Hesse, Serra.
—Art of the Last 20 Years: “Very thin.”
Tinterow then conceded the obvious: “There’s a lot of work to be done.” He added, however, that “we can’t possibly represent every artist of interest to us in the permanent collection.”
So what ARE they going to do about it?
COMING SOON: How the Met is trying to fill its contemporary generation gap.