Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum

Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum

By: Michael Gross  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

“Behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime.”
With these words as a starting point, Michael Gross, leading chronicler of the American rich, begins the first independent, unauthorized look at the saga of the nation’s greatest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this endlessly entertaining follow-up to his bestselling social history 740 Park, Gross pulls back the shades of secrecy that have long shrouded the upper class’s cultural and philanthropic ambitions and maneuvers. And he paints a revealing portrait of a previously hidden face of American wealth and power.

The Metropolitan, Gross writes, “is a huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of man’s attributes—extravagance, lust, gluttony, acquisitiveness, envy, avarice, greed, egotism, and pride—into the very best, transmuting deadly sins into priceless treasure.” The book covers the entire 138-year history of the Met, focusing on the museum’s most colorful characters. Opening with the lame-duck director Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s longest-serving leader who finally stepped down in 2008, Rogues’ Gallery then goes back to the very beginning, highlighting, among many others: the first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an Italian-born epic phony, whose legacy is a trove of plundered ancient relics, some of which remain on display today; John Pierpont Morgan, the greatest capitalist and art collector of his day, who turned the museum from the plaything of a handful of rich amateurs into a professional operation dedicated, sort of, to the public good; John D. Rockefeller Jr., who never served the Met in any official capacity but who, during the Great Depression, proved the only man willing and rich enough to be its benefactor, which made him its behind-the-scenes puppeteer; the controversial Thomas Hoving, whose tenure as director during the sixties and seventies revolutionized museums around the world but left the Met in chaos; and Jane Engelhard and Annette de la Renta, a mother-daughter trustee tag team whose stories will astonish you (think Casablanca rewritten by Edith Wharton).

With a supporting cast that includes artists, forgers, and looters, financial geniuses and scoundrels, museum officers (like its chairman Arthur Amory Houghton, head of Corning Glass, who once ripped apart a priceless and ancient Islamic book in order to sell it off piecemeal), trustees (like Jayne Wrightsman, the Hollywood party girl turned society grand dame), curators (like the aging Dietrich von Bothmer, a refugee from Nazi Germany with a Bronze Star for heroism whose greatest acquisitions turned out to be looted), and donors (like Irwin Untermyer, whose collecting obsession drove his wife and children to suicide), and with cameo appearances by everyone from Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland to Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten, Rogues’ Gallery is a rich, satisfying, alternately hilarious and horrifying look at America’s upper class, and what is perhaps its greatest creation.

Publisher: Broadway

Release Date: 2009-05-05

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
horrific ebook editing - The Kindle version of "Rogues' Gallery:..." HAS AN ERROR ON EVERY PAGE. Missing punctuation, horrific misspellings of foreign words and proper names, typos on every monetary symbol and amount. I started making my own footnotes, but gave up because the process is so encumbered, not user friendly, and pointless since there is no way to directly contact Amazon, get a replacement copy that is properly edited or a credit for my purchase!

Just prior to reading this, I purchased and read "THe Man Who Outshone The Sun King" and it was missing all its illustrations.

I won't be buying any more ebooks from Amazon, but will try other suppliers, and wait for the 2nd generation of IPad and a back lit touchscreen.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Interesting Read But Biased - I found this well-researched book an interesting look into the history and workings of the Metropolitan Museum, so I'm grateful I read this book and therefore learned a lot about the world of art and art museums.

And yet I'm disappointed with ROGUES' GALLERY. Here's why: So many characters come and go I couldn't bond with any of them, even though Mr. Gross fills his book with many short, interesting biographies; so I suspect I didn't bond partly because the characters are, for the most part, depicted coldly and unfavorably. I got the strong feeling that Mr. Gross is biased against the wealthy and wrote his book - though certainly not a hatchet-job - with a clear agenda.

(I've worked as a chauffeur so I've had a lot of first-hand experience with the wealthy of New York.)

I'm sure many of the people who helped make the Metropolitan Museum what it is today were decent people with a strong love of art, some of whom donated their collections so the public - the non-rich - could enjoy them. I would have liked to have met those generous people. If I had this book would be a fairer, more-accurate history, and therefore a better one.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
wonderfully detailed read but Kindle version has problems - This is a fascinating glimpse into an amazing museum and into a life that most of us would have no chance to ever be a part of. What strikes me most is not the incredible amount of money and privilege but the owning of paintings that I know and have seen at The Met- the stories behind many of them having once been hung in someone's apartment. It's just hard to take in. The fact that someone needs generations of connections to be part of this world. The politicking makes politics look like nothing.

The details and stories are so rich. I can't imagine how long it took to research this book. Having just finished reading it last night I am dying to take a trip to NYC now.

Now, the Kindle version is very disappointing. There are countless typos and information left out. A painting sold for "%&@"... what does that mean?? How much did it sell for? Or someone is worth "si^*%^^" million dollars. Huh? Or a name will appear as characters I can't even find here on my keyboard. Or the new wing cost "-*^^" million dollars. It was incredibly frustrating.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
WHO IS THE AUDIENCE FOR THIS BOOK? - I am truly fascinated by who would find this book interesting or useful. I've worked with hundreds of museums for over 40 years (including The Met) and I'm finding the book very interesting but I can't figure out who the book's target audience is (if it in fact has one). New Yorkers? The reviews giving this book 4 and 5 stars seem to be primarily from New Yorkers. People who work/have worked/have worked with/for The Met?

I'm reading this book on the Kindle which I find makes reading a book seem much shorter than reading the print version. Yes, there are formatting errors but that's true of just about all of the books I've read on the Kindle. I really can't imagine reading this in print as the first couple of hundred pages (as other reviewers have noted) are endless lists of donors, new trustees, dead trustees, prices paid for things, annual budgets, etc.

If you're interested in reading this book, I strongly recommend reading it on a Kindle. Or, if you don't have a Kindle, get this through your local library.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Kindle edition badly formatted - I enjoyed the content of the book, but the Kindle edition is badly formatted and was clearly never proofread before release. Important information to the story, like amounts of money given or spent, come out garbled clumps of letters and numbers because the dollar sign threw off the Optical Chracter Recognition conversion program they were using. Other annoyances were the loss of footnote numbers, so that many of the footnotes were identified only as .'; this is critical since the footnotes are not at the bottom of the page, but at the end of the main text. Minor irritations, but indicative of a lack of proofreading, are all the German names whose umlaut became an apostrophe over empty space and other foreign words whose accent or circumflex caused them to come out as a string of cartoon profanity.

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