Generation Complex

NEW YORK—If the art world wasn’t exactly shocked by the announcement of Philippe de Montebello’s impending retirement—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s longtime director is, after all, 71—the news certainly jolted it into conversations about how much American art museums have changed since the French-born aristocrat took the helm at the Met three decades ago, who his successor might be, and what kind of challenges they’ll face.

Those conversations have opened up a wider discussion of the increasingly complex responsibilities awaiting new directors in institutions of all sizes. De Montebello might be the highest-profile art-world doyen to retire in a long time, but several other museum leaders have also recently announced plans to step down, including Trudy C. Kramer of Parrish Art Museum on New York’s Long Island, Jay Gates of Washington D.C.’s Phillips Collection, and John R. “Jack” Lane of the Dallas Museum of Art. Those departures, coupled with what some are calling an unprecedented number of vacant museum directorships (“I don’t remember the number of openings being this high since 1983 or ’84,” Mimi Gaudieri, the Association of Art Museum Directors’s executive director, told the New York Times last July) have some art-world insiders wondering if museums in the United States might be experiencing a changing of the guard.

As of December, even before de Montebello’s announcement, more than 20 museums across the country were looking for directors, according to a list published monthly by the Association of Art Museum Directors. “There are always [directorship] vacancies at museums, but generationally we are probably facing a moment where there will be increasing numbers of openings,” said Elizabeth Easton, former chair of the Brooklyn Museum’s department of European Painting and Sculpture, former president of the Association of Art Museum Curators, and cofounder and director of the newly established Center for Curatorial Leadership, which was founded in 2007 to educate curators in the managerial, fundraising, and administrative responsibilities of directing an institution.

Jack Lane, who will retire from the Dallas Museum of Art in May, started his career as a museum director at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, when he was 35. “Many of my peers also got their first directorships in their early- to mid-30s, so this seems to be kind of a pattern,” he said.

And if a new generation of leaders is cycling in now, it certainly has its work cut out for it. The museum landscape has shifted dramatically over the past few decades, and it continues to change rapidly. “Obviously museums are many times the size they were 30 years ago and their budgets and visitor numbers are much larger,” Easton said. “Running a museum is a much bigger operation.”

At the Met alone, attendance has climbed from three and a half million to about five million under de Montebello’s reign. The museum’s physical space has also grown considerably, with countless additions and expansions, from the 100,000 square-foot Lila Acheson Wallace Wing in 1987 to the 57,000-square-foot Greek and Roman Galleries in 2007. The museum currently operates on an annual budget of more than $200 million, a dramatic increase even from $116.5 million in 1999, when CEO was added to de Montebello’s title. In addition, the Met has, along with other museums, dealt with scrutiny into the origins of antiquities in its collection (the museum recently returned the 2,500-year-old Euphronius Krater to Italy, part of a deal that included 20 other antiquities). Other institutions are facing the same changes and challenges on varying scales, making the present a particularly tricky time to be a museum director.

“Museum life has gotten much more complicated,” Lane summed up.

Phillip Nowlen, head of the Los Angeles–based Getty Leadership Institute, which offers educational programs for both current and future museum leaders, ticked off a list of new challenges including the changing distribution of wealth in the United States (which affects the culture and composition of museums’ boards of directors); the tendency of today’s museum visitors to bring less art knowledge; museums’ mounting financial challenges; the intricacies of repatriation; and increasing demands for transparency in museum policy and decision-making.