A Day in the Life: Gary Tinterow

A Day in the Life

Christian Deydier

Bettina Korek

Ken Yeh

Piotr Uklanski

Damien Hirst Joseph Mallord William Turner Tara Donovan Eugene Delacroix Francis Bacon Tony Oursler Jeff Koons El Anatsui

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For a reporter's take on what it was like to follow Gary Tinterow for a day, click here.

In an art world buffeted by the winds of fashion, with countless museums wooing celebrity architects or ceding to the temptations of commercialism, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York relies on a serious, not to say old-fashioned, virtue: first-rate scholarship that enhances the public’s experience of great art.  Trustees reportedly wept at the meeting in January when the director Philippe de Montebello announced his resignation after three decades. Speculation soon ran rampant about who would lead the museum in the coming years.

The name of Gary Tinterow—whose current august title is Engelhard curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art—shows up on most short lists. Like Montebello, this 54-year-old Houston native has an uncannily mellifluous voice and has spent much of his career at the Metropolitan. An art historian educated at Brandeis and Harvard, he served as the curator of 19th-century European paintings from 1983 until 2004, when modern and contemporary art were added to his domain.  

Most recently, after co-organizing numerous critically acclaimed and widely popular exhibitions, such as the museum’s 2006 tribute to the fin de siècle Parisian art dealer Ambrose Vollard, he spearheaded the expansion and reorganization of the Metropolitan’s 19th- and early 20th-century galleries. He has injected new life into the contemporary program with adventurous outdoor displays in the museum’s rooftop garden and, downstairs, with a series of small shows by living artists, including Tony Oursler and Tara Donovan.

The first of April found him in constant motion: juggling plans for “J. M. W. Turner,” opening July 1,  and “Jeff Koons on the Roof,” which he would soon begin installing; showing off the new galleries to a collector; supervising the hiring of a technician; and hobnobbing with trustees on an evening tour of a museum just up the avenue.  For Tinterow, it’s all in a day’s work.

7:30 A.M. Wakes in his Upper West Side apartment. Coffee. Feeds the dogs—Peter, a shepherd mix, and Emma, a greyhound—and walks them in Riverside Park. “Greyhounds don’t need a lot of space,” says Tinterow, whose two previous canines were also racing hounds he rescued. “They run, and then they sleep.”

8:15 A.M. Breakfast.

8:30 A.M. Sends e-mails to a colleague at the Tate Britain, in London, regarding a Francis Bacon retrospective arriving at the Met in  summer 2009 and to a French curator in Paris about a 19th-century French painting currently on the market. 

9:00 A.M. Prepares for a special morning meeting with a few trustees on confidential matters.

10:00 A.M. Takes a taxi to the Upper East Side home of one of those trustees.

11:30 A.M. The meeting concluded, walks to the museum.

11:40 A.M. Enters the sleek new office he moved into just a week ago. It once belonged to William Lieberman, the former chair of modern and contemporary art at the Met, who died in 2005. Tinterow’s occupancy was delayed, in part, by the need to rip out the ceiling and add steel reinforcements to support Damien Hirst’s floating shark, installed on the floor directly above. Seated at his computer (his screen saver features greyhounds), he faces away from the spectacular views of Central Park. Responds to e-mails from Jeff Koons’s studio; from the Association of Art Museum Curators, which he cofounded in 2001; and from Met staff regarding the upcoming exhibition “Masterpieces of Modern Design.”

11:50 A.M. Looks over a large printout displaying the precise location of each painting in “Turner,” a show he began planning with the Tate Britain more than 10 years ago.

11:55 A.M. Races out of the office, striding determinedly past canvases by Modigliani and Clemente, to a large gallery closed for the installation of “Masterpieces.” Hanging on a wall is one of his recent acquisitions: a glittering weaving by the contemporary African artist El Anatsui. Checks in with five staff members who are there to give a practical test to applicants for a job as technician. Candidates must reframe an early 20th-century landscape; lift an enormous canvas by the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux; place an Eames chair on a dolly; and transport a midcentury modern casserole. Two candidates have already framed the landscape upside down.

12:07 P.M. Takes a shortcut up a back stairway to the new 19th-century galleries, where the assistant curator Kathryn Calley Galitz and the exhibition designer Michael Langley are looking at wall colors for “Turner.” (Paint is being donated by Farrow & Ball, a British company specializing in historically accurate hues.) The Met’s Turners are all out on loan, so the two hold the enormous swatches next to a Constable landscape instead. Picture Gallery Red is chosen for the room devoted to Turner’s Venetian paintings; Mouse’s Back, a dull brown, will set off his late experiments with abstraction. “Paintings tend to become muted with time,” says Tinterow. “You want a wall color that looks a bit tired so that the paintings appear fresh.”

12:25 P.M. Pauses to show off a recent acquisition, a small and luminous late Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, purchased by trustee Jayne Wrightsman in honor of de Montebello. Erudite chatter with a journalist in the galleries, resurrecting forgotten rivalries among 19th-century Salon painters.

12:40 P.M. Back in the office, looks over paperwork concerning proposed loans, gifts and deaccessions. Responds to an e-mail regarding the deaccession of a 19th-century British painting, sold at auction for $6,000.

12:50 P.M. Darts into the hallway, where he approves a press invitation and a poster for “Jeff Koons on the Roof.”

1:00 P.M. Lunches on seared tuna in the trustees dining room with Toto Bergamo Rossi, the aristocratic Venetian art restorer and stalwart of the organization Venetian Heritage, a benefit for which Tinterow attended the previous evening. Bergamo Rossi is proposing a loan exhibition of bronzes by the late-Renaissance master Tiziano Aspetti from the Chapel of St. Anthony, in Padua, soon to close for an extended renovation. While fleshing out the particulars, the two men recall their first meeting, at a mutual friend’s summer home on the Croatian island of Lopud, where Bergamo Rossi is now restoring a 15th-century stone house. Nightlife in Lopud, Tinterow says, involves “listening to the local donkey raid the garden.”<

1:40 P.M. Ian Wardropper, the chair of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, joins them over coffee to discuss further details, including scheduling.

2:00 P.M. E-mails in the office: more Koons.

2:20 P.M. Tours the galleries devoted to 19th-century landscape painting with Alice Goldet, an American collector living in Europe, and her friend the French writer Olivier Bourgeois. Discussion of donors “Gene” (Eugene Thaw) and Wheelock Whitney III: when and how their collections were built and the merits of plein air sketches versus finished canvases. Tinterow calls Caspar David Friedrich “not a great painter but a great image maker.”

3:00 P.M. Meets in his office with a young woman who has recently moved to New York from London and is seeking a curatorial position. Tinterow asks about her work experience and in response to her queries, traces his own trajectory from his days as a student assistant at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, through his hesitating between law school and Harvard art history, to his first show, of Picasso’s drawings at the Fogg, timed to coincide with the artist’s centenary.

4:00 P.M. Museumwide conference of department heads with de Montebello regarding performance reviews for curatorial staff.

4:50 P.M. Steals an hour to edit his just-completed catalogue essay on Francis Bacon’s critical reception in America before “all hell breaks loose on Monday” with the Koons installation.

5:45 P.M. Meets with two of the Met’s “friends” groups—donors to particular areas of the museum—at the Guggenheim to tour a survey of Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist best known for his use of gunpowder in drawings and installations. Leisurely progress up the ramp of the rotunda chatting with the Met trustees Cynthia Polsky and Marie Douglas-David. Tinterow curated an exhibition of Cai’s work two years ago on the roof of the Met during which the artist set off daily explosions. “The first day, along Fifth Avenue, the nannies ran for cover with the children,” he says. “But people got used to it.”

8:00 P.M. Heads down to Tribeca for a cocktail party at the architectural practice of his friends Steven Harris and Lucien Rees-Roberts.

9:00 P.M. Dinner at home with his partner, the antiques dealer Christopher Gardner, before walking the dogs one last time. 

"A Day in the Life" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.