A Day in the Life of an Arts Reporter

Photo by Christopher Anderson

Tinterow choosing wall colors for an exhibition. The author weighed in and her favorite—Oval Room Blue—was eventually chosen.

Joseph Mallord William Turner Cai Guo Qiang Amedeo Modigliani Tate Pats Itself on the Back, Plans Ahead Old Master Paintings J. M. W. Turner The Hit Parade Asia Specific

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The web exclusive that follows is an extension
of A Day in the Life: Gary Tinterow, an article originally published in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing a journalist who sets out to trail the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gary Tinterow is keeping up with the over-six-foot-tall curator—and greyhound aficionado—as he strides past the masterpieces in the Met’s galleries. “Sometimes I stop to smell the flowers,” Tinterow admitted as we sailed past an exquisite Modigliani portrait en route to one of his dozen appointments. Mostly, though, he’s a man with a mission.

Whether that mission will include leading the entire museum as its new director is anyone’s guess. To an outside observer, at least, Tinterow’s formidable political instincts are tempered by his charm, intellectual passion and scrupulous politeness. Apart from needing to constantly duck the camera of our accompanying photographer, who didn’t want a journalist in his candid shots,  I found the day I spent with the curator as something between his guest and his shadow to be immensely pleasurable. I got to weigh in on wall colors for the upcoming J. M. W. Turner exhibition—my favorite, Oval Room Blue, was Tinterow’s choice for a room devoted to works on paper—with no one challenging my credentials. I noticed a gleam of scholarly gratification in Tinterow’s eyes as, standing in the newly reinstalled 19th- and early 20th-century galleries, I identified the inspiration for an obscure Salon painter’s portrait of a young girl: Ingres’s Mlle Rivière, now hanging in the Louvre museum.

There were some lovely surprises. An expatriate American art collector, Alice Goldet, touring those same galleries with Tinterow, graciously invited both him and me to visit and view her hoard of 19th-century landscape paintings at her home in Paris. And although Toto Bergamo Rossi, an aristocratic Venetian art restorer, nearly choked on his lunch of smoked trout when I suggested he redo in high modernist style the 15th-century stone house he’d recently purchased on a Croatian island, both men were far too well mannered to make much of it.

At day’s end, a leisurely tour of the Guggenheim’s Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition in the company of several Met trustees seemed like a bit of a busman’s holiday. But not for Tinterow, who was seeing the show for the fourth time. “If I’m not in my museum, I’m in somebody else’s,” he said. That’s the curator’s life.

"A Day in the Life of an Arts Reporter" is a web exclusive published in conjunction with 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.