The Met Vs. MoMA: Bob Colacello Uncovers The Battle For Art, Prestige, And Young Trustee Blood

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Vanity Fair special correspondent Bob Colacello reports on the competition between New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for artworks, prestige, and young, moneyed trustees—“which in the museum world means anyone under 60,” Colacello writes. As Picasso biographer John Richardson tells Colacello, “The Met is upwardly mobile at the moment and it’s doing everything it can to be more modern and more varied in what it has to offer, without vulgarizing things. And MoMA, an institution that I revere, is in a period of going slightly down in everybody’s estimation.”

The Met is making big moves into 20th-century art, propelled by Leonard Lauder’s recent $1 billion gift of 81 Cubist masterpieces—though MoMA’s president emerita, Agnes Gund, tells Colacello: “I think it’s great that Leonard’s collection is going to the Met, not that we wouldn’t have wanted it at the Modern.” Colacello also details the massive expansions both museums are planning, which for MoMA includes a highly controversial Diller Scofidio + Renfro design that proposed opening the entire first floor free of charge, including the garden. MoMA director Glenn Lowry responds to criticisms of the plan, telling Colacello, “We heard a lot of feedback at the time we announced the potential opening of the garden to the public, from people who were genuinely concerned that that would alter its unique quality,” he said. “So we’re thinking it through.” But Ronald Lauder, MoMA’s influential honorary chairman (and Leonard’s brother), gives Colacello a more absolute answer: “The garden should not be open to the public. The board feels that way.” For his part, Lowry’s rival, Met director Thomas Campbell, tells Colacello of the Met’s planned expansion, for which no architect or budget has been announced, “It’s going to be the most high-profile cultural building project in New York in the next 10 years.”

Colacello addresses the rumors that Lowry may depart for Sotheby’s, now that chairman William Ruprecht has resigned. One of MoMA’s highest-ranking board members dismisses the notion, telling Colacello, “We just made up a new contract. We want Glenn here until he’s 65 [the semi-mandatory retirement age].” Colacello reports that the 60-year-old Lowry earned $1.8 million in salary and benefits in 2011, and he and his wife, Susan, a landscape architect, live rent-free in a Museum Tower apartment bought in 2004 by the museum reportedly for $6 million.

Another factor altering the balance of power between the museums is the battle for young trustee blood. Colacello reports that MoMA has been on a “youth kick” that has included bringing in Highbridge Capital co-founder Glenn Dubin, real-estate heir Lawrence Benenson, and Agnelli scion John Elkann, who is chairman of Fiat.

But the Met has come out of what Colacello calls “the youth-plus-dough sweepstakes” on top by landing Alejandro Santo Domingo and Samantha Boardman Rosen—the psychiatrist wife of real-estate tycoon Aby Rosen, whose contemporary collection includes several Warhols, Twomblys, and Basquiats. Colacello reports that the “Jewels by JAR” show staged under Campbell’s aegis in winter 2013 was in part an opportunity to curry goodwill with a number of the jeweler’s well-heeled clients—including Nancy Marks, whose billionaire investor husband, Howard Marks, recently joined the Met board.

In the meantime, the big win for the New York art world’s soon-to-be downtown darling, the Whitney, is Lise Evans, the Norwegian wife of former Goldman Sachs vice-chairman J. Michael Evans, who recently joined Alibaba’s board. (The Guggenheim doesn’t figure into this competition, because, as one Manhattanite puts it, “they’re expanding in Abu Dhabi.”)

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