The Glenn Lowry Years: The Mixed Record of MoMA’s Mega-Builder (and who should succeed him)

When Philippe de Montebello announced his intention to retire after three decades as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the museum’s curators (spurred by Helen Evans, then the Met’s Byzantine art curator) took upon themselves the task of mounting a tribute exhibition honoring their admired leader—“The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions”:

The invitation to the Met’s October 2008 press preview (which I attended) for the PdM Years consisted entirely of images of the eclectic masterworks acquired on Philippe’s watch:

Like de Montebello, Glenn Lowry, who last month announced (via Robin Pogrebin of the NY Times) his impending retirement from the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art, will have served in his post for three decades. Here’s his grim, confrontational official photo, recently distributed to the press:

I much prefer remembering him this way:

Unlike de Montebello, who enjoyed the praise and respect of his curators, Lowry was often at odds with his underlings. He controversially enforced a 65-and-out mandatory retirement policy to put out-to-pasture one of MoMA’s “most consistently brilliant curators” (as I had described the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture in my Elderfield Too Elderly? post):

As I had suspected might happen, Glenn exempted himself from the 65-and-out rule: Now 70, he plans to leave in September 2025. He was undeniably a gifted manager of employees and wooer of donors, as you can read in his MoMA bio that touts his achievements in upping the museum’s size, endowment and visitation.

BUT…there are lots of “buts”:

Lowry’s acceptance (through a private foundation, enigmatically named: “New York Fine Arts Support Trust”) of millions of dollars in secret supplements to his MoMA compensation from individual collector/trustees (without approval from the full board) struck me (and others) as “not just unorthodox, but potentially unethical,” as I wrote here. What’s more, he undermined several bedrock principles of museum stewardship—particularly the ethical guidelines regarding deaccessions, which were more widely honored in the breach during the pandemic. In deploring MoMA’s disposals, Eric Gibson, the Wall Street Journal‘s Arts in Review editor, quoted me at length 10 years ago, in his piece titled, “MoMA: A Museum That Has Lost Its Way”:

In a May 2004 article (my link, not his), cultural journalist and blogger Lee Rosenbaum reported in the [Wall Street] Journal that MoMA had sold nine paintings from the permanent collection at that year’s spring auctions for a total of $25.65 million. But this was, she wrote, “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“In the past five years MoMA has sold 12 other works from its painting and sculpture collection and hundreds more from other departments,” she continued. “What makes MoMA’s sales unusual is the quality and financial value of its offerings, which include major works by two of modernism’s defining masters, Picasso and Braque.”

One of the biggest of these was the 2003 sale of Picasso’s “Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro” (1909), a proto-Cubist landscape from one of the most important phases of the artist’s career. In pre-Taniguchi days it could often be seen hanging with “The Reservoir, Horta,” a closely related work painted during the same “campaign.” When asked about this sale by Ms. Rosenbaum, “Mr. Lowry observed that there would be ‘nothing wrong’ with having both pictures, ‘if we were a Picasso museum.’”

This was a foolish thing to say.

Here’s the Picasso sold by MoMA, which had been bequeathed to the museum by Nelson Rockefeller:

When interviewed by me, eminent Picasso scholar John Richardson had decried this as “one of the most appalling bits of deaccessioning. I’m still shuddering and shaking.” The Art Newspaper reported that it was acquired by “the German dealer Heinz Berggruen through Acquavella Galleries, New York.”

In another controversial move, Lowry was a party to the evisceration of the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), when MoMA took over AFAM’s former headquarters (adjacent to MoMA), knocked down its Tod Williams/Billie Tsien-designed building, and used that land as the site of MoMA’s 1,050-foot-high Jean Nouvel-designed skyscraper. The MoMA Monster (as I had dubbed it) was downsized from its originally planned 1,250-foot height, keeping it shorter than the city’s iconic, 1,250-foot-tall Empire State Building. As I wrote here: “MoMA bought the flagship building of the financially strapped AFAM for $31.2 million in 2011, in a deal that I criticized at the time because AFAM never sought other potential buyers to determine whether it could have gotten a better deal than what MoMA had offered.”

AFAM moved its headquarters to a smaller, less distinctive building across town, which was formerly that museum’s satellite facility. Prior to Lowry’s directorship, MoMA had been a prime mover in the development of the César Pelli-designed mixed-use “Museum Tower” (1983), which included space for MoMA’s expansion on its lower floors and luxury condominiums (including an apartment that the museum purchased in 2004, where Lowry lived rent-free, as reported in 2007 by the NY Times).

As it happened, I walked by AFAM’s current site on Sept. 15, on my way to a memorable NY Philharmonic concert that was conducted by the indomitable Michael Tilson Thomas:

But back to AFAM: Below is what that beleaguered (but still open) museum looked like when I walked by on Sept. 15. It was largely hidden behind scaffolding from a large, unrelated construction project that began in July.

But back again to Lowry and his strained relationships with some of his curators: According to “I Remember MoMA” by Calvin Tomkins (in the Sept. 25, 2006 New Yorker), the late, great Kirk Varnedoe, then MoMA’s head of painting and sculpture, “felt he was no longer being allowed to do the job that [William] Rubin [my link, not Tomkins’] had passed on to him.”

Tomkins wrote:

The chance to present the collection in more depth, to tell the synoptic story of modern art with great complexity and variety than the old galleries had allowed, was tremendously important to him [Varnedoe], but now he was being told that Glenn Lowry wanted a final say on the rehanging.

One curator who left MoMA during Lowry’s tenure, Robert Storr, former senior paintings and sculpture curator, alleged in a 2014 interview with Randy Kennedy, then of the NY Times, that Lowry “simply does not understand modern and contemporary art and is rivalrous with the people who do.”

In an interview with Gareth Harris, published last May in The Art Newspaper, Storr decried “the resistance some of my initiatives met with”:

After all, my job was to bring first-rate art to the attention of the general public and I was thwarted numerous times because of the formal or content-driven squeamishness of patrons who served as the gatekeepers….I can understand how patrons squirm at being told or shown how they’ve been remiss or blind or biased. But, as the arbiters of a public trust they should rise above their personal discomfort and so acknowledge that they’ve gotten the message.

That said, Lowry inarguably excelled in expanding the museum’s square footage, more than doubling the size of MoMA’s galleries. But I doubt that Glenn will be venerated upon his retirement as Philippe was—accorded his own bronze likeness at the entrance to his museum’s galleries, where he greeted visitors for several years after his retirement in 2008:

As I stated in my January 2008 commentary for New York Public Radio (WNYC) on de Montebello’s retirement:

He had tremendous credibility and respect of the trustees, the staff, the City of New York. He’s someone who radiates integrity and a devotion to excellence, and I think he was able to communicate that to the people who needed to support his initiatives….He won the respect and love of his curators.

By contrast, I think the colleagues with whom Lowry felt most compatible were not the art experts but the major collectors and megabucks donors whom he expertly persuaded to part with their assets—both artistic and financial.

There has already been much speculation about who will succeed Glenn, with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, getting a lot of buzz. What remains to be seen is whether the Ford Foundation’s just announced $10-million grant to endow her Studio Museum position (reported by Pogrebin of the Times but not yet announced on the museum’s website, as far as I can determine) will induce Golden to stay or prompt her to leave, knowing that a desirable replacement could be enticed by the munificent support.

Surprisingly, I’ve seen no suggestion that a worthy successor could be someone well acquainted with MoMA and its staff—Connie Butler, a former MoMA curator who went on to become chief curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and is now director of MoMA PS1.

She’d be my pick:

That said, journalists (including me) are notoriously unreliable predictors of who will clinch the top spots at art museums. Time (and the whims of museum trustees) will tell. Also yet to be determined is Darren Walker’s next move: The Ford Foundation announced in July that its president had “shared his plans to step down from the foundation by the end of 2025,” ending a 12-year tenure.