SHE was a difficult old woman," remarked a staff member of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, musing on the late Adelaide de Groot, heiress to a vast fortune derived from her father's success in the China trade. "The more presentable junior employees had to take turns squiring her around, pushing her wheelchair. And all to get that damn bequest!"
The bequest was considerable, but so is the acrimony it has since roused. In the past year, the Met has quietly sold or traded off 50 of the 211 paintings Adelaide de Groot willed to the museum on her death in 1967, including works by Rousseau, Modigliani, Picasso, Gris and Bonnard. The New York Times's persistent reporting of this, over the past five months, has taken on the character of a vendetta. Sometimes the Times seems to hint darkly at sins where there were no sins—or at most only dubious transactions. But the publicity has caused a violent row over a great museum's duty to its benefactors and public. New York State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz opened an inquiry into the "legality and prudence" of the Met's behavior. At stake are the Met's prestige and that of its director, Thomas P.F. Hoving.
It is common in America—though not in Europe—for museums to sell their unwanted objects. So why the fuss? Because, his critics charge, Hoving's administration had disposed of important works to raise cash, tried to conceal it and made special arrangements with favored dealers instead of putting pictures up for auction or on the open market. Furthermore, by claiming some of the sold pictures were "superfluous" and "duplicates," the Met bent its standards of taste and scholarship. "In the history of painting there are no duplicates," said Britain's leading journal of art history, the Burlington Magazine, which called Hoving's policy "sinister."
The distinguished College Art Association of America censured the Met for "contradictory public statements and inconsistent administration of professed standards for de-accessioning." In answers to questions from TIME (in writing, the Met stipulated), the museum staff replied that the C.A.A. board "appears not to understand" that the Met will eventually run out of space and therefore must get rid of some pictures. "In time, all other museums in the country will have to do the same."
When political, the art world resembles a castle populated by Coney Island ghosts. Fluorescent skeletons jiggle their pasteboard bones in each recess; the cellars resound with prerecorded mutters, wails and injunctions to silence; entrepreneurs tap their way down the corridors, prodding each moulding in the hope that a panel will fly open, revealing a lost Titian, an undocumented Goya, or a Japanese gingko-nut tycoon with an open checkbook. Collectors do not want the taxman to know how much they paid for what, and neither do dealers. The availability of a painting may be the occasion for as much conspiratorial hoo-ha and discreetly vicious elbowing as anything in the annals of industrial espionage. It is fun. It becomes a habit of mind, a badge of club membership. And some of the Met's difficulties, it seems, arise from this deeply ingrained reflex.