The Muses' Marble Acres

They start arriving on the steep stone steps at an early hour. In wintertime, the motorcycle jackets and minks, chesterfields and children's snowsuits quilt the entrance. In summer, every shirtsleeve seems to end in an ice cream cone. In any season it is Sunday, and the people wadded up against the doubled Corinthian columns are waiting to get into the most culturally concentrated 20 acres in the U.S.--New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Watching the crowds jostling through the Met's entrance last week, Director James J. Rorimer, 59, could not repress a small sigh for the bygone days when museum corridors contained echoes rather than crocodiles of squealing children. "My ivory tower is no more," he said. In the decade of Rorimer's stewardship at the Met, annual attendance has skyrocketed from 2,830,000 to nearly 6,000,000, rising more rapidly than that of any other major U.S. museum. Over the Washington's Birthday weekend, the Met counted a record of 59,099 admissions during Sunday's four-hour visiting period. It was a record for only a fortnight; two weeks later, more than 62,000 came. The Met even plans to widen its front steps.

The pressure has become staggering. But Rorimer, like most U.S. museum directors, welcomes the crowds."Familiarity with beauty can only breed more beauty, he believes, adding, "We have more people interested in art today than when these old masterpieces were produced." To make the turnstiles turn faster, and thus acquaint more people with their artistic heritage, he arranged in 1963 for Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to make a guest appearance at the Met, certain that it would increase museum attendance by more than a million. It did.

Bravura Rembrandt. To cope with the current culture explosion, other museums sprout wings like seraphim. The Met is busily rebuilding itself behind its own monumental neoclassic fac,ade.

Two months ago, Rorimer reopened 43 newly air-conditioned, relit and restored galleries of European paintings. He unveiled the U.S.'s largest art reference shelf, the 150,000-volume Thomas J. Watson Library, and threw open the Velez Blanco Patio (opposite page), whose elegant lintels had lain in the basement since 1945. This week he will open to the public the Met's new Far Eastern and Islamic galleries (color pages, following), with great halls of giant buddhas that seem to ring with temple gongs, and a collection of Islamic art without parallel in any of the world's museums outside of Istanbul's Topkapi.*

All these splendors just gild what was already there. Even within a single gallery, the Met is worth a thousand and one days of exploration. Only the Louvre and Leningrad's Hermitage, among museums outside of Holland, rival the Met's Rembrandts. Hanging in honeycomb luminosity are 33 of the Dutch master's softest illusions, from his early white-ruffed burghers to intense portraits of his mistress Hendlrickje Stoeffels to his jeweled Old Testament parables and his bravura Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, the costliest work of art ($2,300,000) ever auctioned.

Renaissance Fantasia. Passing from gallery to gallery becomes a kind of progressive Elysian cocktail party. Nowhere in the world does such a trio of great Manets dominate a wall as do the Met's three restored portraits in Spanish costumes. El Greco's alabaster Cardinal Nino de Guevara glowers within sight of the Spanish master's only landscape, View of Toledo, and his last great commission, St. John's Vision. In adjacent quarters Poussin's Sabine women are abducted in the passionless postures of French neoclassic actors. Through another doorway the visitor is delivered into 18th century England, attended by four Gainsboroughs, three Reynolds portraits, a Romney, and a dozen other chamois-cheeked countenances that peer down, mellow within their lacework gilt frames, between ornate black marble period fireplaces.

"Just to show a Syrian head and say it's beautiful is not enough," says Rorimer. He relates pieces chronologically so that visitors stumble without accident upon one masterpiece that helps explain another. The Met's collection of Islamic art lines a corridor that logically leads to a 14th century tiled mihrab (prayer niche), as magically multicolored as a Persian carpet. To show the effervescent character of baroque art, a huge, gilded 17th century harpsichord is placed against a wall of Tiepolo's levitating flights of linear fancy. And in the center of a room coated with Italian 16th century masters rests Benvenuto Cellini's great cup, a Renaissance fantasia 7 1/2 in. high, in which a turtle and a dragon balance a seashell in gold, enamel and pearls.

Don't Caress the Curple. The man who has presided over the Met for nearly a decade works tucked away in a tapestry-lined office on a floor between ancient Etruscan pottery, above, and Greco-Roman statuary, below. Son of a Cleveland interior designer, Rorimer has been at home at the Met ever since his 1927 graduation from Harvard. A fervent medievalist and devotee of the decorative arts, he named his children Louis and Anne after the late 15th century French monarchs, Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, whose marriage was celebrated by the weaving of the Unicorn tapestries, which Rorimer acquired for the Met. He was director of the Met's Rockefeller-endowed, monastery-like Cloisters, overlooking the Hudson, from its very inception, when he virtually designed it by staking out full-scale mock-ups in burlap. Chosen from among 150 potential candidates to become director in 1955, he today heads up a curatorial staff of 128, administers a budget of $4,800,000 ($1,300,000 provided by the city), has behind him a war chest of more than $1,000,000 available for new acquisitions.

But even after leading the Met through a decade of spectacular growth, Rorimer still prowls the museum like a bemused headmaster. Wearing ankle-high combat boots that go back to his Army days,* he roams the halls, wiping dust off display cases, bellowing "Please don't touch the art objects!" when kids tweak a sphinx's beard, or sternly lecturing an adult caressing a caryatid's curple: "That's 4,000 years old. If everyone who saw that had touched it, it wouldn't be here!"

The Missing Pot. Despite its hanging treasures, the Met under Rorimer has become vastly more than a picture gallery. Says Rorimer: "Museums have gotten into the problem of minor arts v. the so-called fine arts. Minor arts are simply things that are considered smaller." To prove that the minor arts are not always so small, Rorimer got the Hearst Foundation in 1957 to give him a lofty 45-by 47-ft. Spanish baroque choir screen, whose 60,000 Ibs. of elegant grillwork spans one of the Met's halls. Only a museum can frame a room as art, such as the Met's cubiculum, or bedroom, from the Roman town of Boscoreale on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Its wall scenes of architectural vistas help make the museum's Roman painting the best outside Italy, as well as giving a sense of the 1st century B.C. country squire's yearning for civility. The private study of a 15th century Italian duke, Federigo da Montefeltro, a Renaissance humanist, is a fool-the-eye masterwork; the tiny think chamber appears to have cabinets popping open with navigational tools, books and musical instruments. It is all illusion, a 91-foot cube for a pensive nobleman to fail-safe in.

As a total museum, the Met embraces all the muses. In its collection are 4,000 musical instruments from a baroque organ to Alpine zithers; and the museum's three Stradivarius violins are regularly lent for concerts in the Met's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Its priceless collection of 1,450 Greek pots includes all the known shapes of Attic vases across three centuries, except for one, an elusive type of lekythos. One corner of the museum contains an unequaled war lord's ransom of well-wrought jade in the Heber R. Bishop collection.

To maintain the U.S.'s only museum collection of medieval armor, the Met has a 200-piece set of armorer's tools, some dating to the 16th century, including yard-long shears. In the penthouse studio, the restorers ("Most important men here," says Rorimer) contemplate a Renaissance Piero di Cosimo for months before attempting to remedy a millimeter's flaking. In the dungeon basements, a crusty bronze Vishnu lies in a vat of alkali soaking nearly a year until cleanliness restores it to godliness.

How to Unwrap a Mummy. Getting new art works is half the fun. But Rorimer collects objects with objectivity. He did not blink at buying a couple of lumpy 10th century Persian ivory chess pieces for a four-figure price. They are not so pretty, but they are as scarce as pterodactyls' teeth. The Met prefers to buy what collectors do not favor. Not enough French impressionists and postimpressionists? Indeed, the museum has only 28 Degas, 26 Monets, 22 Renoirs, 16 Cezannes and seven Van Goghs. But that is because Rorimer is in no hurry to buy at the top of the market. Death and taxes will funnel private prizes into the public domain. Just before last July 1, when tax revisions ended the practice of deducting charitable gifts now and relinquishing them after death, 41 major donors bequeathed their collections to the Met; one so far unannounced donation would alone fill ten galleries.

With such depth to draw on, the Met can afford to place quality first. The day when donors' private collections were hung in toto is past; the Met insists on constantly upgrading as finer examples become available. Also past are the days when objects were crammed together in unlighted Victorian display cases. To catch the eye of the young (1,000 schoolchildren a day visit the Met by appointment), the museum inaugurated one of the first children's museums in the U.S., with spinning color charts, and a movie of unwrapping a mummy that fascinates even adults.

Home-Grown Art. The Met aims to be both a place of contemplation and study; and Rorimer's proudest statistic is that 32% of the museum visitors return as often as two to three times a month. Artists come in droves, as students to sketch everything from Renaissance Madonnas to abstract collages, as established painters to perfect. Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, who haunted the Met as a young man, says: "The greatest thrill of my life is to walk from the Rembrandt rooms and find my Easter Monday hanging on the wall."

Now that American art has risen to lead the contemporary world market, the Met is challenged to make room for home-grown work. Significantly, this occurs at a time when a major re-evaluation of earlier periods of U.S. art is in full swing. In response, the museum will put on view next month some 450 works of U.S. painting and sculpture, spanning three centuries in a previously impermanent panoply drawn from its own collection. Rorimer has also just announced plans for a new $4,000,000 American wing. The Met being the Met, no sooner said than half the funds were promised. It all fits into the Met's grand philosophy--to live with the best of the past without slighting the present.

*A treasure chest of Islam's rarities, among them Mohammed's personal belongings, Topkapi was the scene of the crime in the current motion-picture thriller of the same name, which possibly inspired the recent theft of the Star of India from New York's American Museum of Natural History. It is no mean tribute to the Met that the men accused of the burglary first cased the Met--and gave up.

*As a U.S. Army captain, he received the Legion d'Honneur for his detective work in uncovering cached Nazi art loot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.