Growing Pains

The occasion was marked by the panache that Thomas Hoving has displayed ever since he became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art three years ago. Mrs. Richard Nixon flew from Washington to help inaugurate a show of 19th century American art. Next day, Manhattan's finest and richest turned up at another gala to celebrate, for the fifth time this season and for $125 apiece, the 100th anniversary of the museum. There was waltzing to a Meyer Davis orchestra in the Arms and Armor Court, frugging to Watson and the Sherlocks in the Fountain Restaurant, and the guest list filled the society columns for days. Even the pickets were elegant. In black tie and evening gowns, conservationists marched up and down in front of the new fountains on the floodlit Fifth Avenue side to protest the "invasion" of green park space projected in the Met's new building plans.

The Inevitable. As announced last week, the plans are elaborate, extensive and controversial. Yet something clearly has to be done. The Met has long since outgrown its present building, and has to keep three-fourths of its permanent collection locked away in storage. In addition, three recent gifts have made expansion inevitable.

Biggest single gift is the 82-ft.-long Temple of Dendur complex, which Egypt offered to the U.S. for its help in saving ancient temples (including Dendur) from the rising waters behind the new High Dam at Aswan. Though several museums wanted it, the Met won by promising to build a special climate-controlled building to protect it from the rigors of U.S. weather. The costliest gift is the private collection of Investment Banker Robert Lehman, which includes masterpieces by Botticelli, Da Vinci and Rembrandt and has an estimated value of over $100 million. The late Bobby Lehman, former board chairman of the Met, willed his collection to the museum on condition that it would be kept together and displayed in a setting similar to the one it enjoyed in his elegant Manhattan town house. The third gift is the enormous collection of primitive art assembled by New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Problems and Possibilities. Architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo spent over two years discussing problems and possibilities with museum officials. Their plan calls for two new wings to be built over existing parking lots at the north and south ends of the building to house the Temple of Dendur and Rockefeller's primitives. A smaller, tent-shaped pavilion at the back of the present Medieval Hall is planned for the Lehman collection. Two glass-enclosed all-weather gardens will give access to the galleries from Central Park.

The design will provide new exhibition space for the overcrowded American wing and the European collections. On the park side, the present hodgepodge fac,ade of Romanesque, Venetian Gothic, bare brick and nondescript modern will be concealed behind windowless walls or veiled by vast expanses of glass. A final judgment will have to wait until the time, still at least ten years off, when the project is completed. But some critics already feel that the new park fac,ade is blank and featureless; it seems more appropriate to a factory than to one of the world's greatest art museums.

Opinions are mixed also on Roche's overhaul of the monumental classical Fifth Avenue fac,ade, designed in 1896 by Richard Morris Hunt, the leading U.S. architect of his time. Roche has got rid of the wooden outhouse-like box added to cut down drafts at the main entrance, and is providing a spacious, three-tiered staircase flanked on both sides by formal plazas and a serried row of fountains set in reflecting pools. More controversial is his plan to replace Hunt's grand staircase inside with two escalators and a passageway in order to increase the flow of traffic to the rear galleries. "There will be a lot of screaming and yelling and nostalgia and recriminations," says Director Hoving, "but we need to get people back to those galleries. Go down to the porcelain galleries on the museum's lower level on any crowded day, and I'll guarantee you'll find no more than five people there."

But are escalators the answer? The Met's porcelain galleries are not only behind Hunt's doomed staircase but down another much less visible set of stairs. Maybe some signs are needed. Or maybe there are fewer people in porcelain because more people like painting.

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