Met expectations: all museums face a choice between the claims of exclusivity and the demands of democracy. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has always known which side it's on.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, David
• Position: 'Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum' - Book review

Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum

by Michael Gross

Broadway Books, 560 pp.

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"There was money in the air, ever so much money," Henry dames wrote, in The American Scene, of the giddy, acquisitive Gilded Age New York in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art was first conceived, then declared, and, finally, like the piecemeal republic itself, fitfully assembled. "And the money was to be for all the most exquisite things--for all the most exquisite things," he noticed, "except creation, which was to be off the scene altogether."

The Met was not founded out of open hostility to new art, but neither did its patrons exhibit anything more than skeptical curiosity toward living artists; it took the curators, focused on Old Masters, a half century to warm to the Impressionists.

As Michael Gross recounts in his chatty survey history of the museum, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, the founders and early supporters of the Met--men like John Jay, J. P. Morgan, and Elihu Root--were typical Victorian Americans, in that they were as Victorian as they were American. They continued to look across the ocean for cultural cues, and treated the artistic achievements of their countrymen with a sort of haughty disdain. (That this would be the last American epoch that could plausibly be characterized by reference to a European monarch was news that reached Gilded Age elites last.) New art from New York, a fledgling cultural outpost on the European periphery--that was more or less a laughable proposition.

To these men, nineteenth-century New York was "an appalling sink of ignorance and depravity," as the art critic Calvin Tomkins puts it in Merchants and Masterpieces, his erudite, semiofficial museum history, first published in 1970. By their lights, the city was a mongrel metropolis, a modern Babel of tenement stacked against tenement, the population nearly half foreign born, largely uneducated and distressingly illiterate, and stuffed into "slums more miserable than those of London or Calcutta."

Native New Yorkers weren't much better off than the newcomers. In the aftermath of the Civil War, as many as 100,000 of them lived in lightless, airless cellars, stuffed sometimes a dozen to a room in sprawling communities of the desperately poor the critic and urban archivist Luc Sante has called "tenement plantations." Ten thousand homeless children, perhaps more, roamed the streets of Manhattan, many in gangs, many abandoned by their families. Disease was everywhere one looked, sanitation nowhere to be found. Crime was as common as poverty, and violence, drunkenness, and prostitution were...