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Power 100
Glenn D. Lowry
Category: Museum Director
Nationality: American
Last Year: 4
Despite the now-continuous rumble of discontent with the shopping-centre-
deadliness of its $850 million Taniguchi building and its lacklustre installations,
MoMA, 12 years into Glenn Lowry’s directorship, remains the proverbial 800-
pound gorilla which sleeps where it wants. Its peerless collection, generous
trustees and roster of supporters, whose combined wealth and influence exceed
that of most countries, guarantee it a stature no other museum can match.
This past year has seen a string of impressive, if obvious, retrospectives: Brice
Marden, Richard Serra and Jeff Wall. A show of Venezuelan painter Armando
Reverón and an upcoming one of the African-American sculptor Martin Puryear
offer some respite from this apotheosis of white male artists.
Welcome news came in January with the announcement that MoMA
would net $65m and an additional 60,000 square feet of space from the sale to
a real-estate developer of an empty lot to its west. Behind this coup was tycoon
Jerry Speyer, who became chairman of the board of trustees in May.
Most unwelcome, however, was The New York Times article in February
revealing that Lowry’s already generous salary (more than $1.28m in the year
four.lin
ending June 2005) had been sweetened by payments from a charitable trust
established by trustees David Rockefeller and Agnes Gund. These totalled
$5.35m from 1995 to 2003, not to mention the $1.3m gain Lowry realised when
the trust bought his apartment, the mortgage on which the trust had already
been paying. Questions raised by the New York State Attorney General’s office
regarding the trust’s payments to Lowry were duly answered, although one can
imagine how some of the less-well-paid members of the museum staff felt when
it was revealed that their well-paid director had been even more richly rewarded
behind their backs. Not the best way to build team spirit.
What might have been Lowry’s coup de grâce arrived in the form of Senator
Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa and member of the Senate Finance
Committee. He was apparently questioning MoMA’s governance as part of his
investigation of possible abuses of nonprofit status and of donor deductions for
charitable giving. The scandal alone was proof of MoMA’s importance and of
Lowry’s prominence.
Meanwhile, the board remains squarely behind Lowry and the brouhaha
has vanished to the back burner and beyond. Nor should museum watchers
think that Lowry has been distracted from MoMA’s problems. With several
senior curators approaching retirement, Kathy Halbreich has just been named
Associate Director, and the savvy anticipate announcements in the coming
months which will reveal that Lowry has been laying plans to invigorate his
institution. Still others are wondering if he will head uptown to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art to replace Philippe de Montebello, but for now Lowry remains
the 800-pound gorilla.
oy Lichtenstein 2007 (5)
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