Displaying items by tag: Met Museum

Nineteen artifacts taken from the tomb of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun will be returned to Egypt next week after more than half a century at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Egypt's antiquities authority said Saturday.

The trove includes a miniature bronze dog and a sphinx-shaped bracelet ornament, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.

The move, scheduled for Tuesday, is the result of an agreement between the two institutions last year to return the objects to Egypt.

At the time, then-antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said the objects would become part of the permanent King Tut collection at the new Grand Egyptian Museum, which is under construction near the Giza pyramids and is scheduled to open in 2012.

Hawass, once the most public face of Egyptian archaeology, was fired earlier this month after intense criticism of his close ties to ex-President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in February in a popular uprising.

The antiquities authority said the pieces were sent to New York in 1948 when the Metropolitan Museum closed its expedition house in Egypt.

The decision to repatriate the objects came after an extensive examination of the validity of their origin.

High fashion and money have always gone together, and for the next few weeks, they will do so in the museum world as well as on the racks. The Metropolitan Museum of Art said Tuesday that its Alexander McQueen show, which it recently extended by a week to accommodate the overflow crowds, will be opened during special viewing hours on Mondays, when the Met is usually closed, for patrons willing to buy $50 tickets.

Since the show opened on May 4, more than 150,000 people have gone to see it, making for long lines and waits. The tickets, which will go on sale in early June at the museum and online at metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen, will allow entries on Mondays on the half hour, from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. beginning June 6. (The show continues through Aug. 7; tickets for Monday viewing will not be available for July 4, when the museum is open to the public as part of a special holiday program.) The McQueen show will continue to be available during the museum’s regular hours with no additional charge above the Met’s $20 suggested admission price.

Thomas P. Campbell, the Oxford- educated curator elevated to director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in January 2009, earned $929,735 in salary and benefits in his first year atop New York’s most visited museum.

The package, disclosed in the Met’s 2009-2010 tax return, is in line with recent pay at the nation’s top museums, which have responded to the recession by trimming executive compensation. Campbell was approved by the Met’s board as its ninth director six days before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy. He took over following a 38 percent annual drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock Index and with the Met’s endowment down by more than a quarter.

The Museum of Modern Art, with half the budget of the Met, paid its director, Glenn Lowry, $1.32 million in salary and benefits in the year ending in June 2009. That was down from $1.95 million the year before that.

(Complicating the comparison, MoMA is a private nonprofit organization that received no government operating support in 2009-2010, according to its financial statement. The Met sits on city-owned land and received a $25 million appropriation from New York City.)

James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, with 60 percent of the Met’s budget, earned $836,000 in pay and benefits in 2008. (Cuno takes over the J. Paul Getty Trust in August. Neither the Art Institute nor MoMA has yet released its 2009-2010 return.)

Attendance Rising

Attendance at the Met, with a collection of more than 2 million artworks, was 5.2 million in 2009-10. It was the first time it exceeded 5 million since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a press briefing on Monday, Campbell said the museum’s new exhibition of the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen had nearly 12,000 visitors on Saturday. The wait to get in was 45 minutes.

Campbell earned $640,697 in base pay, $160,103 in expenses and pension benefits plus $129,000 in estimated rent for the Fifth Avenue apartment where he lives with his wife and two children. The museum owns it and requires him to reside there.

A 49-year-old tapestry specialist born in Cambridge, England, he oversaw a hiring freeze as well as hundreds of job cuts to balance the Met’s budget. In the year ending in June 2010, the Met reported a $3.7 million surplus, following a record $8.4 million operating deficit the year before.

Galleries Open

“We didn’t sacrifice programs,” Campbell said in a brief interview this week. “We didn’t close galleries.”

More than a half-dozen Met staffers were in Campbell’s pay stratum in 2009. Some were longtime continuing employees who earned retirement-fund payouts and others took buyouts -- “separation pay” in the tax return -- for early retirement.

Daniel Brodsky, a real estate developer, was elected chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday in a vote by the museum’s board. Mr. Brodsky will assume the post on Sept. 13, succeeding James R. Houghton, who has been chairman for the past 13 years and will now become a trustee emeritus.

A Met trustee since 2001, Mr. Brodsky, 66, has served on important committees, including those for Finance and Buildings. He is also a trustee of New York City Ballet and New York University.

The Met chairmanship is one of the most prestigious positions in New York’s cultural firmament, requiring someone who is politically deft, an adept fund-raiser and well liked and respected by the rest of the board. That description seemed to fit Mr. Brodsky.

The Met’s director, Thomas P. Campbell, described him as a “good listener, someone who really takes the time to consider everybody’s opinions, but at the same time has a clear sense of purpose and direction.”

Mr. Houghton said that Mr. Brodsky got “along well with everybody.”

After Mr. Houghton announced his plan to retire in early March, the board — at 40 voting members, one of the largest of any American cultural institution — formed a succession committee led by three longtime trustees, Henry B. Schacht, S. Parker Gilbert and Annette de la Renta. The committee spoke to a number of people — the Met would say only that that group included Mr. Campbell — and made its recommendation to the full board at its meeting on Tuesday.

In an interview Mr. Brodsky said that his work on various board committees had given him a good view of how the museum was run and that he had enjoyed that learning process.

“The more you get involved with it, the better you know it, and the more you want to know about it,” he said of the museum.

Mr. Brodsky, who is unassuming in conversation, said he did not have a deep knowledge of art history or a favorite piece in the museum’s collection, although he prefers modern art. His wife, Estrellita Brodsky, is an independent curator specializing in Latin American art who has endowed the post of Latin American curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mr. Brodsky is the managing director of the Brodsky Organization, a company he started with his father, Nathan Brodsky, in 1971. It currently owns and manages 6,200 apartments in 68 Manhattan buildings and has also developed a number of condominium and co-op buildings.

As a trustee of City Ballet, Mr. Brodsky played a significant role in rallying support among Lincoln Center’s constituent organizations for the renovation of its campus, one of the biggest construction projects undertaken by a cultural institution in recent years. During the planning process, which was sometimes contentious, he said he learned that he enjoyed “listening to people and hearing them out and being able to help people come to a consensus.”