Treasure and Trespasses

By ROBERT HUGHES

In size, scope and excellence of quality, the Robert Lehman Collection --now ensconced in a special wing of New York's Metropolitan Museum and soon to be seen by the public--was the last of its kind. It was started 70 years ago by the investment banker Philip Lehman, head of Lehman Brothers; his son developed it into a great private collection along the legendary pattern of the Morgan or the Frick. It ranges from Renaissance pottery and medieval acquamanilia (water vessels) to Rembrandts, El Grecos and an astounding collection of more than 1,000 14th-19th century drawings. Parts of this hoard were occasionally lent to institutions like the Orangerie in Paris, but nobody had regular access to it except Lehman's friends and a small circle of approved art historians. Lehman's eye for painting after 1860 was poor, and his collection has its foibles--one being an appetite for fluffy-bunny boudoir pictures by Renoir and his imitators. But any museum director in America would have genuflected his way backward down a drainpipe to secure the old masters, and Lehman knew it.

Five Conditions. Though Lehman had presided over the Met as trustee and chairman, there were rumors that the pictures might go to Yale or the Smithsonian. "You will never, never, never get it--unless you fulfill five conditions," Lehman once told the Met's director, Thomas Hoving. Some of the terms are still secret, but his known requirements boiled down to a demand that the works be housed forever beneath a glass roof in a new separate wing of the Metropolitan; that they should never be absorbed into the bulk of the Met's collections; and that the old masters should be hung in replicas of the rooms in the Lehman town house in New York. In 1969 Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo Associates, using money given by Lehman, produced a plan not only for the new wing, but for the redesign of one entire side of the Metropolitan.

The plan, to be completed by around 1979, will cost some $80 million and includes the new American and European wings, the Temple of Dendur (under glass), as well as the Michael Rockefeller wing for primitive art. The $7.1 million Lehman pavilion was merely the first phase. But it is certainly the most spectacular, as well as controversial. Seen from Central Park, it is dominated by a 67-ft.-high glass pyramid built onto the museum's original Victorian fac,ade, with an atrium below, two levels of gray limestone ambulatories, and (sealed off from daylight on the main floor) so-called period rooms in which the greatest paintings hang.

Some of its contents are both well known and justly famous: the majestic St. Jerome as a Cardinal by El Greco, Giovanni di Paolo's exquisite description of the medieval cosmos, The Expulsion from Paradise, Rembrandt's Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, a Botticelli Annunciation. Others are perhaps less familiar -- Ingres's Portrait of the Princesse de Broglie, one of the supreme moments in 19th century art; a Sassetta Temptation of St. Anthony; Petrus Christus' Saint Eligius and assorted Flemish treasures; a splendid array of medieval and Renaissance panel paintings from Italy and northern Europe. Among the drawings-- which, at the time of Lehman's death, was one of the greatest collections in private hands in the world -- are such rarities as two highly finished studies by Rogier van der Weyden, a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci and Duerer's famous self-portrait at age 22.

Transparent Pyramid. The setting, however, is a different matter. It is pharaonic: a nucleus of ritual objects meant to serve the dead man in his next life, immured at the center of a transparent pyramid. Only a mummy is absent, but the eye of an irreverent visitor may easily stray to the center of the sunken atrium, half expecting to see a sarcophagus. Roche-Dinkeloo's design is elegant, icy and inflated. Lehman agreed that the new wing should have almost the same proportions as the Met's Great Hall -- thus ensuring a large abstract monument to himself -- but he also wanted to commemorate his way of life with the period rooms. Unfortunately, these seven gloomily sumptuous chambers are of little historical interest (they were done in 1959 by a Paris decorator, in a plum-cake version of stockbroker's plush). Lehman's paintings, now that they are public, would have looked better in a clean, airy, comprehensible museum space than in this red velvet warren. No service to art is done by preserving the symbolism of private ownership in a public precinct; in a museum, paintings and sculpture deserve -- indeed, demand -- to be experienced as unedited messages from the painter to the viewer, rather than as things colored by the presence of this or that owner. In that regard, the Lehman be quest has set a precedent that one hopes will not be followed by lesser collectors eager for self-commemoration. Nevertheless, the collection itself remains superb: an extraordinary addition to the Metropolitan and, by extension, to the quality of imaginative life in New York, and the U.S.

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