This is a guest post by Caroline Town.

If you happened to be in the gallery around midday last Monday, you might have wondered what was going on in the solo gallery, where eight people were sitting around enjoying a lively discussion. They were members of The Art League book club, which meets about every six weeks and is organized by outgoing gallery director Rose O’Donnell.

For this meeting, we had chosen two books by former directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Making the Mummies Dance by Thomas Hoving (Simon and Schuster, 1993), and Rendezvous with Art by Philippe de Montebello (Thames & Hudson, 2014). Although Hoving’s tenure at the museum was only 10 years (1967-1977) compared to Montebello’s 30-plus (1977-2008), Hoving’s is the book that really got our attention. It is a gossipy, opinionated, and very entertaining inside look at the upper echelons of donors, collectors, curators, politicians, etc. who make up the Met elite.

Hoving himself comes across as an outsized personality who was in his element wheeling and dealing to raise money for blockbuster exhibitions, big-ticket items for the collection, and badly needed renovations to the buildings. He even titles one chapter “Toadying,” and readily admits to being the toady-in-chief when he needed to be. While acknowledging mistakes he made along the way, his tone is generally one of self-congratulation. The general consensus among us was that he probably had much to congratulate himself about, but that he was also pretty ruthless in his personal relationships.

Montebello’s book doesn’t focus on the Met at all, but rather is a compilation of his commentaries on art in various collections — interesting, but lacking structure and narrative flow. Some of us also read Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Danny Danziger (Viking, 2007), a more down to earth and personal view of the Met through interviews with its employees. All in all we had an interesting conversation about the books, the Met, and art museums in general.

For our next meeting, we’ll be reading a biography of Marcel Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins, or we can choose another book about Duchamp’s life and art. If you love art and books, come join us!

— Caroline Town

Interested in joining the book club? Email [email protected] for details.