In June, Keith Christiansen (Bild), the museum’s chairman of European paintings, posted to his personal Instagram feed a print featuring Alexandre Lenoir, a figure who tried to save monuments during the French Revolution. „Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis,“ Christiansen wrote. „How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve?“

The post came at a moment of national riots that had quickly moved beyond the dismantling of Confederate monuments to the indiscriminate destruction of any and all public works. „And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir, Christiansen continued, „who realized that their value-both artistic and historical-extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.“

A member of the Metropolitan staff since 1977, Christiansen well understood that the en- cyclopedic museum, including his own, is the direct descendant of Lenoir. From the French Revolution, coming out of the American Civil War, on through the Monuments Men of the Second World War, collecting institutions have saved culture from the forces of destruction. „The losses that occur when major works of art are destroyed by „war, iconoclasm, revolution, and intolerance,“ as he explained, are the enemies of art history, diminishing our „fuller understand- ing of a complicated and sometimes ugly past?‘

Christiansen was denounced for daring to compare Jacobin-like terror to the Jacobin Terror. This fall, he was among the 20 percent of Met staff to announce their retirement, to resign, or to be pushed out. One of his final acts at the museum has been the restoration of the second floor skylights for its collection of European paintings. It took one hundred and fifty years for that light to make the Met what we see today. It might take far fewer for the museum’s future to dim into its unmaking.

The New Criterion, Dez. 2020
The mob comes for the art world