Collection Sharing: Gary Tinterow Does It Right

Gary Tinterow

I come to praise Gary Tinterow, not to bury him.

CultureGrrl readers know I've been periodically critical of the Metropolitan Museum's curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art. But in a laudable collection-sharing arrangement that we can only hope will proliferate more widely at the Met and other institutions, Tinterow has agreed to long-term loans of some 28 mid- to late -20th-century sculptures to the University of Texas at Austin, to be installed across campus as part of the school's ambitious Landmarks public art program.

What's more, it's a collegial loan, not a fundraising rental. Carol Vogel of the NY Times reports (scroll down):

The university is paying for the installation, shipping and insurance; the Met is not charging a loan fee. The loan agreement is renewable in five years.

You don't need a long memory to remember Gary's unfortunate plan to sell at Sotheby's the Met's Chillida sculpture, Silent Music II. That sale was aborted after the work's donor angrily objected. The piece had been part of the 1987 inaugural installation on the Met's roof garden, but Tinterow declared a couple of years ago that the museum no longer intended to exhibit it. In a happy resolution of the contretemps, that sculpture was loaned in 2006 to the grateful Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.