The Exhibitionist: Living Museums, Loving Museums

By Karl Katz

The renowned curator gives a personal tour of his journey from archeology to the Met, the Jewish Museum, and helping found the Israel Museum.
 
In The Exhibitionist, museum director Karl Katz discusses his tireless, impassioned work spanning six decades and numerous countries. As a young man, Karl traveled to the newly-formed state of Israel to pursue archaeology, only to be thrust into the role of directing the Bezalel National Art Museum in Jerusalem. From that early trial by fire to his many leadership roles at the Museum of Tolerance, the International Center of Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Katz found innovative ways to make museums inviting, educational, living, and vibrant.
 
A book for lovers of history and art criticism, as well as collectors, curators, administrators, and students, The Exhibitionist is filled with a wide range of discussions both cultural and personal. Katz discusses the exhibits, the discoveries, and the incredible people he worked with along the way, from his mentor Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem and founder of the Israel Museum, to Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and Broadway showman Billy Rose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781468313482

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WITH A FRESHLY MINTED STAFF ID HANGING AROUND MY neck, I opened a door marked CLOSED and walked into a museum gallery lit by dangling bare bulbs. The world’s oldest extant pianoforte—a Florentine creation from 1720—sat in the corner. Several Stradivarius violins lay in open cases, their prized necks resting on black velvet. I walked up to two men talking in the middle of the gallery, recognizing the younger of the pair as Stuart Silver, the museum’s master designer. Stuart, great to see you!

Silver introduced his companion, Emanuel Winternitz. The septuagenarian curator of musical instruments was wearing a broad-shouldered suit and a stiff upper lip. As I shook his hand I looked around the galleries. This is all marvelous.

It was 1971. Silver, Winternitz, and I were standing in the yet-unfinished Musical Instruments galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They had been a long time in coming.

In the 1890s, Mary Elizabeth Brown donated hundreds of instruments to the museum. For well over half a century, the collection—considered one of the top in the world, unsurpassed in its encyclopedic scope—had foundered. With this installation, the extraordinary assemblage was finally receiving its due.

The allotted gallery space spanned a series of rooms that wrapped around the triple-height central hall of the Arms and Armor galleries. Western instruments were to flank one side of the atrium, Eastern and ethnological instruments the other.

I looked up and down from the second-floor balcony. Above me, organ pipes rose toward the vaulted roof. Below, a quartet of mounted knights stood in the center of the Arms and Armor Hall. Dressed to the metallic nines, lances held aloft, they were better prepared for battle than I.

Will we be able to hear the instruments?

Winternitz bristled. Silver looked down at his notes, anxious to continue the design session I had interrupted. The curator cleared his throat. Absolutely not, he declared in a thick Viennese accent.

But shouldn’t we give visitors the chance to hear what each magnificent instrument sounds like? They were originally meant for playing, after all.

The curator’s eyes darkened behind thick-framed glasses and he shook his head. Silver tapped nervously at his clipboard. A museum is a place of egos and territorial rights. My well-intentioned question put me on what Winternitz saw as dangerously invasive ground. Just because I was the museum’s newest upper administrator, appointed to oversee exhibitions, loans, and special projects, didn’t mean I knew what was best for his precious violoncellos. They can’t be played just for anything, he told me.

Physically, many of them could be played. Winternitz had spent decades bringing each fragile piece back into playable condition. But the fruits of his painstaking efforts were only rarely appreciated. He hosted a critically acclaimed concert series for museum members, but those engagements were limited by the instruments’ fragility. My suggestion to play them on a regular basis must have horrified him. The public will enjoy looking at them, and then they’ll go home and listen to recordings, he said definitively.

I shrugged. It seemed to me that if we were reimagining the galleries, we should make the most engaging display possible. I just don’t think we’re giving the museum visitor a complete experience, I mumbled. With that, Winternitz stalked away, Silver trailing behind. They resumed their conversation in low tones at the far end of the gallery, arranging and rearranging the brass instruments of an Ottoman Janissary marching band.

I slipped out of the room through an unmarked door, and as I walked back through the museum’s Italian masterpieces to my new office, I replayed the conversation with Winternitz. I wanted to enhance the museum experience for our visitors. By the time I sat down at my desk, I was determined that the Musical Instrument galleries were where I would begin. I just didn’t know how.

I WAS STILL THINKING about that conversation a few weeks later as I walked through another set of galleries, this time at the Louvre in Paris. I was there to discuss an upcoming exhibition, and had decided to stroll the galleries before heading back to my hotel.

As I neared the Mona Lisa, it was not her enigmatic smile that caught my attention but a gentleman standing to her right. He was armed with a half dozen objects that looked like the shafts of tennis rackets. One by one he handed them to passing visitors. After some softly worded explanation, they approached the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece and each raised a shaft to an ear.

I approached the wand-wielding man. He was a Hungarian inventor, and he explained that he was experimenting with low-frequency radio signals for use in museums. He had embedded a tape player and transmitter under the carpet in front of the painting. The wand held a receiver. When people lifted the wands to their ears, the motion turned on the device—known then as Serac—playing an audio explanation of the Mona Lisa.

We walked behind the arc of listeners and he tapped his toe on the rug, indicating where another piece of hardware was hidden. That, he explained, emitted a magnetic field to block the radio signal from drifting out of the gallery and down the rue de Rivoli.

He was at the Louvre to see how the new device went over with the public. It was going well, he said. But he didn’t need to convince me. I knew his invention would be a success. I was thinking about Winternitz’s beautiful Stradivarius violins. I got his name and coordinates, excited to bring news of his creation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

BACK IN NEW YORK, I brought the idea—and one of the wands—to Thomas Hoving’s office, where the museum director and I met at a small, round table for our late afternoon debriefs. I slipped the device onto the table between our two cups of coffee. What’s this? Hoving asked, picking it up.

I smiled with my reply: Our new audio guide.

Hoving loved the idea. The Metropolitan already had audio guides: Acoustiguide-produced bulky cassette players for some special exhibitions and highlights of the collection. But its technology was based on clumsy players that hung from the shoulder. And because they played from audiocassettes, routes were fixed. A visitor could press the STOP button while taking a closer look at something, or go back to the audio guide desk in the lobby to get another tape. But most visitors were so good at following the directions that to watch them stream through the galleries, earphone in place, was like seeing a zombie parade lumbering past. The Hungarian’s wand was a small advance in technology, but its implication was huge: visitors could chart their own routes, going where they wanted, not where they were told to go.

Hoving called Silver. Once out of Winternitz’s earshot, the designer agreed that having audio in the galleries was a good idea. We recruited another colleague, an amicable female curator, to re-suggest the idea to Winternitz in more friendly terms. With her help, the old curator agreed to a trial run. The Hungarian inventor flew over from Europe. We recorded some of the antique instruments and culled other samples from existing recordings. Tape players were hidden behind pedestals, transmitters planted underfoot. Finally, on the trial’s opening day, visitors were handed receivers as they entered the new galleries.

I stopped by one afternoon to see how the test was going. The ceiling’s once bare bulbs were now aimed at the graceful curves of so many violins. A line of horns marched down one gallery’s wall. I watched people walk around the space, eagerly looking at—and listening to—the museum’s extraordinary collection. On my way out, I glanced down to the Arms and Armor Hall. Now, the line of horse-mounted knights looked heraldic rather than foreboding, poised as if triumphantly entering a new land.

MORE THAN FORTY-FIVE years have passed since that installation opened. To visit them today comes as something of a shock. From the museum’s bustling and grandiose Great Hall, you walk up a sweeping staircase and into the European Paintings galleries, past the recently purchased Duccio, Madonna and Child (with a $44 million price tag), then by the landmark Diego Velázquez painting of his servant, Juan de Pareja. A pair of double doors opens into the familiar galleries. But today they feel different. The lights are low. The labels look dated. A tear in the carpet has been repaired by inauspicious duct tape. Hushed footfalls echo from the Arms and Armor galleries below, where knights still stand in wait. The Stradivarii remain in their display cases, but the same cannot be said of the audio component I had so enthusiastically promoted. That magical wand, which set a new standard for museum audio, has long since been abandoned for digital technology. The audio for the Musical Instruments galleries that were built in 1971 has run its course.

Museums preserve objects for posterity. But the exhibitions displaying them are inevitably temporary. Most major changing loan exhibitions last for about three months; other installations have hung around for thirty years. But even permanent displays need to be refreshed, as the Musical Instruments galleries demonstrate. They are slated for a much-needed renovation, and when that comes, the last marks of our 1971 efforts may be erased. None of the original team will be present to contribute to today’s project. Winternitz retired in 1973; Silver left the museum in 1979; Hoving resigned from the directorship in 1977; and my twenty-plus-year tenure at the Metropolitan ended more than twenty years ago. On the one hand, renewal is necessary—a relevant museum must remain contemporary, reacting to developments in technology and scholarship, and building exhibits that respond to the needs of its community. But in doing so a museum risks wiping away the memory of the many whose hands gave it shape. As someone who has worked in museums for over fifty years, I find it jarring to see institutions devoted to history—be it of art, a community, or an idea—so forgetful of their own stories and the lessons learned along the way.

Some of our efforts can still be seen today. Others are gone, having preceded the Metropolitan’s Musical Instrument galleries into underdocumented oblivion. But regardless of whether you can see my work today, the story of where and how my personal history has intersected with the histories of some great museums is a narrative field guide on how to make museums come alive.

Many books have been written about museums. Tomes catalog their collections; libraries are devoted to scholarship on the artworks and artist represented therein. Even the buildings themselves are featured in attractive monographs: an architect like Frank Gehry can make a museum a landmark before a single piece of art is installed. But few books pay attention to the people who make museums: the directors, curators, designers, and educators who shape each collection of objects and ideas into an institution.

This is a book about museums over the last half century. It is about my work in these institutions, as the exhibitionist of the title, but also my experiences as a director and a student, as an archaeologist and a techie, as a curator and a collector. It roughly follows my career on its zigzagging course from New York to Israel and back again. Along the way it also recounts the efforts of my able colleagues, from the deep ranks of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the mayor of Jerusalem, from university scholars to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Collectively, we make museums come alive.

To many potential visitors, museums have the bad reputation of being dreary and dusty, inaccessible and out of touch. I’ve heard the term museum interchanged with mausoleum more than once. I have, however, spent my life countering such deprecatory comparisons by making museums more accessible, inviting, and educational … even lovable. Pour a certain amount of energy and innovation into an institution and it becomes a living, vibrant thing. It’s a labor of love. And with equal parts effort and affection I have spent my career breathing life into museums.

CHAPTER 1

THE EDUCATOR

ONE

HAND MANEUVERED A PAINTED PAPIER-MÂCHÉ GYPSY across the stage, thumb flicking a whip in the puppet’s tiny fist. In the other hand, a brown bear danced in time to the music with each dip of my wrist. I stood below the pair, legs spread wide, my black sock-clad arms locked at the elbow. Here my five-foot, six-and-a-half-inch stature served me well. Taller men could never have managed the space—though even I stooped in the cramped black booth, my head just below the stage’s bottom border. It was imperative that I keep my head low lest my hair make a guest appearance as a hedge. Without looking up, I also had to keep straight my lefts and rights. And in that moment I could not recall whether it was my right hand or left that bore the dancing bear.

Odds are that the audience—a gaggle of young Jewish children sitting cross-legged on their school’s cafeteria-room floor—was baffled by the commanding bear and dancing gypsy that followed. That gaffe is my most vivid memory of a two-year weekend career as a puppeteer. The play’s name is gone from my memory, as are the titles of all the other goofy skits I performed for eager-eyed students at Sunday schools around New York as a part of Bubatron—theater of dolls in Hebrew.

I had found my way into the bilingual (English and Hebrew) puppet troupe by way of a good singing voice and the Theatre Department at Columbia University. There, my acting career’s first setback had been the discovery of two minor speech impediments, including a slightly sibilant s. An unfortunate onstage experience performing the work of Henrik Ibsen reinforced that the theater was not for me. The sock-handed mix-up now unfolding above my head had just confirmed it. Acting was out. But what was in?

School had not been my forte when I was growing up. Unable to do much in the way of math, I had grown accustomed to a position near the bottom of the class ranks. Even if I had been better at algebra, excelling at Midwood High, my Brooklyn alma mater, seemed impossible after my brother Elihu passed through. Three years my senior, Elihu was editor in chief of the Argus, the school newspaper, and a straight-A student on his way to Columbia. I was an underachieving high school freshman. It was an impossibly tough act to follow—so I didn’t try too hard. In fact, I just aimed to graduate. Reading trashy books, walking on the Coney Island boardwalk, and playing pool were my seventeen-year-old male modus operandi. In June 1947 I did graduate—by the skin of my teeth.

I wanted nothing to do with college, but my family insisted, so I enrolled in Long Island University. After a disheartening semester at its Brooklyn campus, my big brother came insisting. At twenty-one, he was already a success in the Sociology Department at Columbia, well on the path to graduate school and a distinguished career. But despite these grand ambitions, he hadn’t forgotten his little brother floundering back in Brooklyn. Don’t stay at LIU, Karl, he said. Transfer to Columbia.

Yeah, right, was my incredulous reply—until he told me how.

Columbia had just opened its School of General Studies, designed to accommodate the swell of young veterans returning from World War II. Though boasting the same professors and courses as the university’s School of Arts and Sciences, its student body was quite different. Along with GI Bill veterans, it was accepting others who had detoured along their academic route. My brother was certain there would be a spot for me. Sure enough, they accepted my transfer application, and I moved uptown.

Unpacking my bags at Columbia’s Furnald Hall, I remember feeling as if I had just entered the Ivy Leagues through the back door. Over half a century later, I still sometimes feel that I snuck into the venerable institution. But front door or back, there I was, standing inside one of the country’s best universities. And I was determined to stay.

My Columbia education began before I ever left my new dorm room. At nineteen, I’d removed myself and moved into an apartment with my brother and his friends. They were an imposing group: a world-renowned sociologist in training, a couple of Columbia Law Review guys, a future executive at the World Bank. As a freshman, trying to impress any college senior was daunting. The task was made harder by their collective brainpower. Elihu had ushered me into the pool, and I recognized that I was in the deep end. It was up to me to sink or swim.

This was both inspiring and intimidating. I wanted to show my brother that I could cut it at his university. First, I needed to find a major, and tried several departments on for size. In addition to theater, I took a crack at journalism, studied in Elihu’s Sociology Department, and even spent time penning poetry. All were wonderful, but none felt quite right. Then I sat in on a lecture by art historian Meyer Schapiro. Those ninety minutes sealed the deal. I would study art history and archaeology.

Yet, even after I found art history, and despite the gypsy/bear puppet debacle, I stayed with the puppet troupe, traveling the city on weekends with my black booth of a stage, my painted window-shades-cum-backdrops, and my papier-mâché players. It was not for love of theater or for acting ambitions, but for money. I wanted to travel abroad. Europe and Israel were waiting.

Israel had been a very real presence throughout my Brooklyn childhood. I had attended Yeshiva of Flatbush, where the day was divided between four hours of English and four hours of Hebrew. For all the secularism of the English courses—I didn’t even have to wear a kippah during that half of the day—Israel loomed large. After morning prayers, boys began pulling pennies and nickels from their pockets for Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, the Jewish National Fund. In exchange for our coins we got postage stamps, which we proudly glued into notebooks like so many merit badges. A certain number of stamps meant a tree had been planted in Palestine. Later in the day came choir practice. Blessed with a good voice, I was the soloist in the yeshiva’s chorus. The songs—Hebrew verses about pioneers, kibbutzim, and sowing the seeds of Eretz Israel—were indelibly burned into my memory.

Israel was important at home as well. My mother was a vice president of the New York chapter of Mizrachi Woman of America, a powerful branch of the worldwide modern Orthodox women’s Zionist movement. Though my family was safe in New York during the Second World War, my father gave money to secure safe passage for an Eastern European family. The horrors of the Holocaust confirmed for my father how desperately we needed a state, and when we were old enough, my brother and I joined the Zionist cause through the Intercollegiate Zionist Federation of America (IZFA). Elihu eventually became its president; I was the art editor for its nationally circulated magazine.

ON NOVEMBER 29, 1947, my mother, father, and I sat in silence in the kitchen; with somber faces we leaned forward, heads tilted toward the radio on the Formica tabletop. We were listening to a live broadcast of the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine. One by one, each country’s vote was announced: yes; abstention; no. My mother kept tally with pen and paper. Each time a Latin American country abstained, my father pounded his fist on the table in anguish. We needed every country we could get. At the count’s conclusion, my mother looked at her tally card: thirty-three yeses, thirteen nos, and ten abstentions. We erupted in celebration; the State of Israel was born!

IN THE SUMMER OF 1950 my puppeteering paid off and I finally made it to Jerusalem. I was touring through the three-year-old country with IZFA, whose tour guides shuttled the American college students from our high-school-classroom-cum-dormitory in Jerusalem to countryside kibbutzim and back again, making certain we admired the accomplishments of the young state along the way. They noted the hastily constructed water towers (each marking a new Israeli settlement) and the border hazards that dotted the landscape; they doled out biblical history lessons and made us brush up on our Hebrew with Sabras, the native-born Israelis. The entire country felt like a string of frontier towns. Every time we pulled into a new place, I half expected to see a sheriff’s office and general store, but we were more likely to see a machine gunner, an ancient excavation, or a tent city of recent immigrants. On each kibbutz we lived like the locals, and ate like them, too; we got the same ration as every one else in Israel: an egg a week. There wasn’t pasteurized milk or ice cream for the New York boys used to such luxuries, but we could have all the eggplants and tomatoes we wanted.

Karl as a young man. Circa 1950s.

One afternoon in Jerusalem, I slipped away from the group to visit the Bezalel National Museum. Founded in 1906, the museum took its name from Bezalel ben Uri ben Hur, the biblical artisan commissioned by God through Moses to build and decorate the Tabernacle, the menorah, and the Ark of the Covenant. The Bezalel had its home in a Turkish-style villa—a vestige of Palestine’s Ottoman period, two governments gone—and was showing its age. The building burst with a rapidly growing, and frankly uneven, collection of everything from Judaica and Western art to prints, local crafts, and Israeli fine art. The hodgepodge was the closest thing Israel had to a national general collection. As a newly minted student of art history, I wanted to see what the young country had to offer.

After cruising the cramped galleries, I introduced myself to the museum’s staff. That didn’t take long. It was a tiny group: the director, a curator of prints and drawings, a contemporary art curator, a librarian, a few administrators, and guards. As I dashed off to rejoin my group, the director, Mordechai Narkiss, said he was certain he’d see me again. My brother had just married a gorgeous Israeli soldier, an ex-sapper; she was also a pianist, and an emissary to students in the United States via IZFA. I agreed that I’d be back through Jerusalem. Little did I know I’d stay a dozen years.

AFTER THE ISRAEL IFZA tour, I headed back to New York by way of Europe with my friend Lionel Kestenbaum, hitching and traveling by train through Italy, France, Belgium, and Great Britain. Trying to stay kosher despite the lure of Italy’s sausages, France’s tournedos and frites, and England’s mystery meats proved harder than catching a ride, but we made do with loaves of bread and hunks of cheese.

In addition to stopping at cultural monuments featured in our guidebook, we spent a lot of time in antique shops. I was on the hunt for silver candelabra: my mother commissioned me to buy one, or a pair, along our route home. She trusted my taste. Ever since I was a young boy I’d squirreled away clippings from newspapers and magazines of all sorts of beautiful objects, and my recent switch to art history confirmed her faith that I had a good eye.

While scoping out the candelabra selection in countless antique shops, I also examined everything else, trying to gauge the craftsmanship and purpose, material and beauty of each object. My analyses were more intuitive than scholarly, but those long looks became the foundation of my art education and life-long love of looking and collecting.

Amid all the dusty storefronts, I finally found the perfect pair of candleholders near the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. They were superb, each with five branches. Even better was that the pieces could be disassembled and easily packed. (To a twenty-one-year-old traveling on foot, this was true beauty.) Once I decided they were the ones, Lionel and I quickly discovered the other half of buying antiques: negotiation. In postwar Europe, dealers were eager to take anything—dollars, silk stockings, and chocolate bars were all legal tender—and lots of it, especially from a gullible-looking pair of foreigners toting a foreign-language phrase book. Yet I was determined to get the candelabras. After three daily rounds of haggling, the price dropped to $150 for both, and the deal was done. This was my first Western art acquisition.

•  •  •

RETURNING TO NEW YORK, I plunged headlong into finishing my bachelor’s of arts degree and working toward a master’s in art history. After all I’d seen that summer, I had a new appreciation and a more cultivated eye for art, architecture, and archaeology. Perhaps even more important, I was working closely at Columbia with Meyer Schapiro, one of the century’s great art historians.

When I had first heard him lecture as an undergraduate, Schapiro had been at the university for nearly thirty years. He arrived in 1920, age sixteen, as a precocious polymath from Brooklyn with two well-won scholarships. Schapiro completed his undergraduate years with two degrees: one in art history and a second in philosophy. When he didn’t get into the established art history program at Princeton University (a slight that he suggested could have been anti-Semitic), Schapiro decided to stay at Columbia for his doctoral work on Romanesque sculpture. His was the first art history PhD earned at Columbia, but his doctoral years were more notable for their groundbreaking approach. His dissertation, completed in 1929, was unlike any other scholarship being produced. He wrote on the cloister portal of the abbey at Moissac, whose eleventh-century relief sculptures are among the oldest and most important extant Romanesque sculptures in France. Along with art history’s standard discussion of iconography and chronology, Schapiro brought everything from illuminated religious manuscripts to medieval social history into his analysis of the doorway.

Even before Schapiro completed his dissertation, his extensive research and eloquent argument earned him an appointment as a lecturer in art history at Columbia in 1928. Three years later, an excerpt of his finished work ran in the Art Bulletin, a scholarly art publication. No one had read anything like it before.

After establishing himself as a formidable expert on Romanesque sculpture, Schapiro developed a second expertise as a scholar of modern art. He believed that in the span of nine centuries between the Romanesque and Rothko, all Western forms were interconnected, and that his role as educator was to mediate that ocean of information and bring those corresponding pieces together. His students spanned a wide range as well, from doctoral students uptown to the artists and writers who attended his lectures downtown at the New School for Social Research.

Although Schapiro wrote sparingly during his fifty years at Columbia—he only published a handful of books before retiring in 1973—his standing-room-only lectures were legendary. He was known for his own particular breed of no notes oration: a discussion that started with a clearly stated summation and then spiraled up and out, pulling from as many fields as he had fingers. Connections were made like so many synapses firing—everything from psychoanalysis and religion to political science and semiotics—and by the hour’s end, I often didn’t know what I was supposed to know.

ONE AFTERNOON, I WAS walking down a hallway in Schermerhorn, the Art History Department’s home, when Schapiro summoned me into his office with a demanding, Katz!

I stepped inside. The lights were low, the projector humming. Please identify the slides displayed on the screen. He clicked the machine. The first slide slid into place. I had no idea what was coming—with Schapiro, it could’ve been anything from a prehistoric cave painting to a Hans Hofmann canvas! I swallowed hard and recognized the first picture. Then I nailed the second. A couple of images in, a slide of a staircase came up. I remember thinking that it could’ve been any staircase in the world, and my dry-mouth response was, I think it’s Bauhaus or something.

Schapiro considered the image, and my response. No. It’s from the Palace of Minos at Knossos, and it’s about 1900 BC. I waited for the ax to fall as he turned to me. But it uses approximately the same proportions of rise and tread, so I won’t fault you on that one.

I was relieved to get out of the session with my ego intact. As admired as he was by the students, Schapiro had a reputation as remote and hypercritical one-on-one. He was impossibly demanding of his students, and because of that notoriety, many steered clear of him for their graduate work. I was no different: I was scared as hell every time he looked at me, ready to be grilled with another question I couldn’t answer, another set of stairs I couldn’t identify.

But I also knew he’d be the right adviser for my work. I was writing my thesis on early Hebrew manuscripts from Yemen. Among his other studies, Schapiro had researched an array of illuminated manuscripts, including Ireland’s prized Book of Kells and the famously apocalyptic Beatus Manuscript from Romanesque Spain. His expertise and research would be invaluable, so I took a deep breath and stepped back into his office.

Titled The Survival of Byzantine Ornaments in South Arabian Manuscripts, my thesis turned out to be much more interesting than its title implies. Yemen was still a very remote place in the early 1950s. The only Westerners entering the country were a handful of scholars interested in pre-Islamic inscriptions and an assortment of daring Europeans looking for traces of the Queen of Sheba. Based on legends and the little solid information we did have, scholars thought that Jews had been living in the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula since about 100 BCE, and there were Yemenite Hebrew manuscripts dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries. A few of these manuscripts ended up at The Guenzburg Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts in St. Petersburg—but an equally significant portion rested right up the street from me. The Jewish Theological Seminary had acquired a large number of Yemenite manuscripts over the years. So I walked six blocks up Broadway to see them for myself.

Eager to begin my first major research project, I began poring over the manuscripts. Many hadn’t been studied since they’d entered the collection, so there was a real sense of discovery as I lay each one down on the library’s wide wooden table. The codices were almost always on handmade paper in largish formats, written in black gall ink. Three out of four were from the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew scripture), complete with all the familiar diacritical marks and chapter breaks I’d learned at yeshiva. The delightful aspect of these manuscripts was the overwhelming sense of their having been lovingly and intensely used—the corners of pages were marked by years of turning, and the ink was worn where the lines of favorite passages had been traced by a pointer again and again.

I began with the frontispieces, the most artistic and heavily ornamented pages, like a Koran. I then followed chapter headings and the border designs alongside each text. I was looking at the squiggles with a specific goal: charting the evolution of decoration from the early centuries after the birth of Christ to this far-flung corner of the Arabian Peninsula a millennium later. I tracked the trickle-down effect of art history, tracing Christian Coptic and Ethiopic ornamentation—such as those plus-sign-like crosses—from early Christianity into the Byzantine visual language, then followed their iconic symbols as they spread across the Mediterranean with the Byzantine Empire and Islam. Eventually those familiar decorations migrated south, landing on the pages in front of me, in South Arabia’s Hebrew manuscripts.

After a long time spent looking, purely entranced by their simple beauty, I started to consider whether there was a deeper meaning to these designs. Did they hold more significance than just decoration? Then one day, I felt I found my answer in the use of alternating colors adorning the symbols on folios. Rhyming poetry had one pattern of coloration; verse used another; music a third. I went back through the stack of manuscripts with a new set of eyes, poring over the leaves to find more examples of the coded patterning. It was there, clear as writing on the wall.

My thesis weighed in at about two hundred pages—two thick volumes. Schapiro, who had been excited by my research, which also included the coffee trade, encouraged me that the work was extensive enough to be submitted as a doctoral dissertation rather than the master’s thesis I’d intended. He told me that I could submit a second, shorter paper from my course work for my master’s thesis, use my Yemenite volumes as a dissertation, and come out with a PhD, as long as other requirements were fulfilled.

It was an exciting proposition. I already had enough credits to graduate with a master’s. But standing between me and either degree was the German language requirement. Because so much of nineteenth-century art history and archaeology scholarship was conducted in Germany and Austria, German proficiency was mandatory for all art history graduate students. As a Jew, the atrocities of the Holocaust were still too close in the 1950s for me to disassociate the language from the war. It was too soon. I couldn’t bring myself to learn German. Not then, and, as it would turn out, not ever.

WHILE MY GIFTED classmates blazed their way through the program, I developed my own route through Columbia’s graduate school. It involved spending a lot of time in the back of Schermerhorn Library in the graduate student reading room. There, as my classmates drifted in and out with stacks of scholarly texts, I passed countless hours thumbing through everything and anything with illustrations: academic research and general interest books, criticism and monographs. The text of these tomes didn’t interest me too much—I went straight for their grainy black-and-white and color reproductions. I knew I was not going to be an academic, but since meeting Schapiro, I also knew I had a good eye, and I wanted to cultivate it. When presented with an unknown object—on a dig, in an antiquities shop, on a slide, or in a gallery—I wanted to be able to quickly identify the familiar details and easily recall how it referenced other objects I had seen. To do that, I just needed to see more of everything. So, day after day, I dragged out encyclopedic volumes of archaeological imagery, spending hours with the pictures, establishing my internal database of objects and contexts. Alongside these independent studies I researched and wrote papers on a wide range of subjects, from proportion in African sculpture, Roman architectural decoration reflecting the decline of the empire to the appearance of God from a finger in a cloud to a full figure. Somewhere in there I began to feel comfortable as a generalist in art. But as much as I liked my new skin, I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

George Roseborough Collins was also struggling to find his way. When we met, Collins was the Fine Art Department’s newest professor, barely thirty and fighting to make a name for himself as an architectural historian. He was working on colonial South American architecture, a topic that seemed terribly obscure to me at the time—though I’m sure he could say the same for my Yemenite manuscripts—and he was having difficulty getting published. Despite our different academic interests, we hit it off extracurricularly, and I saw him around the Morningside Heights neighborhood, where we both lived, more often than in the department’s offices.

One day, after months of commiserating, he stopped me on the stairway of Schermerhorn and exclaimed, Katz! I’ve been published! After a round of excited congratulations he promised to share the piece with me.

A few days later I received an article from Collins. But it wasn’t an architectural review; it was an offering from a journal of tropical medicine. Perplexed, I flipped through the magazine to the dog-eared page—a case study on South American parasites. The article referred to a Dr. G.C. Apparently, while studying his Spanish colonial churches, Collins had contracted a malady so unfortunate it merited the biological study!

At least he’d retained a sense of humor about his plight—and eventually received well-earned validation. His years of struggle were rewarded in 1960 when he published the first book in English on Antoni Gaudí. Collins became one of the preeminent experts on the Catalan region’s modernismo style, and remained at Columbia for forty years.

Perhaps because we were both grappling to find our ways, Collins did me a tremendous favor early in the spring of 1953. He called to say that he’d just spoken to Sterling Callisen, dean of education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum was preparing a show called From the Land of the Bible, and they were looking for someone who could speak Hebrew, knew the Bible, and had some knowledge of art history and archaeology. The description fit me, but Collins emphasized that the position required a person willing to step in and fill a little gap, someone who would do whatever was needed to be done as the exhibition’s opening approached.

"I’d love any job at the Met," I told him, and after thanking him immensely I called Callisen. A few days later I met with the Met’s director, Francis Henry Taylor.

Taylor was just as imposing as the full-length bronze sculpture of a Roman emperor on display near his office. He had this great nose, and a perfectly Vitruvian head-to-body proportion of eight to one. It seemed the only difference between the two was that the sculpture was nude, while Taylor was impeccably dressed in a conservative suit.

Taylor was none too happy to see me. Another student of Meyer Schapiro! he roared. He and Schapiro had had quite a battle in 1945. Taylor had privately produced a small book called the Tower of Babel, a collection of essays on the dilemma of modern museums. It was highly critical of developments in art historical scholarship and of modern art, but held some sympathy for his German colleagues. Reading it, Schapiro had jumped on Taylor’s allusions to degenerate art and the similarity of his position to that of the Nazis, and wrote a very lengthy, scathing review in the Art Bulletin. There was nothing I could do about the men’s battle, however. I admitted to my association with Schapiro and tried to put my best foot forward.

A few weeks passed—I assume Taylor was hunting, unsuccessfully, for another, less-offensively affiliated candidate—before I learned I’d gotten the position.

From the Land of the Bible was to open in a few months. Callisen, a sweet, hulking, mustachioed Norseman, was in over his head with the exhibition, and needed help for the final haul. I would be a go-between, acting as liaison to the museum people from Israel and, when necessary, translating for all the involved departments, visiting archaeologists, and installation teams. I could hardly wait to begin.

From the Land of the Bible—an exhibition we called by its unfortunate acronym, FLOB—was conceived by Walter Moses, a prominent Israeli industrialist with a penchant for archaeology. Moses, a founder of Tel Aviv’s archaeological museum, Museum Haaretz, was known for one of the world’s best collections of ancient glass, and for being among Israel’s wealthiest men. After Israel’s hard-won independence in 1948, Moses was looking optimistically toward the future. The fifth anniversary of Israel’s statehood was approaching, and he wanted to mark it with an international celebration of Israel’s achievements. In such a short time, the list of accomplishments was not spectacular. But if you included Israel’s archaeological record, it was a story that spanned many millennia. So, in 1951, Moses approached the chairman of the American Fund for Israel Institutions, Edward A. Norman.

Norman was the son of a Sears, Roebuck & Company founder, and with then wife Dorothy Norman, was a leading advocate for liberal causes in New York through the 1930s and 1940s. The Normans made several trips to Palestine in the 1930s, where he observed how the cultural, educational, and vocational organizations competed among themselves for the same foreign funding. To eliminate such feckless scrambles for money—and to make supporting Palestine, and then Israel, easier for potential American donors—in 1941 he cofounded the not-for-profit American Fund for Palestine Institutions, which became the American Fund for Israel Institutions (AFII) after Israel’s statehood. (Today it is the American-Israel Cultural Foundation.) AFII’s second purpose—the one that brought Norman to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—was to foster cultural exchanges between Israel and the United States.

Depending on your viewpoint, the proposed FLOB exhibition was either a tour-de-force, celebrating many millennia of civilization and about 3,500 years of Jewish habitation, or it was just a collection of brown pots. Admittedly, antiquities from Israel held far less glamour than their Mediterranean and Middle Eastern counterparts. Aesthetically, the archaeological records of Greece, Iraq, and Egypt were all far more attractive.

But the organizers weren’t interested in looks so much as politics. The objects in FLOB formed an archaeological record confirming much of the Old Testament, the document central to the Jewish claim to the land of Palestine. As Moses put it in an article previewing the show, the collection was a surviving witness of Biblical history, and sometimes, real scientific proof that the Bible is true. For a young nation founded on the basis of that sacred record, the artifacts—for instance, jewelry scientifically dating to the time of Moses, which, based on matching biblical descriptions, could have adorned the neck of Rebecca or Leah—was as valuable as any air force base. Moses believed that Israel needed these objects to reinforce claims to its sliver of land—and, even more, needed the world to see that the testimony of these objects justified Israel’s contentious existence.

The Met’s board didn’t express much interest in the show. The archaeological objects weren’t visually exciting. And even if the pots had been more spectacular, mounting a show of Israeli archaeology would be a bold political statement. None of Israel’s Middle Eastern neighbors—not even Egypt and Iraq, with their stupendous collections—were mounting state-sponsored international exhibitions. (The Egyptian government’s first large show would not come to American shores until the Metropolitan’s centennial in 1970; the blockbuster King Tut traveling exhibition would not cross the Atlantic until 1976.) The Met had sent excavation teams around the Middle East before World War II, and had maintained relationships within many of the newly independent states after the war. It would ruffle more than a few Arab states to see the museum get behind an Israeli exhibition.

At that time, supporting the State of Israel was not a high priority. There were few if any Zionists on the Metropolitan’s board or staff and, traditionally, Jews didn’t go into the museum business; instead, they were academics like Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Kurt Weitzman, and Columbia’s Meyer Schapiro. The American museums that had started to spring up in the 1870s—the Metropolitan, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran in Washington, D.C.—were still inhabited, by and large, by the old guard, a tight-knit group that was mostly white, Protestant, moneyed, and male.

In 1953 there was a Jew on the Met’s board of directors, but only one: a judge named Irwin Untermeyer. A few Jews filled the curatorial ranks. James R. Rorimer, founding curator of the Met’s hallowed Cloisters in northern Manhattan, became the museum’s first Jewish director in 1954—but he had converted to Christianity. The Islamic Art Department’s Maurice Dimand had also been born Jewish, but he played down his religion. When I arrived in 1953, I felt like the only Jew in the building—there certainly weren’t matzoh in the dining halls on Passover. More than once, I sensed an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the administration. But aside from a few comments, religion stayed out of the museum.

Despite the board’s apathy, however, Norman maintained his hard sell. The Metropolitan was the preeminent institution, in the largest Jewish city in the world. He and his organization came with some financial—and cultural—cache: in their first ten years, the organization had raised $7 million for Israel and, in celebration of the country’s fifth anniversary, was launching a $2 million campaign. This fund-raising effort would be aided by an impressive group of musical programs, with stars from the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic performing everywhere from Ebbets Field to the Waldorf-Astoria.

In the 1950s, New York City’s Jewish population peaked at about two million—a quarter of the population. Between AFII’s pulling power and the huge number of potential visitors, the Met board recognized it would be committing a certain degree of public-relations suicide to turn down FLOB. Begrudgingly, it approved the exhibition. The Israelis fell all over themselves with excitement and began preparations for their New York debut.

Spurred by the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and intensive construction