Galleries of the World
LAST SUMMER, DANIEL H. WEISS was named president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the United States. In addition to its iconic building on Fifth Avenue, the Met now includes the Cloisters, which is located in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and specializes in medieval Europe, and the Breuer, the former Whitney Museum, currently a showcase for modern and contemporary art. An art historian who has an MBA as well as a PhD, Weiss was dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins University and then president of Lafayette and Haverford colleges before joining the Met about three years ago as president and chief operating officer. I first spoke to him as he was finishing his move into his new office, its walls hung with paintings by Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Andreas Achenbach, and Alfred Sisley. We talked again during the holiday season, when the Met was drawing large crowds for Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer, the 10th-most-visited exhibition in the museum’s history.
Do you remember your first experience
