Full Name: Salinger, Margaretta M.
Other Names:
- Margaretta M. Salinger
Gender: female
Date Born: 22 March 1907
Date Died: 08 March 1985
Place Born: New York, NY, USA
Place Died: New Britain, Connecticut, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Institution(s): Metropolitan Museum of Art
Overview
Curator of the Department of European Paintings 1970-72 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Salinger was born in New York, NY, to Arthur A. Salinger, a veterinarian, and Adaline Sager Magill (Salinger). She received a B.A., cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1928. The same year she travelled to Munich on fellowship to study art. In 1930 she joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a cataloger of objects. She began writing articles for the Museum in 1937. This position gave her a closeness with the objects which allowed her to co-author with Harry B. Wehle, A Catalogue of Early Flemish, Dutch, and German Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum in 1947.
She advanced to a Research Fellow and later Senior Researcher. Salinger also served on the Board of the Scientific Publication Committee of the Met under the chair was Gisela M.A. Richter. The Board’s purpose was to evaluate scholarly work for publication. She succeeded Richter as chairman in 1949 following Richter’s retirement. Salinger began giving public lectures on art appreciation in the 1950s. In 1955 The ‘Encyclopedia of Painting appeared with Salinger as co-editor. As a sole author, she published entry-level books on artists. Her first, solely under her authorship, was Michelangelo’s ‘The Last Judgment,’ published in 1963. Following the appointment of Thomas Hoving as director of the museum in 1966, Salinger chaired The Editorial Advisory Committee of the Museum, another publication unit (to 1971). The following year, 1967, she joined the Scholarly Programs initiative, the Museum’s public-facing educational initiative. Her judgment as an editor was trusted so much that when Hoving launched Metropolitan Museum Journal, one which focused strictly on Museum objects, Salinger was appointed that Board’s chair. Salinger was named curator of the Department of European Paintings, which she held until her retirement in 1972, becoming curator emeritus. In 1977 she donated the papers of Wehle to the Archives of American Art, which noted that “her relationship to him is unclear.” Salinger had settled in Weston, CT but died in New Britain, Connecticut in 1985.
Salinger’s publications outside journal articles consisted of co-authorship with principal curators of the Museum, Charles Sterling and Wehle or in the case of her sole publications, brief guides to their work. She never received an advanced degree in art history. Met director at the time of her death, Philippe de Montebello, characterized her as having both a precise and a synthetic mind and a strong sense of skeptical connoisseurship by looking (Times).
Selected Bibliography
- “Piazzetta’s Drawing of a Shepherd Boy”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 32
- and Wehle, Harry. Tiepolo and His Contemporaries. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1938.
- Peter Paul Rubens. New York: Book-of-the-Month Club,no. 2 (1937): 38–40. 1953.
- Tintoretto, 1518-1594. New York: Abrams, 1960.
- “Windows Open to Nature.” essay in her, Impressionists in the Metropolitan. New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1968.
Sources
- [obituary:] “Margaretta Salinger, a Curator Emeritus at The Met Museum”. New York Times, March 14, 1985, Section D, Page 27.
Archives
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library, archives.