Profile of Cleveland Museum of Art’s former director

The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Steven Litt delves deeper into the story of the city’s great museum director, Sherman Lee:

The interviews reveal the inner workings of the museum and its sometimes-cantankerous director, including stories omitted from the museum’s published official histories.

The oral history also reveals Lee as a surprisingly modest person who didn’t consider himself a great scholar, who admitted to being poor at math and who confessed to struggling with the German exam he had to pass for his art-history doctorate at Western Reserve University.

“I am frankly not the type of student that is going to become a profound, meticulous scholar,” Lee said — a statement that might make others disagree.

Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, called Lee “one of the greatest museum directors that America has known.”

Sherman Lee, the Cleveland Museum of Art director who laid the foundation for the new East Wing, is revealed in oral history (Cleveland Plain-Dealer)