Who

The head of the Brooklyn Museum, Lehman is the man who gave you the Giuliani-versus-art scandal of the late 1990s when he brought the "Sensation" exhibit to his museum.

Backstory

Born in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Lehman initially allowed chance to determine his career path: After graduating Johns Hopkins, he applied to doctoral programs in anthropology, English and art history. Art history prevailed, and he earned a PhD from Yale before teaching at City College and briefly serving as executive director of the Parks Council. In 1974, he became director of the Miami Art Center; five years later, he moved to Baltimore to head up the city's Museum of Art. He ended up spending a total of 18 years there, boosting its endowment to $40 million—up from $1 million when he took the helm—and raising its visibility on the national arts scene.

In 1997, Lehman was invited to return to his hometown to serve as director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Although he initially turned down the offer, he later reconsidered and in the decade since, he's been credited with reviving interest in the dowdy institution by appealing to a younger audience. His approach hasn't been without controversy: Critics have assailed him for dumbing down the museum with faddish exhibits and for neglecting its own world-class collection in a bid to drum up visitors and publicity.

Of note

The Brooklyn Museum was once one of the borough's most popular attractions: Unveiled in 1897, more than a million visitors passed through the storied institution's Beaux-Arts doors every year during its heyday. But the budget dwindled over the years and by the early 1990s, the number of annual visitors had dropped to just 200,000. Since arriving in 1997, Lehman has gone to great lengths to reverse the decline. He focused on attracting Brooklyn residents to the museum (as opposed to trying to make it a destination for people who live outside the borough), instituted new programs like First Saturdays, which offers free admission to the galleries on the first Saturday of every month, and presided over a critically-acclaimed $63 million renovation by James Stewart Polshek, which was unveiled in 2004.

The number of annual visitors to the Brooklyn Museum has since doubled, but Lehman's efforts have resulted in a good deal of angst. His reinstallation of the permanent collection several years ago was widely panned by art insiders (Yale's Robert Storr called it "a categorical disaster") and exhibitions like 2000's "Hip Hop Nation" and 2002's "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" were dismissed by many as silly memorabilia shows. More dissatisfaction followed Lehman's 2006 decision to reorganize the curatorial staff, a move that critics argued was aimed at de-emphasizing the museum's permanent collection of classical works. The ensuing imbroglio led to the resignations of three curators and two board members.

Drama

In 1999, the aptly titled show "Sensation," an exhibition of avant-garde young British artists, pitted Lehman against the Giuliani administration due to show's inclusion of Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, which featured Mary festooned with elephant dung and photos cut from porno mags. The outraged mayor shut "Sensation" down two days before it opened, cut off funding to the museum, and later even threatened eviction. Lehman ended up taking the case to court; the city lost the case on First Amendment grounds, and the museum regained its city funding. The high-profile rift generated a good deal of publicity—a total of 175,000 New Yorkers ended up trekking to Brooklyn to see the dried feces up close.

Personal

Lehman's wife, Pamela, is the granddaughter of department store magnate Ellis Gimbel. They have two grown sons and live in a 3,000-square-foot loft in a Gothic Revival building in downtown Brooklyn.