Senior leaders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art conceded to angry high-dollar donors that the institution had erred in choosing designer John Galliano, who was convicted over antisemitic abuse, for a major honor, sources said.
In a hastily arranged Zoom call late Monday afternoon with the museum’s influential board of trustees, Met CEO Max Hollein and billionaire board co-chair Tony James acknowledged concerns that the institution failed to gather sufficient input before moving forward with the polarizing selection, people familiar with the meeting told The Post.
“They admitted it was a mistake,” one source said of the hourlong discussion, which came just hours after Galliano, 65, announced he was stepping away from being honored at May’s star-packed Met Gala and from a related curated costume exhibition. The celebrated couture figure has long faced backlash for a past outburst in which he declared, “I love Hitler.”
According to the source, museum officials discussed how the decision-making process had broken down and acknowledged that the final choice was misguided.
James, sources said, personally conceded that Galliano was the wrong honoree at the wrong moment, particularly amid heightened alarm over rising antisemitism.
New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, an ex officio trustee who helped drive mounting protest against Galliano’s selection, spoke during the meeting and reiterated that honoring the onetime catwalk virtuoso was a bad move, sources said.
But while copping to botching the 2027 mega-fund-raising gala, Met execs and some trustees still refused to take on 76-year-old Vogue editrix Anna Wintour — and even her flamboyant buddy Galliano.
“People were complimentary of Anna,” a source said — adding that Met leadership was grateful that Galliano bowed out on his own.
Wintour, the ironfisted power behind the gala, has remained loyal to the eccentric Galliano, helping him to continue his fantastical work in the fashion field since his fall from grace.
Around 2011, Galliano was the star of legendary fashion house Dior when he was caught on camera hissing horrific anti-Jewish vitriol at various patrons of a cafe in Paris.
He blamed being booze- and drug-addled at the time, copped a mea culpa, entered rehab — and then seemed to make nice with some key Jewish national leaders.
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But a fashion publicist recently recounted how she and a friend had an antisemitic encounter with Galliano years later, in 2019, in which he sneered over her pal speaking in Hebrew. Galliano has denied the encounter ever happened.
Wintour has stood by the disgraced designer through it all, even calling his decision to step down from his Met fete “courageous.’’
No decision was made about a replacement “theme’’ for the gala or exhibit, Met officials noted at the meeting, sources said.
But there also was heightened discussion and soul-searching about the Met’s values overall, sources said.
“I felt that it was a two-part problem,’’ said Met donor Alice Tisch, referring to Galliano’s selection, to The Post on Monday after his sensational bow-out.
“It was the Jewish problem — which is so, you know, heightened right now with all of the issues and all of the antisemitism,” said Tisch, who is not a trustee.
“But as much as that, it was the governance issue that just bespeaks a larger problem and something that should not be,” she said.
“You can’t have one donor to the museum, whether they’re a trustee or not, saying ‘We’re going to do this show, this is an artist we need to promote,’” said Tisch, a relative of NYPD Commish Jessica Tisch. “It’s got to come from curatorial. There’s got to be church and state. This stuff has to be a little separate.
“I did enough research into it,’’ she said. “I was thinking, it’s got to be that at least 50 percent of the donors to the Met are Jews — you know, historic big collections.
“There’s the Lehman collection, the Gelman collection, the Annenberg collection. There’s a lot of great Jewish collections there.
“So they’re also running a Lee Krasner and a Jackson Pollock show at the same time. And that’s when I started to think, what would Lee Krasner do? What would one of these Jewish artists’ responses be to the Met for showing this art?”