I am in hopes that you will all forgive me if I again interrupt "Renaisssance" to post an article which I believe, for many reasons, our group will find relevant.
Thomas Hoving, Who Shook Up the Met, Dies at 78
By RANDY KENNEDY
Thomas Hoving, the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose decade-long tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Nancy, said.
One of the breed of brash, self-mythologizing leaders like Mayor Edward I. Koch who came to define New York in the 1970s, Mr. Hoving spent a whirlwind year running the city’s parks before taking over the Met at a time when it was, as many thought and as he boldly told trustees, “moribund,” “gray” and “dying.”
He became its seventh director and, at 35, its youngest. And during his tumultuous reign, the museum did many things it had never done before, often for the better, sometimes for the worse: it formed a contemporary art department and displayed Pop painting alongside Poussin and David; regularly draped the now-familiar banners on its facade to advertise shows; created the enlarged front steps that have become Fifth Avenue’s bleachers; paid $5.5 million for a single painting (the Velázquez masterpiece “Juan de Pareja”) while quietly selling works by Van Gogh, Rousseau and others to help pay for it.
The museum also opened new galleries dedicated to Islamic art, organized a major reinstallation of its Egyptian wing and set in motion an expansion program that eventually resulted in a much larger American wing, a glass-walled addition for the Temple of Dendur, a wing for the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Americas, and a new southwest wing, now dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
Two years into his tenure, the Met received the largest donation of art in its history, the collection of the investment banker Robert Lehman.A new $7 million pavilion to display it — functioning essentially as a museum within the museum — opened in 1975.
In his establishment-rattling mission to make the art museum a more populist institution, Mr. Hoving was “probably the most influential and innovative museum official of the postwar period,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times.
Philippe de Montebello, who worked for many years under Mr. Hoving and succeeded him as director, said Thursday: “People criticized him for his excesses, but you have to remember that it is not the timorous who climb life’s peaks. He has left us with a changed museum world.”
Mr. Hoving helped greatly enlarge the Met’s collections, often in dramatic fashion, letting few things, least of all shame, stand in his way. A rangy 6-foot-3 man with boyish, at times explosive energy, he described how he once pleaded with a dealer who knew about the medieval ivory masterpiece known as the Bury Saint Edmunds cross, telling him: “I am being devoured by this cross. I want it, I need it.”
He outmaneuvered the Smithsonian Institution to get the crowd-pleasing Temple of Dendur and helped save an entire prairie house by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose living room was meticulously reassembled in the American Wing.
But the story of probably his greatest acquisition coup — an exquisite 2,500-year-old Greek vase adorned by the master painter Euphronios, bought in 1972 for $1 million — did not end as happily.
Even before the vase went on display, experts contended that it had been wrested illicitly from an Etruscan tomb near Rome. In 2006, after years of demands from the Italian government, the Met agreed to return the vessel to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other antiquities.
Mr. Hoving admitted in “Making the Mummies Dance,” his rollicking 1993 memoir about his years at the Met, that he knew that the vase, which he jokingly called the “hot pot,” had probably been smuggled out of Italy. But he made no apologies for his ask-questions-later approach to acquisitions, one he had formed as early as his days as a curator at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval branch.
“My collecting style was pure piracy, and I got a reputation as a shark,” he wrote, adding that his little black book of “dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers” was bigger than anyone’s.
Despite his braggadocio, Mr. Hoving, the son of a Fifth Avenue merchandising tycoon, proved to be an able administrator and budgeteer. Even during the city’s fiscal crisis, when many other large cultural institutions were in the red, the museum was usually able to balance its books, and its merchandising operation grew tremendously during his years, eventually contributing more than $1 million in annual income.
But Mr. Hoving tended to receive more attention for his temporary contributions to the Met than for his permanent ones. Along with J. Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, he was one of the architects of the blockbuster exhibition, which introduced to the Met’s galleries the carnival atmosphere of a summer movie opening.
Mr. Hoving defended such shows against criticism that they cheapened the museum and that they were intended solely to plump attendance and admission-fee income. “Great art should be shown with great excitement,” he once said, citing an observation by a previous Met director that the museum is the “midwife of democracy.”
“And damn it, it is!” he said.
His negotiations with Egyptian authorities in 1975 were pivotal in bringing about the first American tour of the treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun. During one of several visits to Egypt to cajole and twist arms, Mr. Hoving recalled, he and his assistants were left mostly alone with piles of Tut artifacts, and Mr. Hoving claimed to have wheeled around the pharaoh’s solid-gold inner coffin himself.
The exhibition arrived at the Met in December 1978 after attracting 5.6 million people at five other museums across the country, and drew almost 1.3 million during its four-month stay in New York, generating more than $100 million in additional tourism money for the city.
Besides the Tutankhamun show, he also oversaw several highly popular and often well-received exhibitions, like “The Great Age of Fresco,” in 1968; “The Year 1200,” in 1970; “Masterpieces of Tapestry” in 1974; “From the Lands of the Scythians,” in 1975, a display of gold treasures mostly from the Hermitage; and “The Impressionist Epoch,” which set a special-exhibition attendance record the same year.
Early in his tenure, however, he helped organize an exhibition that almost ruined his career. “Harlem on My Mind,” a 1969 multimedia show of photographs and recordings focused on the history of Harlem, was intended, as Mr. Hoving later wrote, “to chronicle the creativity of the downtrodden blacks and at the same time encourage them to come to the museum.”
Instead it enraged many New Yorkers, black and otherwise, who saw the show — an exhibition in a major art museum that included no paintings or sculpture — as paternalistic and insulting, though it did result in the discovery of James Van Der Zee’s important photographic work from the 1920s and ’30s. The show’s catalog included anti-Semitic (along with anti-Irish and anti-Hispanic) remarks by a young black essayist, setting off protests by both blacks and Jews. Mr. Hoving apologized for the essay, saying that in approving it he “wholly failed to sense the racial undertones that might be read into portions of it.”
In 1975, decisions he made about another exhibition also got him into trouble. Along with Mr. de Montebello, a deputy at the time, Mr. Hoving cut 50 paintings from a show organized with the Louvre and the Detroit Institute of Arts, “French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution.”
Mr. Hoving said the decision was made solely to control the show’s costs. But Robert Rosenblum, a leading art historian who had helped organize the show, accused the museum of removing the paintings because they were by lesser-known artists, a shameful decision, he said, to sacrifice scholarship for “predictable box-office results.”
The chairman of the museum’s European paintings department and a curator in the department resigned in part because of the decision. Mr. Hoving later wrote that he had tried to convince Mr. Rosenblum and others that “there was a difference between an art exhibition and a scholarly tome.”
“But that made them even angrier.”
Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving was born in New York City on Jan. 15, 1931, the elder child of Walter Hoving, a renowned merchandiser who was president of Bonwit Teller and then chairman of Tiffany & Company, and Mary Osgood Field Hoving, a descendant of Samuel Osgood, the first postmaster general of the United States. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he grew up mostly in Manhattan.
As a child, he spent a considerable amount of time visiting the Metropolitan Museum, where he gravitated to the Egyptian wing and was especially fascinated by a temple relief in which only the pharaoh’s lips remained clearly visible on his profile. “I looked deeply into the lips of King Akhenaten,” he told John McPhee in a profile in The New Yorker in 1967.
Mr. Hoving’s early academic career was checkered. He was eased out of the Buckley School on the Upper East Side in the fourth grade and spent the next five years at Eaglebrook School in western Massachusetts. From there he went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he lasted only six months, leaving after an incident in which he punched a Latin teacher.
He graduated from Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, then worked a summer as a copy boy for the columnist Sidney Fields of the New York newspaper The Daily Mirror, a job that seemed to jumpstart a lifelong, and sometimes ill-advised, affection for media attention. (He joked that his middle initials stood for Publicity Forever.)
During his sophomore year at Princeton, he found his calling when he took an art history course. Princeton is also where he found his wife, Nancy Bell, a Vassar student whom he met at a house party, where they were both trying to avoid their dates.
Besides his wife, Mr. Hoving is survived by his sister, Petrea, of Manhattan; his daughter, also named Petrea, who is known as Trea, and three granddaughters.
Mr. Hoving graduated from Princeton summa cum laude, winning honors for a thesis on architectural history. After three years in the Marines, he announced his intention to pursue a graduate degree in art history, but his father refused to give him money for it. So instead, he won a fellowship.
He earned a master’s, then a doctorate, in art history at Princeton. Then, in 1958, after a lecture he gave at the Frick Collection on the Annibale Carracci frescoes at the Farnese Palace in Rome, a man he didn’t recognize and who didn’t introduce himself invited Mr. Hoving to take a walk up Fifth Avenue to the Met to see a marble table that had once graced the palace. The man turned out to be James J. Rorimer, the Met’s director, who offered Mr. Hoving a job.
He began as a curatorial assistant at the Cloisters, where he distinguished himself early on by identifying a rare Romanesque marble relief that the Met had declined to buy; it reversed itself when he discovered that the relief was a long-missing piece of a noted 12th century Florentine pulpit. His most impressive accomplishment was his globe-trotting role in helping the Met acquire the 12th-century walrus ivory cross attributed to the Abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds in eastern England, considered one of the finest medieval ivories in existence and now on display at the Cloisters.
In 1965 he was named curator of the department of medieval arts and of the Cloisters, but within months his career was to take another direction. He had worked in the early 1960s as a campaign volunteer for John V. Lindsay, the congressman from Manhattan, who became a casual friend. And when Mr. Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City in 1965, he asked Mr. Hoving to be his parks commissioner. Though Mr. Hoving had little administrative experience and scant knowledge of the park system, he plunged into the job. He became a familiar sight at parks around the city, zipping around to them on his Jawa motorcycle. And he quickly generated headlines by winning a fight to close Central Park’s east and west drives to car traffic on Sundays and instituting a series of park gatherings — known as “Hoving’s Happenings,” a term borrowed from the artist Allan Kaprow — in which huge crowds turned out to do things like communal painting or lying in the Sheep Meadow to watch a midnight meteor shower.
Less than six months after Mr. Hoving took over the parks job, his mentor at the Met, James Rorimer, died unexpectedly in his sleep at age 60, and in December 1966, Mr. Hoving was chosen from a field of 40 candidates to take over the museum’s directorship. At the press conference in which he was named, Mayor Lindsay said he felt like a father “who has just given away the bride.”
Mr. Hoving stepped down in 1977, after a decade in the job, with the intention of becoming the head of a new branch of the Annenberg School of Communications, to have been established within the Met for the purpose of making fine art more accessible through television and films. But the plan, backed by a $40 million pledge from the publisher Walter Annenberg, fell apart amid criticism by some city officials, who questioned Mr. Annenberg’s motivations and complained that the center would occupy space in the museum that rightfully should have been used for exhibiting art.
Mr. Hoving’s post-museum career was mostly filled with writing books, several of which sold well, though sometimes for the wrong reasons. “King of the Confessors,” his 1981 account of his pursuit of the ivory cross and the Met’s acquisition of other treasures, was rejected by the Met’s bookshop because museum officials felt that it mischaracterized the museum’s collecting policies.
His memoir of his years leading the Met was written with all the flair of a potboiler, helped along by passages that bordered on the fictional, at least heavily embellished. Mr. Hoving seemed to anticipate criticism of the book and the pivotal years it described by saving some of the harshest assessments for himself, calling himself cold, driven, hypocritical and impulsive.
One thing he never claimed to be was modest. Under his leadership, he wrote, “the most sweeping revolution in the history of art museums had taken place.”
“The Met, once an elitist, stiff, gray and slightly moribund entity, came alive,” he added. “The mummies did dance.”
