Thomas P. F. Hoving, who died this morning at the age of seventy-eight, was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a decade, from 1967 until 1977, and in many ways he invented the model of the modern encyclopedic museum: drawing huge crowds to blockbuster exhibits; buying high profile, exorbitantly priced masterpieces; realizing the revenues that could be generated by Hermes scarves inspired by the art of the Scythians. (John McPhee wrote a marvellous Profile of Hoving, who had formerly been a curator at the Cloisters and Lindsay’s Parks Commissioner, when Hoving was just two months into the top job at the Met.)
But as flamboyant and outrageous as Hoving often was as the Met’s director—a job to which he was appointed when he was only thirty-five—he was no less so as the Met’s former director, an unofficial position he held for the subsequent twenty-two years, to the occasional chagrin of some in the institution he left behind. Hoving wrote a number of books inspired by his years at the Met, including “Making the Mummies Dance,” a memoir of his directorship in which he pronounced that in addition to being “a gifted connoisseur, a well-trained scholar, an aesthete, a patient diplomat, a deft fundraiser, an executive, and a conciliator” the director of the Met also had to be “part gunslinger, ward heeler, legal fixer, accomplice smuggler, anarchist, and toady.”
Hoving reveled in his accomplishments when it came to this latter list of qualifications, which certainly makes for a lively memoir: he gives a gripping cloak-and-dagger account of acquiring the Ephronios Krater, a Greek vase depicting the death of Sarpedon—“the single most perfect work of art I had ever encountered,” he called it—which the Italian authorities alleged was illegally excavated and which, in 2006, the Met finally agreed to return to Italy by 2008. But it was Hoving’s accomplishments in the first list of qualifications—his scholarship, his connoisseurship, and his remarkable energy—that underlay his greatest accomplishments on the museum’s behalf. After I wrote a piece about the opening of the new Greek and Roman galleries, in 2007, Hoving told me in an e-mail that he had just been to visit them, and struck a wistful note, twenty years after the end of his directorship: “I launched many fond glances at the most beautiful Euphronios Sarpedon.”