Met Museum former director Thomas Hoving dies at 78

Thomas Hoving, the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977 fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Nancy, said.

During his tenure, the museum 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.

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, known as a krater, 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.

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, generating more than $100 million in additional tourism money for the city.

Excerpted from an article by Randy Kennedy for The New York Times

Tags: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.