“Tom has a natural, unstudied political talent. There's
nothing he can't do....He is a thoroughly civilized man. He understands the
dynamics of institutional life. In the [Metropolitan] Museum [of Art], he’ll
make the mummies dance.”—New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay on Thomas Hoving,
quoted in John McPhee, “A Roomful of Hovings,” in The John McPhee Reader (1976)
Longtime supporters of some institutions might
praise them as “stable,” but other “s” words would spring to the lips of
detractors, such as “staid,” “starchy” and “stultifying.” Thomas Hoving—born on this day in 1931 in New York City—belonged to this
latter group.
John Lindsay, who campaigned into Gracie Mansion on
the strength of the juicy Murray Kempton quote, “He is fresh, and everyone else
is tired,” saw a kindred disrupter in Hoving, who left his job as the mayor’s
Parks Commissioner after only a year to take over the Met. Hoving lasted in his
new post for a decade, but in many ways his controversial leadership there
shaped him even to his death in 2009.
Like many a born plutocrat (his father, Walter, was
the formidable head of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s), Hoving harbored populist
aspirations. At the Parks Department, he sponsored “Happenings” where people
could fly kites, paint on canvases, and build castles of plastic foam, and
he spearheaded the building of vest-pocket parks throughout the city, including
its most poverty-stricken areas. At the Met, he organized crowd-drawing blockbuster
exhibits, including the one that absorbed much of his energy toward the end of
his tenure, on King Tut.
One of Hoving’s most controversial practices was
deaccessioning, or removing an item from the museum, usually through a sale to
raise money for new acquisitions or for closing budget gaps. As Hilton Kramer wrote in 2005 for The New Criterion, the practice is not illegal and can even
be justified if the item lies outside the mission of the institution, but is
often ethically shady because it results in the loss of a property given in
good faith. Hoving’s resort to this, involving the sale of important
impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, seemed particularly
questionable.
Eventually, the Met board, tiring of Hoving’s
high-flying ways and unorthodox manner, forced his ouster. In 1981, he took
over Connoisseur, shaking things up
there as thoroughly—and, perhaps, more catastrophically—than he had at the Met.
Under his leadership, the publication switched its focus to examine the inside
world of museums, giving full vent, for instance, to Hoving’s beefs about the
Getty. Connoisseur went under in
1991.
His memoirs written after his Met stewardship, King of the Confessors and Making the Mummies Dance (the latter
drawn, of course, from Lindsay’s colorful remark), told great stories but at
the expense of Hoving’s reputation for probity. The man who could write, “I had
always been able to lie convincingly,” did little to persuade longtime critics
that his departure from the Met was an awful thing. At the same time, they
demonstrated why he felt that leading the Met not only required “a gifted
connoisseur, a well-trained scholar, an aesthete, a patient diplomat, a deft
fundraiser, an executive, and a conciliator,” but also “part gunslinger, ward
heeler, legal fixer, accomplice smuggler, anarchist, and toady.”
McPhee’s profile, written for The New Yorker only a few months after Hoving took over at the Met,
is, like another early piece on Bill Bradley, an affectionate look at a fellow
Princetonian. It does not overlook its subject’s wild youth (including
expulsion from Exeter for slugging a Latin teacher for only giving him an A-).
But it also captures his lack of snobbishness and his longstanding cultivation
of his powers of observations—honed at first in an unhappy stint at a clothing
shop in his youth, where he sized up quickly the apparel and footwear tastes of
prostitutes and gays, then later as a low-level curator for the Met in the late
1950s and early 1960s.
Hoving was a curious figure who practiced his
curiosity to the utmost, especially in his abiding interest in forgeries.
His remarks to McPhee on the subject say much about the primary instrument for
anyone involved in the study of art:
“Your eye is king. Get in touch with other scholars
- everybody you think is expert . . . Learn the history of the piece - where it
is from, what collections it has belonged to, all the information surrounding
its discovery. Then get the work of art with you and live with it as long as
you possibly can. You have to watch it. Watch it…. A work of art will grow the
more it is with you. It will grow in stature, and fascinate you more and more.
If it is a fake, it will eventually fall apart before your eyes like a piece of
plaster."
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