Thomas Hoving, 78, dies of cancer. Globe and Mail article by Verna Dobnik.
Thomas Hoving’s charismatic but controversial leadership of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is summed up in his autobiography Making the Mummies Dance.
Dr. Hoving died yesterday of lung cancer at his Manhattan home, his family said.
As the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977, he turned an institution he said was “dying” into a happening museum with blockbuster exhibits. The treasures from Egyptian King Tutankhamun’s tomb was the most popular exhibit in the museum’s history, drawing more than one million visitors in New York, plus another 5.6 million at five other American museums.
But Dr. Hoving also raised dust in other ways, paying $5.5-million for a Velazquez masterpiece while selling works by Van Gogh and others to help pay for it. And he had no qualms about letting people sit and snack on the museum’s front staircase, which he had enlarged.
Dr. Hoving’s philosophy was: anything to make people notice great art.
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