The Big Show
by Phyllis Tuchman
DECEMBER 14, 2009 TAGS:
Thomas P.F. Hoving was a born showman. He thought of new ways to bring in large audiences, innovations that are now part of any curator’s skills. He revived the august Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he directed between 1966 and 1977. Before that, as commissioner of New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, he made Central Park, then underutilized, a Happening kind of place.
Hoving was the sort of person who intuitively knew how to reach a wide public. He had the instincts of P.T. Barnum, who called his circus The Greatest Show on Earth; and the panache of impresario Flo Ziegfield, whose extravagant Follies rocked Broadway for decades. Hoving, a six-footer with bright eyes and a radio announcer’s voice, created the blockbuster art exhibition, stocked his museum shop with must-have items, and spent millions of dollars to acquire the Temple of Dendur, paintings by Velazquez and Monet, the antique krater of Euphronios, and a rare medieval cross with exquisite detail.
Hoving began his career as a Princeton-educated scholar who penned erudite footnotes about medieval Carolingian ivories. By the time he died last week, at the age of 78 from cancer, he’d become a charming huckster who delivered glib sound bites. In Hoving’s playbook, if a tree fell in a forest, he was damn sure he’d find ways to make people come hear it drop. His special talents thrived on audience reactions. He joked that his middle initials stood not for Pearsall Field but rather for Publicity Forever.
Hoving was born on Jan. 15, 1931. When he was 5, his parents divorced, and he spent his life trying to measure up to the exacting standards of his father. Walter Hoving, a Swede, was a merchandizing whiz who held executive positions at Macy’s, Montgomery Ward, and Lord & Taylor before starting his own company in 1946. He eventually owned the now-defunct Bonwit Teller and by 1955 was running Tiffany’s, whose snob appeal he famously restored.
Young Tommy was bounced out of various private schools in Manhattan as well as prep schools in New England, At Princeton, he met his future wife, discovered art history and graduated summa cum laude. After serving in the Marines for three years, he returned to Princeton for his graduate degrees, writing a distinguished dissertation on The Sources of the Ivories of the Ada School.
By 1959, Hoving was an assistant curator at the Cloisters, the Met’s enchanting medieval outpost in Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan. With his great eye and skills as a negotiator, he reattributed work and helped the museum purchase sterling examples of 12th-century art.
Even though Hoving was named curator of his department at the Met and of the Cloisters in 1965, he jumped ship when the new mayor of New York, his friend John Lindsay, invited him to run the parks. Ideas Hoving initiated are now long-running traditions. For example, Hoving closed Central Park’s east and west drives to vehicular traffic on Sundays. He popularized park concerts with singers such as Judy Collins. Forty-two years later, pocket parks he created still function as oases in mid-town Manhattan, and the swimming pool he opened in Brooklyn still welcomes bathers.
When James Rorimer, the director of the Met, died from a heart attack at the age of 60, Hoving, only 35, was asked to helm the museum. During his tenure he transformed a dowager into a mini-skirted vixen.
In December 1966, the galleries were mostly empty. If you were a fledgling art historian, the conditions were great: You didn’t get jostled looking at paintings and accoustiguides didn’t distract you because they weren’t there to make noise. Even the bathrooms were exceptionally clean because hardly anyone was around to use them.
Under Hoving things changed rapidly. With stone steps, he reconfigured the entrance. Visitors were now brought into a redesigned, awe-inspiring Great Hall. Who needed the park if you could sit on these stairs on a nice day and watch mimes and other street performers? When the Lehman collection was offered to the Met on the condition that its art be housed apart from the museum’s other work, Hoving built a faux Fifth Avenue mansion behind the Medieval galleries. And once he intruded into Central Park, he introduced a master plan for further incursions.
Blockbusters didn’t become a steady diet until Hoving saw the success of exhibitions he mounted to celebrate the Met’s centennial. New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 was a case in point. To showcase Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, an oddball or two, and American artists such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, Hoving allowed curator Henry Geldzahler, a kindred spirit, to empty out all the Old Master galleries on the second floor and fill them with wall-sized canvases and supersized steel and stone constructions. On some Sundays, it was easy to believe you were at the ballpark.
Hoving had a few missteps: He sold some paintings to pay for the purchase of new ones, a failure to respect the wishes of donors that scandalized the art world and the newspapers. He imported a show of French art from the Louvre and cavalierly dropped from it works by lesser-known artists. Hoving, some critics felt, was beginning to see himself and his actions as invincible.
In the heat of mounting protests of the director’s stewardship of the Met, Walter Annenberg, the TV Guide mogul, offered to make him the head of a communications division he’d fund within the museum. For various reasons, it didn’t fly and Hoving found himself out of a job.
Ever wily, he recreated himself in a new image, one he used for the next 32 years: Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It helped him get clients when, in 1977, he set up a company to advise on matters related to the arts. It helped him get a job on ABC’s 20/20, where he appeared on camera from 1978-84. In the papers Hoving donated to his alma mater, there’s a box from his network days labeled, “People Who Love Me.” It’s filled with signed photographs of Sean Connery, Linda Evans, Jerry Lewis, Jaclyn Smith, and others.
From 1981-91, Hoving was the editor-in-chief of Connoisseur magazine, with a great staff to back him up. He also wrote books about his experiences at the Met. In 1992, he penned Fakin’ It, an unpublished novel. Between 1993-98, he tried to publish a tome on Doris Duke.
This past year, the website artnet serialized Hoving’s autobiography. It makes entertaining reading. A bit of a fabulist, he always told a good story. Artnet also sent Hoving to special exhibitions to make short spots it used to hype its new auction division. Not all of the shows he visited merited the four stars he awarded them. Yet, there’s something endearing about watching Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stand in front of a painting and say, “I went bananas.” His enthusiasm was always infectious.
Hoving was the sort of person who intuitively knew how to reach a wide public. He had the instincts of P.T. Barnum, who called his circus The Greatest Show on Earth; and the panache of impresario Flo Ziegfield, whose extravagant Follies rocked Broadway for decades. Hoving, a six-footer with bright eyes and a radio announcer’s voice, created the blockbuster art exhibition, stocked his museum shop with must-have items, and spent millions of dollars to acquire the Temple of Dendur, paintings by Velazquez and Monet, the antique krater of Euphronios, and a rare medieval cross with exquisite detail. Hoving began his career as a Princeton-educated scholar who penned erudite footnotes about medieval Carolingian ivories. By the time he died last week, at the age of 78 from cancer, he’d become a charming huckster who delivered glib sound bites. In Hoving’s playbook, if a tree fell in a forest, he was damn sure he’d find ways to make people come hear it drop. His special talents thrived on audience reactions. He joked that his middle initials stood not for Pearsall Field but rather for Publicity Forever.
Hoving was born on Jan. 15, 1931. When he was 5, his parents divorced, and he spent his life trying to measure up to the exacting standards of his father. Walter Hoving, a Swede, was a merchandizing whiz who held executive positions at Macy’s, Montgomery Ward, and Lord & Taylor before starting his own company in 1946. He eventually owned the now-defunct Bonwit Teller and by 1955 was running Tiffany’s, whose snob appeal he famously restored.
Young Tommy was bounced out of various private schools in Manhattan as well as prep schools in New England, At Princeton, he met his future wife, discovered art history and graduated summa cum laude. After serving in the Marines for three years, he returned to Princeton for his graduate degrees, writing a distinguished dissertation on The Sources of the Ivories of the Ada School.
By 1959, Hoving was an assistant curator at the Cloisters, the Met’s enchanting medieval outpost in Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan. With his great eye and skills as a negotiator, he reattributed work and helped the museum purchase sterling examples of 12th-century art.
Even though Hoving was named curator of his department at the Met and of the Cloisters in 1965, he jumped ship when the new mayor of New York, his friend John Lindsay, invited him to run the parks. Ideas Hoving initiated are now long-running traditions. For example, Hoving closed Central Park’s east and west drives to vehicular traffic on Sundays. He popularized park concerts with singers such as Judy Collins. Forty-two years later, pocket parks he created still function as oases in mid-town Manhattan, and the swimming pool he opened in Brooklyn still welcomes bathers.
When James Rorimer, the director of the Met, died from a heart attack at the age of 60, Hoving, only 35, was asked to helm the museum. During his tenure he transformed a dowager into a mini-skirted vixen.
In December 1966, the galleries were mostly empty. If you were a fledgling art historian, the conditions were great: You didn’t get jostled looking at paintings and accoustiguides didn’t distract you because they weren’t there to make noise. Even the bathrooms were exceptionally clean because hardly anyone was around to use them.
Under Hoving things changed rapidly. With stone steps, he reconfigured the entrance. Visitors were now brought into a redesigned, awe-inspiring Great Hall. Who needed the park if you could sit on these stairs on a nice day and watch mimes and other street performers? When the Lehman collection was offered to the Met on the condition that its art be housed apart from the museum’s other work, Hoving built a faux Fifth Avenue mansion behind the Medieval galleries. And once he intruded into Central Park, he introduced a master plan for further incursions. Blockbusters didn’t become a steady diet until Hoving saw the success of exhibitions he mounted to celebrate the Met’s centennial. New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 was a case in point. To showcase Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, an oddball or two, and American artists such as Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, Hoving allowed curator Henry Geldzahler, a kindred spirit, to empty out all the Old Master galleries on the second floor and fill them with wall-sized canvases and supersized steel and stone constructions. On some Sundays, it was easy to believe you were at the ballpark.
Hoving had a few missteps: He sold some paintings to pay for the purchase of new ones, a failure to respect the wishes of donors that scandalized the art world and the newspapers. He imported a show of French art from the Louvre and cavalierly dropped from it works by lesser-known artists. Hoving, some critics felt, was beginning to see himself and his actions as invincible.
In the heat of mounting protests of the director’s stewardship of the Met, Walter Annenberg, the TV Guide mogul, offered to make him the head of a communications division he’d fund within the museum. For various reasons, it didn’t fly and Hoving found himself out of a job.
Ever wily, he recreated himself in a new image, one he used for the next 32 years: Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It helped him get clients when, in 1977, he set up a company to advise on matters related to the arts. It helped him get a job on ABC’s 20/20, where he appeared on camera from 1978-84. In the papers Hoving donated to his alma mater, there’s a box from his network days labeled, “People Who Love Me.” It’s filled with signed photographs of Sean Connery, Linda Evans, Jerry Lewis, Jaclyn Smith, and others.
From 1981-91, Hoving was the editor-in-chief of Connoisseur magazine, with a great staff to back him up. He also wrote books about his experiences at the Met. In 1992, he penned Fakin’ It, an unpublished novel. Between 1993-98, he tried to publish a tome on Doris Duke.
This past year, the website artnet serialized Hoving’s autobiography. It makes entertaining reading. A bit of a fabulist, he always told a good story. Artnet also sent Hoving to special exhibitions to make short spots it used to hype its new auction division. Not all of the shows he visited merited the four stars he awarded them. Yet, there’s something endearing about watching Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stand in front of a painting and say, “I went bananas.” His enthusiasm was always infectious.
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