Word: met
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with the Swinging '60s well under way, the museum world was feeling a bit cramped and stodgy to Hoving. That was the year he left the Met to serve as parks commissioner for New York City's newly elected mayor, John V. Lindsay, a dashing liberal Republican (there used to be such things) who was bringing a bit of Kennedy-style panache to the place people would soon be calling Fun City, though usually with tongue in cheek. Hoving fit the new mood perfectly. At the time, the city's parks could be rundown and even sinister, especially at night...
...just months into Hoving's tenure, he was gone-gone. James J. Rorimer, then director of the Met, abruptly died. After a search that led them to consider more than 40 candidates to succeed him, the Met's ordinarily cautious board of trustees took a chance on the irrepressible and spontaneous Hoving, a man who had told the board members at what you might call his job audition that their museum was "moribund," "gray" and "dying." When he got to his new desk, he was 35, the youngest director in the museum's history, and he walked into the building...
...Hoving loved expanding the museum's collections, and he loved the chase. He didn't mind spending lavishly for major works like the Met's great Velázquez portrait of Juan de Pareja, which cost $5.5 million in 1971, a sum that qualified it then as the most expensive painting in the world. He also didn't mind selling off a Van Gogh and a Rousseau to help cover the cost, which got him into a public feud with the press over the notion of museums selling their treasures to buy new ones. The controversy brought on an investigation...
...recent years, another episode of his career at the Met came back to haunt him. It involved the Euphronios krater, a Greek mixing pot from the 6th century B.C. that the Met purchased in 1972 for what was then the enormous price of about $1 million. When it was offered to Hoving, he merrily surmised that it might well have been looted from an archeological dig, as he admitted in Making the Mummies Dance, his typically cocky 1993 memoir. Though he goes on in that book to describe how he became convinced that it wasn't stolen, on another page...
...Unfortunately, it turned out the vessel had been looted - from an Etruscan tomb outside Rome - and Italian authorities embarked on a decades-long campaign to get it back. Two years ago, the Met finally packed up "the hot pot," as Hoving liked to call it, and returned it to Italy as part of an agreement under which the museum also returned 20 other disputed items...