Word: metting
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...narcissism and gleefully roguish manner. But in one job, he left the world a changed place. In his 10 years as director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hoving, who was 78 when he died of cancer on Dec. 10, didn't just transform the Met. He remade the very idea of museums...
...luxury retailer Tiffany & Co. The younger Hoving grew up in Manhattan and attended a series of private schools. Then it was on to Princeton, where he got his bachelor's degree, a master's and then a doctorate in art history. In 1958 he went to work for the Met, eventually becoming chief curator of medieval...
...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...