Word: museumful
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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...
...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 with all flags flying. (Read a TIME 1967 article about Hoving's new tenure...
...catchy name Things for Kings. Very soon he negotiated both the acquisition of the ancient Temple of Dendur from Egypt - over the opposition of Jacqueline Kennedy, who wanted it installed in Washington as a memorial to JFK - and the construction of a giant glass-enclosed addition to the museum to house...
...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...
...early big shows, however, did almost scuttle his career. As a way to bring African-American audiences into the museum, Hoving decided in 1967 to mount "Harlem on My Mind," a multimedia documentary survey of the history of Harlem, which opened two years later. The very idea offended people who couldn't understand what a historical show was doing at an art museum. That bad reaction got worse when the show's catalog turned out to contain an essay by a young black woman that included anti-Semitic remarks. In the uproar that followed, Hoving nearly lost...