Thomas Hoving, whose charismatic but controversial leadership of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is summed up in his autobiography, “Making the Mummies Dance,” died yesterday. He was 78.
Hoving died of cancer at his Manhattan home, his family said.
As the Met’s director from 1967 to 1977, he turned the Fifth Avenue institution that 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 8 million visitors.
But Hoving also raised dust in other ways, paying $5.5 million for a Velazquez masterpiece while selling works by Van Gogh and others.
And he had no qualms about letting people sit and snack on the museum’s front steps.
Hoving’s philosophy was: Anything to make people notice great art.
A brash star in a sometimes staid profession, he was a “perennial thorn in the side of the museum mafia,” author and art historian Michael Gross wrote in his book “Rogues Gallery.”
“I’m a goner,” Hoving told Gross in July, after being diagnosed with cancer in spring. “But I have no regrets. I’ve had a terrific life.”
Hoving was also the first to hang huge banners over Fifth Avenue to announce new exhibits to passers-by.