![]() Hoving’s tenure at the Met spanned the period when the American museum began to shake off its traditional introversion, go for the largest possible public, and become a low-rating mass medium in its own right. Which is not to say that Hoving does not, some of the time, tell the truth but the background beat of mendacity is such that it’s not always possible to know when he is telling it, or if he cares-so deeply rooted is this curious man’s habit of self-dramatization.įinally, although both books-and especially Making the Mummies Dance-are loaded with gossip, they are curiously short on serious and intelligent reflection about what museums are actually for, and the meaning of the very considerable changes that Hoving caused in his. ![]() One ends up thinking of him as a male version of that other mythomaniac, Lillian Hellman-but without the literary gifts. If so, he need not have bothered, since it all comes out sounding like Hoving anyway. The current book is full of “he said-I said” dialogue, and Hoving claims that every line he puts in everyone else’s mouth, some going back thirty years, is reconstructed from his journals and tapes. (These begin with his assertion that in 1967, before his appointment as director, he impressed the trustees with the revelation that “the State Commissioner for Human Rights, Eleanor Holmes Norton, was preparing to hit the museum with a series of legal charges alleging massive abuse in the hiring practices and promotions of women employees”-whereas, in fact, Norton’s inquiry into the Met did not even begin until early 1975, almost eight years later.) And they are laced with fibs, taradiddles, spin, implausibilities, and dramatic inventions. They present their author as a fascinating buccaneer of the art world, swashing down the corridors of power, up to his long neck in secret deals and perilous transactions an ace sleuth tracking down “undiscovered” or “hidden” masterpieces the art world’s Dick Daring or Indiana Jones, perpetually at odds with stuffy trustees and nitpicking critics. They are written in hectoring, zip-blam-pow prose, replete with malapropisms: the style is the man, for Hoving has always been a lapel-grabber. Thus far Hoving has written two memoirs of his career at the Met: first King of the Confessors (1981), an account of his earlier years, centering around the acquisition of a twelfth-century ivory crucifix for the Met, and now Making the Mummies Dance, which covers his period as director. But clippings go yellow and languish unread books are needed. ![]() “The rage for fame infects both great and small / Better be damned than mentioned not at all”-Hoving was the first American museum celebrity, and his compact with the mass media was a Faustian one. He is and always was obsessed with publicity, with being quoted and noticed. Mildness and rumination, let alone discretion, have never been Hoving’s forte. Memoirs by American museum men are fairly thin on the ground, and when they appear-like Self-Portrait with Donors, by John Walker, a former director of the National Gallery in Washington-they tend to be mild, discreet, and ruminative. The striking thing is how much of it he has written himself. Hoving, who ran the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for ten years (1967–1977). No other museum director in American history has had as much written about him as Thomas P.F.
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