He was in large part a showman, and probably more a showman than a curator, and he changed the way museums look at their function in society. He essentially created the blockbuster show with the Tutankhamun show of the 1970s. The New York Times has the obituary.
Some musings on his impact and his passing below the fold.
I figure you have to admire him in a way. But he was rough-edged for what the Met had been. He came to the position of director at age 35, the youngest director the museum has ever had, and he began essentially by telling the trustees of the museum that it was gray and dying. He has been called "the most influential and innovative museum official of the postwar period."
Probably his greatest impact on the museum world was in the creation of the idea of the Blockbuster Show. In 1975, the Met's exhibition "The Impressionist Epoch" set a special exhibition record. He was important in the creation of the "The Treasures of Tutankhamun" show in the late 1970s. It came to New York in December 1978 (the fifth show on its tour of the US), and is estimated to have generated more than $100 million additional tourism money for the city of New York. His autobiography (which has been criticized for misrepresenting, if not outright falsifying, some aspects of his tenure at the museum) was titled Making the Mummies Dance. Hoving himself stepped down in 1977, just before the Tutankhamun show, for a position through the Annenberg School of Communications funded by Walter Annenberg that never panned out. But he kept himself in front of the public as a correspondent for 20/20 and editor of Connoisseur.
He expanded the museum's collection greatly and not only in the traditional western art areas (including the Medieval art which he had curated during an earlier stint at the museum). He was responsible for founding the contemporary art department of the museum (previously, I suppose modern art went largely to MOMA or the Guggenheim), opened the Islamic galleries, and pushed the process which eventually resulted in the spectacular wings for African and Pacific Islands Art, and the building that now houses the Temple of Dendur. He wrote a book about collecting for the museum, titled King of the Confessors. I have to admit I haven't read it, because his responsibility for (knowingly) purchasing looted objects was really distasteful to me, and I didn't want to know what he had to say -- it just made me too angry. The Times obituary notes that the book "was rejected by the Met's bookshop because museum officials felt that it mischaracterized the museum's collecting policies."
The biggest acquisition during his tenure was a vase -- the only complete example of a vase painted by the red figure painter Euphronios. This vessel was purchased by the Met (for $1 million, the most that had ever been spent for a Greek vase at that time, and a price that still is on the high end for the category, even without taking into account inflation). The vase had such problematic provenance, meaning that the ownership information that was attached to it was questioned at the time of its purchase, and it was thought by many scholars to have been illegally taken from Italy (where it had been excavated by tomb robbers), that the first publication of the piece was not done in the journal the curator wanted it to be published in. Hoving apparently referred to the vase as "the hot pot", and he wrote that he knew the vase had probably been smuggled out of Italy. But he didn't care. This tone he set does no one any favours, and sometime I will write a diary ranting about archaeological looting (we are not talking about excavations and colonial acquisitions of 80 or 200 years ago -- we are talking about illegal excavations (grave robbbing) that is done in clear contravention of local laws, and trafficking of this looted material in contravention of international laws). I must admit it gave me great pleasure to see the 2006 agreement with the Met having to give back the vase to Italy, in exchange for longterm loans of other (not as fine) antiquities. And I loved watching Philippe de Montabello, the recently-retired Director of the Met, and Hoving's successor and protege, choking on his words when he insisted the Met did nothing wrong and the agreement was essentially because the Met could no longer be sure of its provenance, so to make everyone happy they were going to give it back to Italy.
Anyway, Hoving did revitalize the museum, and change the way both New Yorkers looked at their Museum (among other things, he broadened the front steps, making them into what are sometimes referred to as bleachers from which one can watch the city go by), and the way people interact with museums in general. It may have been for the better (certainly Hoving's blockbusters got people into the museum more enthusiastically than they had been before), but it also remains controversial -- he thought that there was "a difference between an art exhibition and a scholarly tome." But the finest museum exhibitions in my opinion are those with stunning objects that I learn something from. If you compare the catalogues of the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" show and the recent Met show on "Egypt in the Old Kingdom" you see a completely different point of view, and one that I think reflects well on the Egyptian Department of the Metropolitan Museum, which was one of the sponsors of the exhibit. Or the stunning "Venice and the East" show or the dazzling Byzantine shows the Met has sponsored over the last ten years... These are what a museum like that can manage, combining both the specialness of the shows with truly fine scholarship. I think it is great that the Met celebrates its shows with the great banners on the facade of the building, another innovation by Hoving. These are the things that he did well.
He did indeed "make the mummies dance" and enlivened the whole museum world. He did some of it by making some very serious errors in judgement. But his is a life that made an impact on the world, and his great love of art and enthusiasm for sharing that with the broader public and bringing people into the museum world made his a life worth celebrating on this day, the day after his death at age 73.