page_title: Thomas Hoving
section_title: Career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Hoving / Career / Career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
caption_attribution_description: The Cloisters Cross, 12th century English Walrus ivory; 22 5/8 x 14 1/4 in. (57.5 x 36.2 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1963 (63.12) View at the Metropolitan Museum of Art website Wikipedia Loves Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art This photo of item # 63.12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was contributed under the team name "shooting_brooklyn" as part of the Wikipedia Loves Art project in February 2009. Metropolitan Museum of Art The original photograph on Flickr was taken by shooting brooklyn—please add a comment to the original Flickr page whenever a use has been made on Wikipedia or another project. Project galleries on Flickr: this institution, this team
context_page_description: Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving was an American museum executive and consultant and the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
context_section_description: His tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was characterized by his distinctive approach to expanding the Met's collections. Rather than build more comprehensive holdings of relatively modest works, he pursued a smaller number of what he termed "world-class" pieces, including the Euphronios krater depicting the death of Sarpedon (returned to Italy in 2008), Velázquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja, and the Temple of Dendur.
  The expansion of the Met during Hoving's directorship was not confined to its collections. Hoving also spearheaded a number of building projects and renovations of the Met itself, from a controversial expansion of its galleries into Central Park to the construction of its underground parking garage.
  Two of the building's most characteristic features—the huge exterior banners announcing current shows, and the broad plaza and steps leading from Fifth Avenue to the Met's entryway—are products of Hoving's tenure. At one point, he even floated a plan to remove the Met's "great staircase" leading from the central lobby to the second-floor galleries. That particular project remains unrealized.
  Hoving described the negotiations between the Metropolitan Museum, the Cairo Museum, Egypt's Organization of Antiquities, and the U.S. State Department to bring the exhibition The Treasures of Tutankhamun to the Met as "the high point of my Metropolitan career."  The exhibition was the result of years of negotiations, including plans for a variety of cross-cultural collaborations, galvanized by President Richard M. Nixon's June 1974 trip to Egypt and finalized in an accord signed by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi in October 1975. In July 1976, Hoving visited Egypt to negotiate terms of the traveling exhibition and finalize details of the Museum's collaboration with officials there.
  Hoving was the director of the controversial "Harlem On My Mind" exhibit, curated by Allon Schoener, which garnered significant protests from local activists and artists for its exclusion of black artists, as well as for the inclusion of an anti-Semitic essay in the catalogue. Hoving apologized and included disclaimers before the essay in the catalogue, but did not remove it.
caption: Hoving wrote about his 1960s acquisition for the Met of the controversial Cloisters Cross in a book called King of the Confessors.
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