Technology and Science News ABC News. LG9Xf_vgmdo/S61fdQ13dzI/AAAAAAAABkY/353voIpEXmg/s1600/walrus.gif' alt='The Full I Met The Walrus Movie ' title='The Full I Met The Walrus Movie ' />Thomas Hoving, Bold Remaker of Met in the 7. Dies at 7. 8Two years into his tenure, the Met received the largest donation of art in its history, the collection of the investment banker Robert Lehman. Sean Combs, Soundtrack Training Day. Sean Diddy Combs, AKA Puff Daddy, is the definition of a mogul. Starting his career as the director of AR at Uptown Records, he. We have told you not to stare at the Sun today. We have told you to use safety glasses. We have tried so very hard, and we are so very tired. Smile,jpg, also known as Smile. The tale is often accompanied by a photoshopped. Feature. How Police Cracked Canadas Largest Child Pornography Ring. Inside the yearlong effort to take down a criminal organization hiding in plain sight. I Am The Walrus by The Beatles song meaning, lyric interpretation, video and chart position. A new 7 million pavilion to display it functioning essentially as a museum within the museum opened in 1. Photo. Thomas Hoving in 1. Credit. Jack ManningThe New York Times In his establishment rattling mission to make the art museum a more populist institution, Mr. Hoving was probably the most influential and innovative museum official of the postwar period, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times. Philippe de Montebello, who worked for many years under Mr. Hoving and succeeded him as director, said on Thursday People criticized him for his excesses, but you have to remember that it is not the timorous who climb lifes peaks. He has left us with a changed museum world. Mr. Hoving helped greatly enlarge the Mets collections, often in dramatic fashion, letting few things, least of all shame, stand in his way. A rangy 6 foot 3 man with boyish, at times explosive energy, he described how he once pleaded with a dealer who knew about the medieval ivory masterpiece known as the Bury St. Edmunds cross, telling him I am being devoured by this cross. I want it, I need it. He outmaneuvered the Smithsonian Institution to get the crowd pleasing Temple of Dendur and helped save an entire Prairie House by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose living room was meticulously reassembled in the American Wing. But the story of probably his greatest acquisition coup an exquisite 2,5. Greek vase adorned by the master painter Euphronios, bought in 1. Photo. Thomas Hoving with what was then a recent acquisition at the Met in 1. During his 1. 0 year tenure, he sought to make the museum a more populist institution. Credit. Neal BoenziThe New York Times Even before the vase, known as a krater, went on display, experts contended that it had been wrested illicitly from an Etruscan tomb near Rome. In 2. 00. 6, after years of demands from the Italian government, the Met agreed to return the vessel to Italy in exchange for long term loans of other antiquities. Reputation as a SharkMr. Hoving admitted in Making the Mummies Dance Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his rollicking 1. Met, that he knew that the vase, which he jokingly called the hot pot, had probably been smuggled out of Italy. But he made no apologies for his ask questions later approach to acquisitions, one he had formed as early as his days as a curator at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museums medieval branch in Washington Heights. My collecting style was pure piracy, and I got a reputation as a shark, he wrote, adding that his little black book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers was bigger than anyone elses. Despite his braggadocio, Mr. Hoving, the son of a Fifth Avenue merchandising tycoon, proved to be an able administrator and budgeteer. Even during the citys fiscal crisis, when many other large cultural institutions were in the red, the museum was usually able to balance its books, and its merchandising operation grew tremendously during his years, eventually contributing more than 1 million in annual income. But Mr. Hoving tended to receive more attention for his temporary contributions to the Met than for his permanent ones. Along with J. Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 1. Mets galleries the carnival atmosphere of a summer movie opening. Photo. Thomas P. F. Hoving at a party in New York shortly after becoming director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1. Credit. Marty LederhandlerAssociated Press Mr. Hoving defended such shows against criticism that they cheapened the museum and that they were intended solely to plump attendance and admission fee income. Great art should be shown with great excitement, he once said, citing an observation by a previous Met director that the museum is the midwife of democracy. And damn it, it is he said. His negotiations with Egyptian authorities in 1. American tour of the treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun. During one of several visits to Egypt to cajole and twist arms, Mr. Hoving recalled, he and his assistants were left mostly alone with piles of Tut artifacts, and Mr. Hoving claimed to have wheeled around the pharaohs solid gold inner coffin himself. The exhibition arrived at the Met in December 1. Besides the Tutankhamun show, he also oversaw several highly popular and often well received exhibitions, like The Great Age of Fresco, in 1. The Year 1. 20. 0, in 1. Masterpieces of Tapestry, in 1. From the Lands of the Scythians, in 1. Hermitage and The Impressionist Epoch, which set a special exhibition attendance record the same year. Watch Free Inside Out. A Few Missteps Early in his tenure, however, he helped organize an exhibition that almost ruined his career. Harlem on My Mind, a 1. Harlem, was intended, as Mr. Hoving later wrote, to chronicle the creativity of the downtrodden blacks and at the same time encourage them to come to the museum. Photo. Mr. Hoving with a patron at a social event around 1. Met. Instead it enraged many New Yorkers, black and otherwise, who saw the show an exhibition in a major art museum that included no paintings or sculpture as paternalistic and insulting, though it did result in the discovery of James Van Der Zees important photographic work from the 1. The shows catalog included anti Semitic along with anti Irish and anti Hispanic remarks by a young black essayist, setting off protests by both blacks and Jews. Mr. Hoving apologized for the essay, saying that in approving it he wholly failed to sense the racial undertones that might be read into portions of it. In 1. Along with Mr. Montebello, a deputy at the time, Mr. Hoving cut 5. 0 paintings from a show organized with the Louvre and the Detroit Institute of Arts, French Painting 1. The Age of Revolution. Mr. Hoving said the decision was made solely to control the shows costs. But Robert Rosenblum, a leading art historian who had helped organize the show, accused the museum of removing the paintings because they were by lesser known artists, a shameful decision, he said, to sacrifice scholarship for predictable box office results. The chairman of the museums European paintings department and a curator in the department resigned in part because of the decision. Mr. Hoving later wrote he had tried to convince Mr. Rosenblum and others that there was a difference between an art exhibition and a scholarly tome. But that made them even angrier. Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving was born in New York City on Jan. Walter Hoving, a renowned merchandiser who was president of the department store Bonwit Teller and then chairman of Tiffany Company, and Mary Osgood Field Hoving, a descendant of Samuel Osgood, a postmaster general of the United States in the 1. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he grew up mostly in Manhattan. Photo. As the citys parks commissioner, in 1. Mr. Hoving was with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Petrea, in Central Park. Credit. Arthur BrowerThe New York Times As a child, he spent a considerable amount of time visiting the Met, where he gravitated to the Egyptian wing and was especially fascinated by a temple relief in which only the pharaohs lips remained clearly visible on his profile. I looked deeply into the lips of King Akhenaten, he told John Mc. Phee in a profile in The New Yorker in 1. Mr. Hovings early academic career was checkered. He was eased out of the Buckley School on the Upper East Side in the fourth grade and spent the next five years at Eaglebrook School in western Massachusetts. From there he went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he lasted only six months, leaving after an incident in which he punched a Latin teacher.