Happening at the Met

Eventually it even became a cocktail-party game. Who would--and could--become the new director of the nation's richest, most prestigious art museum, New York's Metropolitan? Since the death of James Rorimer last May, the Met, whose attendance soared under his eleven-year tenure to the largest in the U.S. (7,000,000 visitors a year), has lacked a leader. The names bandied about to replace Rorimer were a Who's Who of American and foreign museum directors. The actual name, when it leaked out a few days before this week's official announcement, was the most highly unexpected expected appointment imaginable.

It was Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving. He is only 35, and his rocketlike rise has come with such rapidity that it seemed that each new stage ignited before the previous one had burned out. No sooner had Director Rorimer read Hoving's graduate paper on Rome's Farnese gallery in 1959 than he hired him as a curatorial assistant to the Metropolitan. In a triumph of scholarship and taste, he personally deduced the origin of the rare Bury Saint Edmunds cross (TIME, June 19, 1964), purchased by the Met for $500,000. The young art historian rose to become curator of the Cloisters, the Met's medieval annex and Rorimer's former bailiwick. But before Hoving had the opportunity to effect great changes, he was tapped by New York's newly elected Mayor Lindsay, who appointed him Commissioner of Parks. Now, only one month after he was named New York's cultural czar and put in charge of all the city's recreational and cultural affairs, Hoving has been awarded the nation's top museum post (salary: about $50,000).

A Little Bit Swinging. Hoving is the personification of success. Son of the board chairman of Tiffany's, he pursued an impeccable education. Although he was bounced from two private schools, he nevertheless managed to acquire a diploma from Hotchkiss, a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Princeton, with a three-year stint as a Marine Corps lieutenant in between to sober him up. The aristocratic, 6-ft. 3-in. Hoving (who often beats traffic by buzzing around town on his motorcycle) is still brash enough to have called Robert Moses' World's Fair Unisphere "a great big heavy clunk" and battled A. & P. Millionaire Huntington Hartford over his desire to encroach on Central Park with a cafe restaurant.

Hoving believed that parks are useless unless they are filled with people. To entice visitors into what most New Yorkers considered wastelands of crime-ridden greenery, Hoving turned showman, scheduled a round of events, each "a little bit swinging." He brought in a computer to mate girls and boys in Bryant Park, proffered 50 beer at band concerts, sponsored miniskirted fashion shows, got 75,000 people to sit on the grass and listen to the New York Philharmonic at night, and flooded Central Park on Sundays with bicyclists by banning cars. His "happenings" in the park inveigled hundreds to paint murals on canvas, fly kites for prizes and watch for meteor showers.

Scrambling for Rembrandts. "There was a time when the Met had the bomb," Hoving said recently. "It dominated the art world. But no longer. Now Los Angeles, Cleveland and soon even Fort Worth will have the bomb." Added to proliferating museums with enough wealth to outbid even the Met is the threat from the largely Government-financed Smithsonian in Washington, which recently acquired the gigantic Hirshhorn collection of contemporary art.

But if the Met is challenged without, it is even more challenged within. Hoving will have to rule over curators who treat their departments like private dukedoms, preside over a 600-man museum staff that must brace itself for weekend throngs upwards of 60,000. Expansion plans call for a new $5,000,000 American wing. And if Tom Hoving has his way, there will be a scramble for any Rembrandts loose on the market and, who knows, even watusiing amongst the Egyptian mummies.

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