Flaking Image: The Director Reviewed

By ROBERT HUGHES

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BIG STICK, by Thomas P.F. Hoving (1931-). A standing figure, slightly over lifesize, wearing a purple toga with a capital S (for Superman) on the chest, in red, now faded. The left hand points to a Master Plan. Despite reports in the New York Times, radiographic examination reveals no trace of horns or pointed tail in the under painting. In the background, above a landscape with kiosks and parking lots thought to represent Central Park, various allegorical groups symbolize the Master's career.

The painting was begun in 1966, when Hoving rose from commissioner of parks to director of the museum. But some flaking has appeared in the image. The museum depicted below him has developed a crack, which appears to go right through its support. Two groups in the upper left, "The Approbation of the Grateful Masses" and "The Invocation of Camelot" are abraded and blistered beyond repair. Another, "Hoving Accepting the Love of His Curators," has almost vanished. Close analysis suggests that the figures previously supposed to represent "The Purification of the Collections" are in fact a recondite allegory of "Charity to Dealers." The chiaroscuro here is very deep. Condition of other areas, especially "The Domination of the Trustees" (far right), is stable. Not deaccessioned. On interim loan to Caribbean.

So the catalogue entry might go. In the seven years of his directorship, Thomas Hoving's image has described a remarkable parabola. He began with a lot: youth (at 35, the youngest director in the Met's history), vast enthusiasm, intelligence, a growing reputation as a medievalist and solid backing from the WASP establishment. He was, to resurrect a headline from his Central Park days, A HAPPENING CALLED HOVING, the epitome of New Frontier bounce, flair and pragmatic cheek. Today, he is besieged in the museum whose physical shape, and concomitant policies, he has irrevocably defined and changed.

Evidently, Hoving's style grates on the art world today; the euphoria of the '60s is over, and the acceptable tone is more cautious. Great museums--and the Met is one of the world's greatest --are, and should be, conservative organisms. They grow slowly like coral reefs, each polyp a work of art, some submerged, and others exposed as the tides of taste fluctuate. They represent a store of evidence about the past that is the indispensable raw material of cultural history. Above all, they are about interaction -- between, among other things, "major" and "minor" works of art. If Hoving's commitment to a masterpiece culture is so extreme in its elitism that in the name of "quality," he must sell a fine Rousseau, the very notion of quality in art is imperiled.

Quality is not an objective property of art works. It is a function of taste. And taste changes. Directors add their propositions to the long consensus a museum represents by buying, not by selling. A director must be either very lucky or a genius to break that consensus and create a new one.

Hoving is neither. His flair, intelligence and energy are plain to see, as is his fascination with plots and grand gestures. But his actions proclaim a man who thinks that the Met is a fief. When euphoric, Hoving will say that the museum belongs to all the people of New York -- and mean it. When defensive, he adduces the strictly legal truth that it is a private corporation whose contents belong to the trustees and no one else -- and means that too. Both and neither are right; in the end it is the public that pays for tax-deductible gifts to the Met. But what guarantees of principle are left, after the recent sales, to safeguard the Met's collection from the ravages of expedience? That is what the recent fuss has been about and it is the issue on which reassurance is sorely needed.

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