Sad News: Thomas Hoving

New York Times (Randy Kennedy)

Thomas Hoving, the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977 fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

Thomas Hoving with what was then a recent acquisition at the Met in 1967, his first year as director of the museum. During his 10-year tenure, he sought to make the museum a more populist institution.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Nancy, said.

One of the breed of brash, self-mythologizing leaders like Mayor Edward I. Koch who came to define New York in the 1970s, Mr. Hoving spent a whirlwind year running the city’s parks before taking over the Met at a time when it was, as many thought and as he boldly told trustees, “moribund,” “gray” and “dying.”

He became its seventh director and, at 35, its youngest. And during his tumultuous reign the museum did many things it had never done before, often for the better, sometimes for the worse. It formed a contemporary art department and displayed Pop painting alongside Poussin and David; regularly draped the now-familiar banners on its facade to advertise shows; created the enlarged front steps that have become Fifth Avenue’s bleachers; paid $5.5 million for a single painting (the Velázquez masterpiece “Juan de Pareja”) while quietly selling works by van Gogh, Rousseau and others to help pay for it.