Tut and Tiffany’s

This morning’s New York Times has an appreciation of Thomas
Hoving, who directed the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the
period when the blockbuster exhibition was invented to bring
people into museums who formerly wouldn’t have know they wanted
to go.

In yesterday’s obituary,
the Times reported that when Hoving wanted to go to graduate
school in art history, his father refused to pay for it, so he
had to get a fellowship.

This morning’s piece adds to that story:

…the son of Walter Hoving, the legendary head of Tiffany’s, Mr. Hoving always tried to live up to his father, for whom a career in art had seemed small and beside the point. J. Carter Brown, former head of the National Gallery in Washington, and Mr. Hoving’s prime rival in the impresario game, once told me, touchingly, that Mr. Hoving gathered the receipts from the ‘Tut’ show’s gift shop every evening to show to his father.