Who Is Thomas Hoving, and Why Do Some Think He Has a Grudge Against L.A.’s Wealthy Museum?

On a slow week in mid-May, 1986, a tall, imposing gray-haired man made his way through the hushed galleries and sunny courtyards of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

Peering into the eyepiece of a video camera, he spent hours filming roped-off statues and display cases stocked with antiquities. As curious officials of the museum looked on, the man spoke in stage whispers into a tape recorder, describing in knowing, precise detail each exhibit before him.

For two days, Thomas P. F. Hoving, a man who was once at center stage in the art world as director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art--and is now editor of Connoisseur, a glossy arts magazine devoted to the leisure activities of the rich--stalked the halls of the Getty like an unfettered tourist, museum officials recall. Even when the filming stopped, Hoving pursued uneasy curators for more information about their precious artifacts.

The nervousness Hoving caused during his brief visit was nothing compared with what followed. In the past two years, Hoving has waged a war of words against the world’s wealthiest museum. Writing of scandals, fakes and “broken trust,” Hoving and his staff have questioned the Getty’s ethics, the authenticity of some of its most valued exhibits, the manner in which the museum acquires its prizes and the character and experience of its director, John Walsh.

Last month, Hoving accused the museum of buying a rare Greek statue dating from the 5th Century BC--a bullet-headed figure supposedly of the goddess Aphrodite--that Hoving contended had been illegally dug up and smuggled from an undisclosed Italian archeological site. Hoving himself was quoted in the International Herald Tribune as saying he had tipped off authorities. Interpol, the international police organization, and the Italian government are investigating the allegations.

Many who know Hoving and Walsh say that a series of personal and philosophical clashes between the two when Walsh worked as a curator for Hoving at the Metropolitan museum 14 years ago may play a role in the continuing rancor. But equally important may be the love-hate relationship between the American museum community and Hoving, a complicated man with a reputation for ambition and a taste for the limelight.

Ethical and legal furors have become routine events in business, politics and government. But they often have an exaggerated effect in the insular sphere of art, where objective standards are rare and reputation is all. Although he has tweaked other museums for a variety of misdeeds, Hoving’s repeated stings at the image-conscious Getty have left museum directors, art dealers and collectors divided over whether he is accurately exposing the flaws of a powerful museum, or is simply settling old scores.

“To judge his motivations, you would have to have total disclosure under hypnosis,” said Dietrich von Bothmer, chairman of the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan who has known Hoving for nearly three decades. “I’m not sure that Tom himself could tell you why he is doing what he does.”

Though Hoving has been quick to publicize his latest allegations--a full report on them is scheduled for his magazine’s October issue--he repeatedly refused requests by The Times for an interview. Walsh, too, declined to respond specifically to Hoving’s charges, agreeing only to generally discuss the museum’s situation.

Even colleagues in the museum world are reluctant to speak openly of the tangle between the Getty and Hoving. “It’s very simple,” said the director of one California museum. “The Getty is very powerful and very rich, and Tom Hoving can always decide to find himself a new target. The last place I want to be is caught in their cross fire.”

For all its clout, the Getty has seemed on the defensive recently, its officials privately rattled by Hoving’s broadsides but publicly unwilling “to respond because it might give him credibility,” as one official said.

On a recent vacation in New York’s Adirondacks, John Walsh found himself so besieged by calls from the Italian press--after Hoving’s first allegations about the Aphrodite--that he had to borrow a fax machine from a vacationing neighbor to reply.

“It’s part of the price of the job,” Walsh, 50, says wearily. Puffing on a cigar, Walsh, an owlish man with a slightly rumpled look, chooses his words carefully, almost painfully. On top of an antique oak bureau in his Malibu office he keeps a row of paper predictions saved from Chinese fortune cookies. One reads: “Everything is not yet lost.” Another: “Soon you will be sitting on top of the world.”

“My impression is that a lot of people watch big institutions like the Getty the way they watch cars in Indianapolis,” Walsh says. “Not just to see how fast they go, but also how hard they hit the wall.”

It is as close as he will come to a public utterance on Hoving, his former boss.

Hoving has been less vague. In a 1987 column in Connoisseur written under the headline, “The Getty Scandals (Part One),” he charged the museum with “overweening opportunism, shoddy management, duplicity, fear, stupidity and warped values.”

During his 1986 visit to the Getty, Hoving tipped his hand about what was to come. In the final hour of his two-day tour, he stunned curators with the pronouncement that one of the museum’s recent acquisitions, a Greek kouros, a life-size statue of a plaited-haired naked youth, was a fake.

In the months after his visit, Hoving and his writers did not let up on the Getty. They exposed the case of Jiri Frel, the museum’s former curator of antiquities, a Czechoslovakian scholar who had quietly been removed for inflating the appraisals of artworks--allowing donors to claim exaggerated tax deductions.

Then the magazine questioned the authenticity of the kouros and the 1985 purchase of a painting by 15th-Century Flemish master Dierc Bouts--both of which have been defended by independent experts but whose authenticity is still debated. Hoving also criticized Walsh for not bidding aggressively for various masterpieces, saying that “such an attitude leads to mediocrity.”

Even passionate supporters of the Getty are hard-pressed to argue that Hoving’s attacks have had no basis in truth. They acknowledge that Connoisseur was on target in bringing the Frel matter to light. But many American museum officials add that they might have tried to keep the case quiet, too.

“Hoving was on target in the Frel case, but he took it too far,” said the director of a major East Coast museum. “He made it out as if the Getty engaged in a big cover-up and committed all kinds of other questionable stuff. As far as I can see, they did what any of us would have done--quietly remove a liability.”

Some museum officials suggest that Connoisseur serves as a healthy deterrent to the Getty, an institution whose $2.8-billion endowment could allow it, in the words of one museum director, to make “as many friends as it wants.”

“They’re big guys and they should be able to take it,” said James Pilgrim, former deputy director at the Metropolitan.

But there are many in the art world who worry that Hoving has gone well beyond the role of vigilant watchdog. “I think it’s pretty obvious he’s out to get the Getty,” said Richard Feigen, a New York art dealer, well-known among collectors, who specializes in expensive artworks.

Even among those who admire Hoving, there are a few voices who worry that his campaign against the Getty has grown rigid and one-sided. “The unfortunate thing is the impression left that there’s some malfeasance or ineptitude without putting what the Getty does in a larger context,” Pilgrim said. “If there has been a pattern of mistakes, do they indicate irresponsibility? So far, they haven’t given that impression.”

On the rain-swept afternoon of May, 9, 1972, about 100 people formed a picket line near the steps leading up to the entrance of New York’s Metropolitan museum. Toting umbrellas and signs that read “Save Our Staff,” the marchers protested a decision earlier that week by Met director Thomas Hoving to lay off 104 curators and other workers.

Among the marchers was the museum’s associate curator for European paintings, John Walsh.

In his office, Hoving was furious. A former aide who speaks admiringly of Hoving recalls him pacing up and down, cursing. “He was mad as hell, saying things like, ‘Bastards! Don’t they know what they’re doing?’ and ‘John Walsh is leading them! What am I going to do about him?’ ” the assistant said.

Relations between Hoving and Walsh were fated to become strained, former colleagues say. Walsh, a Yale graduate whose expertise was in 17th-Century Dutch and Flemish painters, joined the Met in 1968. He became known as a stickler for operating by the book.

“He was honest, with incredible integrity,” said Charles Moffett, now senior curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “Of all the people I worked for, John brought the greatest harmony and sense of good will to projects we worked on. He did things aboveboard with a minimum of back-stabbing and bickering.”

Hoving inspired his own brand of loyalty. “He was the most exciting person in the world to work for,” Moffett said. “He was imaginative, dynamic, believed that nothing succeeds like success. The Met was setting standards among American museums in those days. Hoving made it the flagship institution.”

By the early 1970s, the two men clashed frequently. The first major source of contention was Hoving’s 1971 decision to sell off--”deaccession”--several important art works in order to pay $5.5 million for “Juan de Pareja,” an acknowledged masterpiece by 17th-Century Spanish painter Diego Velazquez.

The following year came staff layoffs. In both cases, friends say, Walsh protested. “John was concerned that values were getting distorted,” said Ann Poulet, who worked in the Met’s paintings department and is now curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Hoving responded by calling Walsh’s reaction “immature,” according to friends of Walsh. In Hoving’s eyes, said a former assistant to Hoving, Walsh’s view of the Met’s internal affairs was a “storybook reality.” “You’ll see what it’s like when you become a director someday,” Hoving reportedly once told Walsh.

Another Met assistant said that Hoving was annoyed by Walsh’s constant harping on ethics. “John is a careful talker who sometimes sounds as if he’s instructing you,” the assistant said. “I think that got to Tom.”

The final straw came in 1975, when Hoving decided to loan 100 of the Metropolitan’s most famous works of art to the Soviet Union in return for an exhibition of Soviet gold objects. Walsh and Anthony Clark, who was chairman of the museum’s European paintings department, opposed the shipment of several fragile wood-panel paintings. When the two men learned that the paintings had already been shipped, they submitted their resignations.

Clark made public his resignation letter, but Walsh kept quiet, taking a job as art history professor at Columbia University, a step down for a museum man. Two years later, he was hired as curator of paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Walsh intimates say that in the years after he left the Met, he heard nothing from Thomas Hoving until he was chosen director of the Getty Museum in 1983.

A museum search committee had seriously considered three candidates for that post, members of the panel said. That list did not include Hoving.

Thomas Hoving has not been shy about promoting his own credentials as a connoisseur. At 57, he has lived a public life, crafting an image for himself as an expert’s expert.

A lean, animated man with the aquiline nose and Old World features of an Ingmar Bergman character, Hoving relishes his art world credentials. Shortly after he was hired in 1982 by the Hearst Corp. as editor of Connoisseur, Hoving posed for advertisements for the magazine, staring over his glasses at objets d’art like a patrician Hamlet examining the skull of Yorick.

Admirers speak glowingly of Hoving’s “eye,” the art world’s term for the almost-mystical ability to scrutinize a work of art, separating the mediocre from the truly exceptional. Each month, Hoving writes an opinion column he calls “My Eye,” ranging over a variety of topics. In one column, he railed against New York’s slums; in another, Hoving accused the Getty of having “sullied its own reputation and . . . the reputation of all other museums in America.” The son of a department store executive, Hoving was graduated from Princeton with a degree in art history. Steeped in the study of obscure medieval ivory carvings, he became a curator at New York’s Metropolitan museum, rising rapidly in its ranks.

From 1967-77, Hoving directed the Metropolitan, a post that placed him at the center of the art world. He brashly acquired new masterpieces, produced popular blockbuster exhibitions and relentlessly courted favorable press notices, amusing curators by telling them that his middle initials stood for “publicity forever.” Eventually, good publicity turned to bad. Hoving was criticized by the New York press for a number of policy decisions--in a relationship that ironically foreshadowed his magazine’s later campaign against the Getty Museum. After 10 years at the Met, saying it was enough time in one post, he resigned.

Years later, he wrote a book about his early years as a curator, describing his pursuit of a historic English relic, the Bury St. Edmonds cross, and liberally lacing the narrative with descriptions of internal politics at the Met. The book so enraged former colleagues, who claimed that Hoving twisted conversations and distorted facts (“He built on kernels of truth and then threw in a lot of exaggeration,” said William Wixom, director of the Met’s Medieval department and the Cloisters), that the Met refused to sell the book in its gift store.

When the Met years were done, Hoving tried his hand at a number of projects, then signed on as a television correspondent for ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine. Despite a few cultural reports, Hoving spent most of his six years with “20/20” interviewing such celebrities as Wayne Newton and Liberace before abandoning television for a job more suited to a connoisseur’s fancy.

In a 1982 issue of Connoisser, Hoving offered his credo: “I feel that one does not have to be rich to be a connoisseur. . . . The key, rather, is an informed passion for things of enduring quality.”

Even critics were impressed by Hoving’s transformation of Connoisseur, then a wheezy London-based chronicle of decorative arts. He moved the magazine to New York, shrunk its size and introduced high-gloss photographs. His biggest change was to discard the magazine’s dry treatises on 18th-Century satinwood bookcases and Queen Anne cabinets in favor of investigative articles on art and slick subjects like Georgio Armani, salmon fishing in Iceland and Louisiana’s zydeco music.

Circulation reportedly has improved, but to many in the art world, Connoisseur’s new-found modern image is still no substitute for scholarship. “It is a nice magazine for rich dentists and doctors who want to give the appearance of having culture,” said Carmen Gomez-Moreno, a former Met curator.

Hoving is an oddity among magazine editors, a self-professed sleuth who works out of his apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. He frequently travels to report his own stories, equipped with high-tech gadgetry.

Some former museum colleagues take the telephone warily when Hoving calls. Stories abound of pleasant conversations that turned into interrogations. The director of a West Coast museum described one such episode a year ago:

“He called on the pretense that he was doing a big piece on some antiquities we had just bought,” the director said. “The whole thing started out in a palsy-walsy way. Then, he gets dramatic. He says, ‘I’ve got big news for you,’ and proceeds to tell me that we bought a bunch of fakes. I wanted to prove him wrong, of course, so I had them tested. He turned out to be right. It leaves a sour taste in your mouth, but we all play in the big leagues, right? We’re supposed to take it.”

Hoving has been known to appear suddenly at former colleagues’ museums, demanding tours. “He will show up like an inspector general in the army,” says the Met’s Von Bothmer with a chuckle. “You are nervous that all the labels are on right.”

Colleagues who have watched and worked with Hoving remain fascinated. But some have begun to talk of him in the past tense. “His opinion really don’t matter much anymore,” said Hilton Kramer, former art critic for the New York Times and now editor of the journal New Criterion. “He was important once, but he has moved on to other things.”

August was a difficult month inside the Getty’s Roman-replica villa in Malibu. The allegations about the Aphrodite statue brought police inquiries. The Italian government had to be dealt with delicately. Archeologists accused the museum of closing its eyes to the statue’s questionable pedigree.

By the end of the month, Hoving had not produced a smoking gun in the Aphrodite matter. But he was promising more revelations in future issues of Connoisseur. And, as an immediate result of the controversy, the Getty publicly admitted that several pieces of marble statuary on loan from a private collector fit a description given by Italian authorities of works stolen a decade ago from an archeological site in Morgantina, Sicily.

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, Hoving claimed that the Getty had put “blinders on,” failing to consult “knowledgeable people who know the smuggling networks, to find out if the acquisition is likely to become an embarrassment.”

During his tenure at the Met, Hoving weathered his own acquisition furors. In the most famous, the Met was accused of approving the purchase of the Euphronious kra ter , an ancient vase that Metropolitan officials said was bought legitimately from a dealer in Switzerland. The New York Times reported that the vase was in fact smuggled from a site in the mountains north of Rome--but the Met kept the vase, eventually smoothing over damaged relations with Italy.

But a recent court case brought by the Turkish government could again embroil the Hoving years in controversy. The lawsuit, filed in July, 1987, in federal court, alleges that from 1966-70, the Metropolitan “unlawfully excavated” more than 200 artifacts including gold and silver items dating from the 6th Century BC, from burial mounds in Turkey.

The Metropolitan has asked the federal judge in the case to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds that a statue of limitations has run out on Turkey’s right to sue, and that the Turkish government unreasonably delayed its demand to have the artifacts returned.

If the lawsuit is brought to trial, lawyers for the Turkish government noted dryly in a 51-page brief, “the most relevant testimony” would come from past and present Metropolitan officials.

Among the officials, the lawyers noted, is “Thomas Hoving, who became director of the museum in December, 1966, and is still living.”