With Choice of New Director, the Met Gets a Scholar and a Showman

To renovate and expand a stately museum in Germany, Max Hollein, who last week was named the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, set out to make a splash — in more ways than one.

First he solicited donations from private foundations and wealthy individuals, which is unusual in Germany, where museums are mostly funded by the government.

But his plans for the Städel Museum in Frankfurt were far-reaching and expensive. So Hollein sought support from the city at large — by selling, among other things, bright yellow rubber boots, which he wore rain or shine. He persuaded the mayor and a soccer team to wear the boots, too.

He even enlisted schoolchildren in his grass-roots fundraising efforts by selling their paintings at auction — all of which brought in more than $6 million in small donations.

Despite the skeptics, Hollein’s unorthodox showmanship paid off. He raised the museum’s public profile — not to mention his own — as well as the $69 million needed for the building project.

“Max Hollein set benchmarks in terms of mobilizing citizens for culture and museums,” said Felix Semmelroth, the city’s former cultural affairs director. “He left deep, deep traces in the city.”

This summer, Hollein, 48, will leave his current job as head of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to become the Met’s 10th director. He arrives in New York as the museum is trying to move past a period of financial struggle and a controversial new mandatory admission fee for non-New Yorkers. He will also be tasked with helping to determine the fate of the Met Breuer, which the Met has rented until 2023, as well as a proposed renovation of the Fifth Avenue flagship’s galleries for contemporary and modern art, which was put on the back burner last year.

Hollein may at first seem a figure of continuity in the mold of his two European predecessors, British-born Thomas P. Campbell and French aristocrat Philippe de Montebello. He was born in Vienna, studied early Flemish painting in his youth and has spent his entire career in museums, becoming director of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt at the age of 31.

He speaks with a Germanic accent — occasionally searching for an English word — favors classic suits and thickly woven ties, and is, to the consternation of some, another white man in a position that has been filled exclusively from those ranks. “I’m sure he is more than qualified,” painter Joanne Greenbaum told The Guardian, “but it’s just the same old status quo.”

Yet for all Hollein’s Old World qualities, he has also demonstrated a modern sensibility and individualist streak that promises to disrupt some of the Met’s traditional ways. He holds a master’s degree in business administration alongside one in art history, and he learned at the knee of Thomas Krens, the former Guggenheim director who franchised that New York museum to Bilbao, Berlin and Las Vegas and raised hackles for mounting shows of Giorgio Armani suits and Harley Davidson motorcycles.

In addition, more than any director of the Met before him, Hollein lives in the world of modern and contemporary art. He has curated numerous influential shows of living artists — from Jeff Koons in 2012 to Julian Schnabel, which opens at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco this week — and can be found on some nights at electronic music gigs in San Francisco warehouses or the wildly popular Berlin nightclub Berghain.

Hollein has also made it clear, both in Germany and in San Francisco, that the line between art and commerce needn’t be so stark. One of his first major curatorial efforts was the 2002 show “Shopping,” at the Schirn, which re-examined the history of modern art — from dada to pop to more recent experiments — through the lens of commodities and consumer capitalism.

Not content to stay inside the gallery, Hollein struck a deal with a large Frankfurt department store to paper its windows with a huge mural by Barbara Kruger critiquing the satisfactions of shopping. The mural said: “You want it/You buy it/You forget it.” The store still got the prestige of art — and the attention surrounding the show.

“You fulfill your programmatic ideas and then you do everything you can to find the funding to make that happen,” Hollein said in an interview at the Met.

This ability to strike a balance between art and business was a skill Hollein learned from Krens at the Guggenheim.

Hollein met Krens through his father, prominent postmodern architect Hans Hollein, whom the Guggenheim had tapped for a branch in Salzburg that ultimately never materialized.

“You became part of the family,” Krens said. “We had a close relationship.” Growing up in a creative household (his mother Helene was a fashion designer), Hollein became conversant in the art world and interacted with leading figures like Joseph Beuys and Claes Oldenburg. When Andy Warhol went to Vienna in the 1980s for a show of his late large-scale silk-screens, 12-year-old Max got the artist to sign every single page of Warhol’s exhibition catalog.

“Contemporary artists for other students were these out-of-this-world figures,” Hollein said. “For me, it was a friends and family background.”

When Max had to do a report on an artist at school, other students chose subjects like van Gogh and Monet; Hollein said he chose Naum Gabo, the Russian avant-garde sculptor.

“My parents would have loved me to be an artist,” he added, “but I had no talent for that or inclination.”

Hollein’s sister, Lilli Hollein, the director of Vienna Design Week, said her brother’s business instincts were apparent early on.

“He once developed a game that had an economic background,” she said. “It was played with farm animals and people, and you had to buy cattle and stuff and then sell it.”

At the University of Vienna he studied under Konrad Oberhuber, an eminent scholar of drawings, and Hermann Fillitz, who directed Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum — but also, “as a revolution against my parents,” studied business.

When Max was 21, he came to New York to work as an intern at the Guggenheim, and Krens invited him to return for a job after completing his education. He ultimately became Krens’ chief of staff and executive assistant, working closely on projects like the Guggenheim branch designed by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain.

“The reason that Max is so multifaceted and has had so many great opportunities in life has a lot to do with Tom Krens,” said Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s Americas division and a former director of the Guggenheim, who overlapped with Hollein. “Tom gave Max opportunities — he was building museums, he was thinking about technology and he told Max to think big.”

After 5 1/2 years at the Guggenheim, Hollein told Krens, “I have to leave here because I risk becoming a copy of you.”

What he took from Krens, Hollein said, was that he could push an ambitious agenda until the pieces fell into place and naysayers came around.

“One must not forget the success of Bilbao,” Hollein said, by way of example. “Two years before it opened there were large amounts of people who thought it would be a huge failure.”

Returning to Europe, Hollein imported the strategies and techniques he’d learned in New York.

“He has this mixture of the European and the American know-how, and that’s a very rare thing,” said Renée Price, the director of the Neue Galerie and a fellow Vienna native.

In 2001, after impressing Frankfurt’s mayor, Petra Roth, at a dinner in New York, Hollein was named director of that city’s Schirn Kunsthalle, a noncollecting institution with such low attendance that local politicians were arguing for its closure.

Hollein quickly whipped it into shape and was savvy about sponsorships, getting private corporations to help pay for exhibitions of Yves Klein and Pablo Picasso.

Attendance surged, and hipsters in Berlin began to take note of the upheaval underway in sleepy, big-money Frankfurt. By 2010, the weekly newspaper Die Zeit had called the Schirn “the most exciting exhibition hall in Germany.”

Hollein was soon invited by trustees to take the director’s post at the Städel foundation, a more venerable institution and home to one of Germany’s best collections of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque painting. He agreed to take the post, as well as the directorship of the neighboring Liebieghaus sculpture museum, under a surprising condition: that he keep the Schirn as well.

This struck some as a power grab, and in Germany, a country whose citizens stick their academic titles on every surface, Hollein’s lack of a doctorate in art history caused additional concern.

Eventually, Hollein’s efforts began to speak for themselves. At the Städel, he helped expand the collection to include 20th- and 21st-century art by brokering unusual long-term loans with two German banks — Deutsche Bank and DZ Bank AG — that allowed the museum to retain the works in perpetuity.

Exhibitions of Cranach, Botticelli and Monet attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors. An ambitious digital program — including art history video lectures in German and English — brought international attention to what was once a museum of only regional influence. And at both museums, Hollein indulged his abiding passion for electronic music. At the Schirn, he backed exhibitions featuring experimental composers like Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda; at the Städel, during a 2012 exhibition of Romantic and symbolist painting, he invited the public to dance until 2 a.m. to DJs from the Berlin nightclub circuit.

Hollein’s progress gained attention on the other side of the Rhine. In 2013, he emerged as the odds-on favorite to become director of France’s leading modern art museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris.

“Max, in Frankfurt, had been committed to very strong temporary exhibitions — blockbuster shows as well as more scholarly, researched, niche shows,” said Alain Seban, who was the Pompidou’s president from 2007 to 2015. He praised Hollein’s “capability to make the whole curatorial team participate in an exhibition strategy for the museum. And perhaps, considering the current situation of the Met, it’s something that he might have to do there as well.”

Seban would continue to hold the top job — a situation that closely parallels Hollein’s new arrangement at the Met, where he will report to Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive.

Yet leaks to the French press damaged his Pompidou candidacy, particularly reports that his requested salary was three times higher than expected. Hollein withdrew before the final selection. (The job went to Bernard Blistène, a Pompidou veteran.)

In his Met interview, Hollein said he felt that the French government couldn’t give him the freedom he needed to make significant strides.

“I draw a lot of energy where I feel I can move the institution forward,” he said, adding: “It clearly was not the money.”

Some people in the art world were surprised to see Hollein take the job in San Francisco, in part because of its powerful board president, Diane B. Wilsey, who has a reputation for being loath to relinquish control of the Fine Arts Museums.

Wilsey, 74, ceded the chief executive title after the museums paid a $2 million settlement to a former high-ranking executive who said Wilsey had her ousted for revealing alleged museum misspending.

But both Hollein and Wilsey said they have had a very productive working relationship.

“He pushes the staff, but they like it,” Wilsey said in a telephone interview. “They’re energized by his energy and intelligence and ambitions.” Indeed, Hollein managed to make an impact during his short tenure at the museum, balancing the budget and initiating shows like “Contemporary Muslim Fashions,” which is set to open in September. (Breitbart News Daily questioned whether it was “a celebration of subjugation.”)

“Fine Arts Museums have for some while now not generally generated their own special exhibitions — one of the marks of success for curators,” said Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Max really had begun to turn that around. I think that was a point of pride for him.”

Still to be seen is whether Hollein, accustomed to being the guy in charge, chafes under having to report to Weiss and how the two will come to distinguish their lines of authority.

“The definition of the role is, on the one hand, fairly clearly outlined,” Hollein said. “But it’s also ambiguous on purpose, because we really see this as a partnership moving forward.”