‘A crazy can-do mentality’: what made New York’s Met one of the world’s mega museums?

It has 1.5m artefacts, 6m visitors, 2,000 staff – and gets by on donations. Max Hollein, the Met’s Austrian-born boss, relives his first five years, when he faced accusations of hoarding, narco-philanthropy and male dominance

Max Hollein is sitting in his airy fifth-floor office in New York. Through one window is a view of Central Park, through another the rolling roofscape of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he has led for the past five and a half years. On his office walls are paintings by Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock. There is also a Chola sculpture from India and the stone head of an Egyptian goddess.

In other circumstances, it might seem trite to open an interview with a tour of interior decor, but this is not any old office: it is a statement of taste and philosophy on behalf of one of America’s grandest cultural institutions. “Obviously, it’s not possible to capture the entire diversity of the collection,” says the museum’s 54-year-old director. “And of course, my own background is a little bit stronger in modern contemporary work. But I wanted to make sure I had a proper reflection of the art in the Met’s holdings.”

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