Schlockmeister

By ROBERT HUGHES

KING OF THE CONFESSORS

by Thomas Moving

Simon & Schuster; 365 pages; $16.95

"Success, adulation--notice--are my primary wishes. Can I be serious?"

Well, dear diary, yes and no. The young man pondering his future, one night in 1960, was an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City whose name was Thomas P.F. Moving.

Before he took up a third career interviewing auctioneers, celebrities and mechanical sharks as a "cultural correspondent" for ABC, Hoving had two others:

first as a scholar of medieval art, and second as director of the Met from 1967 to 1978. The feat that did most to lift him from the curatorial ruck and make him papabile was a work of art he acquired for the Cloisters in 1963. The Bury St. Edmunds Cross, a 12th century English ivory carving, was and still is one of the finest medieval objects in America. It is unsettling as well, since much of its complicated biblical and patristic symbolism insists that the Jews were the killers of Christ and thus an accursed people, so detestable that the usual inscription over the crucified Savior's head, "King of the Jews," appears as "King of the Confessors." If ever one needed proof that a work of art can be both aesthetically ravishing and morally vile, the cross supplies it.

It took Hoving three years of plotting and research to authenticate the ivory cross, establish its background, and pry it out of the hands of its owner, a shady and cunning Yugoslav named Topic Mimara.

It was probably war loot, and Topic Mimara kept it (where else?) in a Zurich bank vault, while he lived (where else?) in Tangier. It was stored with a mass of fakes and rubbish that he also wanted to sell to the Met. It was very expensive at $600,000, an unheard-of price for a medieval object 20 years ago. But as Hoving reasoned, with the delicate sense of public relations that would mark his career at the Met, "Medieval art might be accorded a certain cachet by the expenditure of a stratospheric sum." Other museums, especially British ones, were after the cross, but the Met got it.

It is a fairly intriguing story, though Hoving told it more concisely in The Chase, the Capture, part of a book on collecting policy issued by the Met six years ago. Stretched to this length, it becomes prolix. Le style c'est l'homme, and Hoving's style reflects the character he showed when he was in power at the museum--windy, lapel-grabbing and insincerely populist. The tone is struck in the first sentence: "The vast halls of the Metropolitan . . . were awesomely still." All halls, tomes, sums of money and issues at stake tend to be "vast." Most stillnesses, works of art, asking prices and responsibilities are "awesome." The only sound on the hushed peaks of High Art is the labored twanging of Hoving's exclamation points. He sounds like a comic-strip parody of Winckelmann. "My tree!" he erupts on seeing the cross in the bank.

"Uncanny. Incomparable! The cross is incomparable. I have to have this thing. I must get it! I have to possess this magnificent cross. My God, I have to make this thing mine! How? But how?" End of chapter. All this swooning and bellowing drowns the narrative. It is the prose equivalent of those blockbuster shows that Hoving, as museum director, was so keen on mounting.

What most excites the author's awe and rapture, apart from the melodrama of culture, is himself. "You astonish me," cries Harold Parsons, an old dealers' go-between with whom Hoving is having lunch in Rome. "I had conjured up a different image of Thomas Hoving, assistant curator of the Cloisters, than what I have found. I imagined you as a dour and humorless art historian--a short, fairly fat young fellow--powerfully steeped in some obscure soup of the Middle Ages. A junior James Rorimer. Now, I hope that doesn't offend you. How utterly at odds with my image is reality! Here I find myself conversing with a thin, angular individual with an aristocratic face, refreshingly articulate, seasoning his conversation with wit and sensitivity. I find it all enormously pleasing. Tell me about yourself." A tin ear for dialogue is set on each side of that aristocratic face. However, the striking thing about such passages is the utter seriousness with which Hoving serves up his fantasies of the epic self. His book has the peculiar flavor of an oldfashioned boys' adventure story: the more-than-six-foot hero striding through a labyrinth of secrets and misdirections in search of the lost Holy Grail; its discovery in a cave (albeit a cave in Zurich); the conventional and stilted writing; the defiant postures and strikings of the brow; the monotonous resolution to keep everything a quarter larger than life size lest the young reader's attention wander. Hoving's seriousness is that of the born schlockmeister. Here Judith Krantz meets Raiders of the Lost Ark; and this, one realizes, is the style that ran the greatest museum in America for ten years. If not much else, King of the Confessors gives one faith in the resilience of such institutions.

--By Robert Hughes

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