Museums: A Temple on Fifth Avenue

All museum directors thrive on a mixture of acquisitiveness and showmanship. In his first month as director of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum former New York Parks Commissioner Thomas P. F. Hoving, 36, has put his theatrical talents to good use. To get New Yorkers to take a fresh view of the Met's treasures, he displayed some 600 of them, ranging from the silver portrait of a 4th century Sassanian king to Marie Antoinette's doghouse, under the title "In the Presence of Kings." The array drew 62,000 visitors to the museum on a recent...

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