Max Hollein is helping steer the Metropolitan Museum of Art into the future by encouraging “a multicultural perspective that fosters multiple voices”
Hollein has made a study of being museum director, leading the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “You need to juggle your options as long as possible until you see this window of opportunity,” he says. “You have to be a gambler and a player.”As Max Hollein, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looks west out of his office toward Central Park, he can see skylights above the European paintings galleries.
That amount—for a change many people will never even notice, and that could build an entire museum in some parts of the world—gives a sense of the scale of the transformation currently happening at the Met, where the high-energy Hollein has been director since August 2018. “We are reconfiguring about a quarter of the museum,” he says.