Thomas Hoving, Bold Remaker of Met in the 70s, Dies at 78 Thomas Hoving, the charismatic showman and treasure hunter whose tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977 fundamentally transformed the institution and helped usher in the era of the museum blockbuster show, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. Neal Boenzi/The New York Times Thomas Hoving with what was then a recent acquisition at the Met in 1967, his first year as director of the museum. During his 10-year tenure, he sought to make the museum a more populist institution. The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Nancy, said. One of the breed of brash, self-mythologizing leaders like Mayor Edward I. Koch who came to define New York in the 1970s, Mr. Hoving spent a whirlwind year running the city's parks before taking over the Met at a time when it was, as many thought and as he boldly told trustees, "moribund," "gray" and "dying." He became its seventh director and, at 35, its youngest. And during his tumultuous reign the museum did many things it had never done before, often for the better, sometimes for the worse. It formed a contemporary art department and displayed Pop painting alongside Poussin and David; regularly draped the now-familiar banners on its facade to advertise shows; created the enlarged front steps that have become Fifth Avenue's bleachers; paid $5.5 million for a single painting (the Velázquez masterpiece "Juan de Pareja") while quietly selling works by van Gogh, Rousseau and others to help pay for it. The museum also opened new galleries dedicated to Islamic art, organized a major reinstallation of its Egyptian wing and set in motion an expansion program that eventually resulted in a much larger American wing, a glass-walled addition for the Temple of Dendur, a wing for the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Americas, and a new southwest wing, now dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Two years into his tenure, the Met received the largest donation of art in its history, the collection of the investment banker Robert Lehman. A new $7 million pavilion to display it - functioning essentially as a museum within the museum - opened in 1975. In his establishment-rattling mission to make the art museum a more populist institution, Mr. Hoving was "probably the most influential and innovative museum official of the postwar period," Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times. Philippe de Montebello, who worked for many years under Mr. Hoving and succeeded him as director, said on Thursday: "People criticized him for his excesses, but you have to remember that it is not the timorous who climb life's peaks. He has left us with a changed museum world. Mr. Hoving helped greatly enlarge the Met's collections, often in dramatic fashion, letting few things, least of all shame, stand in his way. A rangy 6-foot-3 man with boyish, at times explosive energy, he described how he once pleaded with a dealer who knew about the medieval ivory masterpiece known as the Bury St. Edmunds cross, telling him: "I am being devoured by this cross. I want it, I need it. He outmaneuvered the Smithsonian Institution to get the crowd-pleasing Temple of Dendur and helped save an entire Prairie House by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose living room was meticulously reassembled in the American Wing. But the story of probably his greatest acquisition coup - an exquisite 2,500-year-old Greek vase adorned by the master painter Euphronios, bought in 1972 for $1 million - did not end as happily. Even before the vase, known as a krater, went on display, experts contended that it had been wrested illicitly from an Etruscan tomb near Rome. In 2006, after years of demands from the Italian government, the Met agreed to return the vessel to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other antiquities. Reputation as a Shark Mr. Hoving admitted in "Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art," his rollicking 1993 memoir about his years at the Met, that he knew that the vase, which he jokingly called the hot pot, had probably been smuggled out of Italy. But he made no apologies for his ask-questions-later approach to acquisitions, one he had formed as early as his days as a curator at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum's medieval branch in Washington Heights. "My collecting style was pure piracy, and I got a reputation as a shark," he wrote, adding that his little black book of "dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers" was bigger than anyone else's. Despite his braggadocio, Mr. Hoving, the son of a Fifth Avenue merchandising tycoon, proved to be an able administrator and budgeteer. Even during the city's fiscal crisis, when many other large cultural institutions were in the red, the museum was usually able to balance its books, and its merchandising operation grew tremendously during his years, eventually contributing more than $1 million in annual income. But Mr. Hoving tended to receive more attention for his temporary contributions to the Met than for his permanent ones. Along with J. Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington from 1969 to 1992, he was one of the architects of the blockbuster exhibition, which introduced to the Met's galleries the carnival atmosphere of a summer movie opening. Mr. Hoving defended such shows against criticism that they cheapened the museum and that they were intended solely to plump attendance and admission-fee income. "Great art should be shown with great excitement," he once said, citing an observation by a previous Met director that the museum is the "midwife of democracy." "And damn it, it is!" he said. Correction: December 19, 2009 An obituary on Dec. 11 about Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose ancestor Samuel Osgood served as postmaster general of the United States, referred imprecisely to the history of that position. While Osgood was the first postmaster general of the United States under the government created by the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was appointed postmaster general by the Continental Congress in 1775 and continued in the post for several months after the Declaration of Independence, making him the first postmaster general of the United States, according to the official history of the United States Postal Service.