Meet Max Hollein, the Metropolitan Museum’s New Director

When Max Hollein learned last March that the search for a new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was down to two people—and he was one of them—he went to see Diane B. “Dede” Wilsey, the imperial president and main patron of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he had been director for less than two years. “Take the job,” she told him. “You’re going to be chosen, and you should know that it’s a great compliment to us.”

Hollein, who as of this August is the Met’s tenth director, strikes many people as being preposterously well qualified for the position. Forty-nine years old and armed with degrees in art history and business administration, he has already directed five museums and overseen the fund-raising and building of a new wing for one of them. He’s curated shows that range from old-master art to Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons, and delivered excellent admissions. He gets along equally well with artists, curators, board members, donors, and scholars. The only downside to his appointment is that he’s not a woman: Here we are again with another white male director, and a European one at that. (Counting Max, half of the Met’s directors have been European.)

At a moment when the museum is struggling to regain its balance after a period of turmoil and the abrupt (many say unjust) ousting of the previous director, Thomas Campbell, the Met’s trustees apparently decided against breaking the mold.

The big question is how Max will cope with not being the Met’s number one. He will report to a paid president and CEO, Daniel H. Weiss. (This has been tried before, unsuccessfully, at the Met. When Philippe de Montebello became director, in 1978, he was meant to report to president and CEO William Macomber, but he refused to do so and soon established his own de facto hegemony as the top authority.) “Max likes to run things,” Dede Wilsey tells me. “He’s always way ahead of everybody in his thinking. So if he’s decided this is going to work at the Met, he’s figured out how it’s going to work.” Weiss describes his own view of leadership as “very collaborative. Max and I talked about this in great detail before his decision to come,” he says. “He will be responsible for the programming of the institution, and I of course will be supportive of him.”

Tall, friendly, confident without being overconfident, Hollein laughs easily and speaks with a German accent, often ending his sentences with “ja?,” but he wants you to know he’s Austrian, not German. His father was the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Hans Hollein, a key figure in postmodern architecture. His mother, Helene, had been a fashion designer before she married, and his younger sister, Lilli, is the director of Vienna Design Week.

“I grew up in an artistically minded environment,” he tells me at his corner table in the de Young Museum cafeteria in San Francisco. (It’s one of the two museums he runs there, along with the Legion of Honor.) But he never wanted to be an architect. “Absolutely not! I felt it would be a really impossible task to follow my father.” As a teenager, Max couldn’t understand why, if his father was so famous, the family “always had financial issues. We lived OK, but modestly, in the same apartment that my father’s mother had rented in 1930.”

Max developed a keen interest in business, and his decision to get master’s degrees in business administration as well as art history was a small rebellion against his strong-willed father, who had hoped he would become an artist. Ironically, his mother arranged for him, when he was 22 and a student at the University of Vienna, to interrupt his studies by going to New York to intern with Thomas Krens, the brilliant and mercurial director of the Guggenheim Museum. At the end of Max’s three-month, “very intense” internship, Krens told him that if he ever finished his two degrees, he would have a job: “Call me.” “I didn’t know at the time that when a New Yorker says, ‘Call me’ or ‘Let’s have lunch,’ it can also mean, ‘This conversation is over,’ ” Max says, laughing. After collecting his double diplomas in Vienna in 1995, he contacted Krens and said, “I’m ready.”

The timing was perfect. Michael Govan, who now runs the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, had recently left the Guggenheim, and Max became Krens’s chief of staff, working 24/7 on major projects like the Guggenheim Bilbao and establishing the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. “We were constantly traveling together,” he tells me. “My mother once came to visit me in New York, and I wasn’t there.” His Viennese girlfriend, Nina Schweiger, who was working toward her master’s in architecture, joined him in New York. (They were married in 1999.) She got a scholarship to work with the architect Peter Eisenman for a year, and that segued into a permanent job with architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

One of Thomas Krens’s great strengths, Max says, “was to keep the balls in the air as long as you can and wait for the window of opportunity when things can fall in place. That opportunity might not come, but you don’t compromise. That certainly resonated with me, to think big. It was the ultimate American initiation for someone just out of the university in Vienna.” After five and a half years with Krens, though, he needed to break loose. “It was clear and important for me to strike out on my own,” he says. “I felt I would risk becoming a copy of Krens, a small copy, ja?”

When he told Krens that he was leaving to become head of the Schirn in Frankfurt, a failing Kunsthalle on the verge of being shut down, Krens was “not pleased,” he remembers. “He said, ‘You’re leaving the Guggenheim in New York to go to Frankfurt?’ ” But Max wanted to have his own institution, and he wanted to be in charge. Thirty-one years old and bursting with energy, he transformed the Schirn’s moribund program with a series of thought-provoking exhibitions. “Max took what was a poor relative in town and made it into a force,” says the New Museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni. “He did it mainly with contemporary shows and ‘high concept’ thematic exhibitions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art.”

Four years later, he was offered the top job at the Städel, with its important collection of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque painting, which included being in charge of the nearby Liebieghaus Museum. He accepted it on condition that he could continue to direct the Schirn. At Liebieghaus he placed Jeff Koons’s highly provocative sculptures in dialogue with ancient works from the collection. “It was the best show I’ve ever seen of Jeff,” says Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim. “His work needs to be viewed against classical sculpture, and Max did it in a way that was really persuasive.” Under Max, the Städel’s brilliant old-master shows (Cranach, Rogier van der Weyden, Botticelli) drew record crowds, but his signal achievement was expanding a minuscule contemporary collection from some 40 works to around 1,400, and raising private funds for half of the $69 million cost of a new wing to house them. In 2012, his three museums drew more than a million visitors, and the Städel was named Museum of the Year by the German Art Critics Association.

After lunch with Max, I go to meet his wife, Nina, at a bakery in San Francisco’s Castro section. (Their three-story Victorian house is around the corner, but the movers are already at work there.) She’s an exquisite brunette, in sneakers, black fishnet stockings, and a spring coat in a linen fabric that looks like a wonderful old checkered dish towel. She switched from architecture to fashion design when she and Max left New York for Frankfurt in 2001 and decided to have children. The coat is from her first collection. “I researched utility fabrics in Austria,” she tells me, “and thought, This is way too beautiful to just be for kitchen towels and tablecloths.” She has marketed her highly original eponymous brand online and in her own Frankfurt boutique. This fall, she’ll bring out her first line of furniture.

Nina and Max were both born in Vienna; she’s two years younger. They met in a bar when they were university students, and “it very soon turned out that with Max this could be interesting for a long time.” They shared a passion for punk rock, which led in Max’s case to a still-abiding allegiance to electronic music. Two of her uncles are architects, a half generation younger than Max’s father, and her family and Max’s knew each other slightly. Both Max and Nina wanted to leave Austria. “Vienna is a superbeautiful city, but at that time it was a little sleepy and boring,” she says, “and our big dream was to go to New York.” Their three children—two boys, Loys and Hector (sixteen and fifteen), and a girl, Lucie (thirteen)—“as usual, complicated teenagers,” according to Max, were all born in Frankfurt.

The Holleins have rented a town house on the Upper East Side (a far cry from the one-room flat in Hell’s Kitchen the couple shared during the Krens era). Every summer, including this one, they spend a month with their extended families at Nina’s grandparents’ farmhouse in upper Austria. “It’s the most beautiful landscape,” Nina says, “just like The Sound of Music.” Max remembers that when he was a child, summer vacations were often aborted at the last minute because of his father’s work. “We’d have our suitcases packed and in the lobby waiting, and at the end of the day, my father would postpone our departure.” Max tries very hard not to let this happen in his family. Breakfast, weekends, hiking and biking and skiing are all family-oriented. “If you come from Austria, you’re a good skier,” Nina jokes. “Otherwise, you have to give up your passport.”

Sitting in Max’s glass-walled office at the de Young Museum during his last days in San Francisco, we talk about the Met and its discontents, and its future under him. “The Met is the prime example of an encyclopedic museum at a very, very challenging, probably volatile moment,” he says. “Encyclopedic museums were founded on the idea that you bring the culture of the whole world to one place and tell one single narrative. That’s an idea from the Enlightenment. But now—you can use all the buzzwords, globalization, interconnectivity, and so forth—the idea that you can actually tell one succinct story is really impossible. You have to be an institution that embraces diversity—another buzzword—not only regarding your staff and collection but in terms of the multiple narratives you provide about the cultures of the world. For me, a museum is not just a place you visit but something that goes way beyond the physical pyramid of the institution.”

Max is brimming with ideas, but for obvious reasons he can’t say too much about them yet. “I haven’t had a chance to speak with the curators,” he explains, “and I haven’t even met with the full board.” He does say, though, “How we deal with modern and contemporary is clearly one of the important questions.” It certainly is, what with the ongoing controversy (inside and outside the museum) about the Met’s $600 million plan to renovate and expand its modern and contemporary southwest wing, and its costly takeover of the former Whitney Museum, now called the Met Breuer, as a temporary annex for recent art. Some people ask why the Met should collect contemporary art at all when MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim are all competing for it. Max feels strongly that it has to, and that contemporary and modern art should hang in the main building on Fifth Avenue. “The Breuer is a temporary solution,” he says. “A great space, but I don’t want to officially comment on this.”

In San Francisco, Max hired the Fine Arts Museums’ first contemporary curator, Claudia Schmuckli, and together they staged shows by Sarah Lucas, Urs Fischer, and Julian Schnabel at the Legion of Honor, which raised some eyebrows and drew mixed reviews—contemporary art had been virtually invisible there. It was Max’s idea to present Schnabel’s work in the Legion’s outdoor courtyard, interacting with the neoclassical architecture. “I met Max nearly 30 years ago,” Schnabel tells me. “He certainly didn’t turn into a jerk as he got older. He’s not just trying to fill up another slot with another show; what he does is much closer to the idea of making art.”

As Max’s record shows, his area of interest is by no means limited to contemporary art. Just look at his current and upcoming program in San Francisco, with shows on Pre-Raphaelites and old masters, the early work of Peter Paul Rubens, as well as a highly political exhibition of contemporary Muslim fashion (page 328). “I think there’s a misunderstanding about modern and contemporary art,” he says. “You already have that in the African, the Islamic, and in other areas of the Met’s collection, but you just don’t notice it. The perception that it’s only in one wing is not right. Modern and contemporary will be part of the equation in the entire museum in multiple ways. What the Met can do is bring it together with older art in a much broader, more complex, sometimes more surprising dialogue.”

What, I ask him, does he plan to do about the highly unpopular $25 admission fee that the Met recently levied on out-of-town visitors? “I fully understand the decision that has been taken,” he says with official aplomb. And then, letting me in on one of the advantages of being number two, he smiles and says, “It’s really a CEO decision, ja?”

Several other museums have tried to recruit Max in recent years. He was on the Guggenheim’s short list ten years ago, and in 2013, he was wooed by the Pompidou—he withdrew because he felt he wouldn’t have the freedom he needed there. And it’s been rumored that MoMA has had its eye on him as a successor to Glenn Lowry. “He was made chairman of Bizot,” says Richard Armstrong, “which is like a secret society for 55 leading museum directors of the world. His peer group, even the old guys, thought he was capable of running the whole thing.”

One of his colleagues on Bizot was Tom Campbell, the Met’s last director, who suggested Hollein when the museum’s board chairman, Daniel Brodsky, asked him for ideas about who might succeed him. “I was very impressed with Max,” Campbell tells me. “He’s a diplomatic, thoughtful guy who sees modern art as something to be celebrated but also something that could be used as a gateway to historical art.” Michael Govan agrees. “He’s extremely smart and a natural leader. There are few people in the field with his level of experience, at his young age,” he says. “He can have a very long run at the Met, as Philippe de Montebello did.”

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