If a museum director in the twenty-first century is always wearing two
hats—one for the art and another for money—then the Metropolitan Museum
of Art has found a great man for the job. At 5 P.M. today, the museum announced
that the forty-eight-year-old Max Hollein, who earned dual degrees in
art history and business administration in his native Vienna, is taking
the reins. The Met will be the third museum that he has helmed in his
career, which began up the street from the Met, at the Guggenheim. This
news breaks thirteen months after the Met’s previous director, the
tapestry specialist Thomas Campbell, resigned suddenly, after an
eight-year tenure.

In the interim, the trustees have implemented changes more in keeping
with corporate boardrooms than with a Beaux Arts palace housing a
collection that spans fifty-eight-hundred years. One new measure is the
controversial rolling back of the museum’s decades-long pay-what-you-wish
admission policy. The other is naming a C.E.O., Daniel H. Weiss, to whom
Hollein will now report. Yet Hollein unarguably brings more expertise to
the institution than his new boss does. Weiss is a medieval-art
historian who rose through academia to become a college president and
came to the Met from Haverford College. Hollein, by contrast, arrives in
New York from two years as the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco. Don’t let the brief tenure alarm you; his predecessor also
left after two years, to become the director of the Morgan Library &
Museum. More to the point, Hollein accomplished a great deal in a short
time, including savvily implementing digital programs to broaden the
museum’s appeal to the coveted millennial demographic. (During a show on
the Teotihuacan pyramids, video gamers could explore the ancient Mexican
city at home, by playing Minecraft.) Before San Francisco, Hollein ran a
trifecta of museums in Frankurt: the Städel Museum, the Schirn
Kunsthalle, and the Liebieghaus sculpture collection, whose holdings run the
gamut from Old Masters to up-and-comers. The shows organized under his
watch range from Albrecht Dürer and Cranach the Elder to Henri Matisse
and Julian Schnabel.

At the Städel, Hollein oversaw a sixty-nine-million-dollar renovation
that was critically lauded. A keen eye for building runs in his blood;
his father was the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Hans Hollein. But,
perhaps most importantly for the Met, Hollein, unlike his predecessor,
is a fund-raiser with a proven track record. The Städel, atypical for
European institutions, relied on state funding for less than fifteen per
cent of its budget, and Hollein is not above an out-there development idea: in
2014, he proposed working with a drug-store chain to sell hundred-euro
prints of works from the museum’s collection. While I hope not to
encounter copies of the Met’s Vermeers in my local Duane Reade any time
soon, it will be thrilling to see what a man who once paraphrased Goethe
to describe his twinned interest in art and finance—“two souls are
dwelling in my chest”—has in store for the museum.

A previous version of this story cited New York Times reporting about a relationship between Thomas Campbell and an employee at the Met. Subsequent reporting noted that an investigation by the Met cleared Campbell of wrongdoing.