The great American museums are great largely because people with the means to collect art and artifacts, or accumulate books and manuscripts and antiquities, have been rescuing, buying, collecting, and protecting them in great quantities since the Civil War. And they are so widely and readily accessible because certain people with knowledge and means, as well as social skills and business acumen, have steered, maneuvered, and charmed the great American collections into those great American museums.
One of the most successful of these all-purpose cultural impresarios was Ashton Hawkins, who died last week from complications of Alzheimer’s disease at age 84.
Hawkins had been the executive vice president of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art until his retirement in 2001, and as a lawyer, he had also served as counsel to the Met’s board of trustees. But in the New York Times’s wry formulation, he “could more aptly be described as the chief curator of its vast collection of rich and powerful donors.” It was Hawkins who served as the vital, indefatigable link between the Met and its patrons and collector-donors.
He was not as well known as the Met’s celebrity-directors of recent decades, Thomas P.F. Hoving and Philippe de Montebello. But their success and the Met’s colossal half-century of growth owed as much to Hawkins’s charm, energy, expertise, and networking as anything else.
It was Hawkins who, in the early 1970s, made the Met’s acquisition of financier Robert Lehman’s vast art collection possible and presided over the construction of the Lehman Pavilion to display it. And when, in the late 1970s, the Egyptian government made a gift to the Met of the first century B.C. Temple of Dendur, it was Hawkins who persuaded the pharmaceutical Sackler family to underwrite a new wing to make it permanently accessible.
Above all, it was Hawkins’s status as a well-heeled, erudite, handsome, and capable lawyer-about-town that allowed him to cultivate New York’s social, commercial, and artistic aristocracy and steer its dollars and prized possessions in the Met’s direction.
It was a role he was born to play. The son of a New York investment broker father and a Russian mother who had fled the Soviet Union, Hawkins grew up on Long Island and studied political science at Harvard University, where he also earned a law degree. Intending at first to join the foreign service, he took a job instead at New York’s venerable Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft law firm and quickly joined Manhattan’s burgeoning 1960s art and social scene.
At home on Wall Street and in Greenwich Village, Hawkins was equally friendly with judges, sculptors, politicians, and social butterflies, worked briefly for New York’s attorney general, and was a fixture at Andy Warhol’s downtown Factory. He began collecting art and photography, Russian silver, and Victorian furniture, and while still in his 20s, he was a guest at Truman Capote’s celebrated 1966 Masked Ball at the Plaza Hotel.
When, in the following year, Thomas Hoving was appointed director to stir a somnolent Met, Hawkins was one of his first recruits. It was a shrewd choice, for Hawkins was not only a successful ambassador for the museum but a smart lawyer as well. He was a pioneer in the growing specialty of art law, mastering not just the acquisition of art and artifacts but the complex problems of provenance, philanthropy, cross-cultural exchange, national heritage, and preservation.
By the time of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he had retired from the Met to practice law full time. But as a founder of the American Council for Cultural Policy, he and a coalition of museum curators, lawyers, collectors, and dealers anticipated the problems of art and antiquities caught in the crosshairs of modern conflict. The American Council for Cultural Policy advocated “regulated trade” and loans among museums and dealers worldwide that respect national heritage while preserving endangered art from destruction.
As he wrote at the time, “We should not allow our primary objectives … to overshadow our cultural responsibilities.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
