ASHTON HAWKINS, born on this date (d: 2022), was, officially, the executive vice president and counsel to the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but who could more aptly be described as the chief curator of its vast collection of rich and powerful donors.
In 1968, Hawkins arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as assistant secretary to the board of trustees, becoming secretary to the musem’s board and counsel the next year. As a prominent New York lawyer, Hawkins used connections to figures such as Robert Lehman and the Sackler family to coordinate donations and acquisitions.
Hawkins was also chairman of the board of the Dia Art Foundation from 1985 until 1996, when an internal conflict drove him and other senior board members out.
A consummate social animal with impeccable taste and seemingly limitless energy, he might have been seen in any given week lunching with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, dancing with Brooke Astor and throwing a party for Andy Warhol — all while wading through the dizzyingly complex world of art law, a field he helped establish in the early 1970s.
His career at the Met spanned a critical phase in its history. He arrived in 1969 as an early hire by Mr. Hoving, who had promised to revive what had become an ailing, dowdy institution. Over the next decade, Mr. Hawkins handled the intricate legal arrangements behind many of Mr. Hoving’s swing-for-the-fences projects, like the acquisition of financier Robert Lehman’s art collection, one of the largest in the museum’s history, and the construction of an entire pavilion to hold it.
Mr. Hawkins extended his influence under Mr. de Montebello, who succeeded Mr. Hoving in 1977 and proceeded to double the museum’s size over the next 30 years. Mr. Hawkins’s extensive social network and preternatural politesse proved invaluable to Mr. de Montebello’s efforts.
Mr. Hawkins who, for example, helped arrange for the construction of a new wing to house the Temple of Dendur, a gift from the Egyptian government — a project, opening in 1978, that was supported by the Sackler family, whom Mr. Hawkins had courted assiduously. (The Sackler name was removed from the wing in 2021 over the role their company, Purdue Pharma, played in the opioid crisis.)
When it came to Hawkins’s law practice, he helped define certain legal codes that are now used somewhat widely within the art world. During the ’60s, he was among those who drafted a treaty adopted by UNESCO that governs the transportation of artworks across national borders. He also advised the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, two industry groups that offer recommendations to art institutions and the people who run them.
He met Johnnie Moore, an actor and producer, in 1996, and they married in 2013. He died from complications of Alzheimer’s in March 2022.