Max Hollein, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promoted to Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture

(New York and Paris, November 9, 2026)— Today, The Met and Villa Albertine announce that Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been promoted to Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

Hollein, who was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2009 while leading museums in Frankfurt, received the insignia of Officier at a ceremony organized by the Musée du Louvre that took place at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The insignia was presented by Mohamed Bouabdallah, Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of Villa Albertine.

The promotion acknowledges Hollein’s wide-ranging contributions to the arts and his role in fostering cultural exchange between cultural institutions in France and the United States.

Catherine Pégard, French Minister of Culture, said: “Throughout his career, Max Hollein has demonstrated an ambitious and truly international approach to cultural leadership. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has championed the Museum’s universal mission all while building lasting relationships with institutions and cultural communities around the world, often opening The Met’s extraordinary collections and expertise to audiences and partners across France. His ability to create new possibilities for cross-border collaboration reflects a true belief in culture as a shared endeavor.”

Mohamed Bouabdallah, Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of Villa Albertine, said: “Max Hollein has been an exceptional partner and advocate for the cultural ties between France and the United States. His openness to new perspectives, his commitment to sharing knowledge, and his dedication to fostering meaningful partnerships with French institutions have helped strengthen our enduring cultural dialogue across the Atlantic. His promotion to Officier is a fitting and well-deserved recognition of this commitment.

Max Hollein said: “I am truly honored to be receiving this distinction from France, a country that is close to my heart and whose commitment to advancing and promoting culture continues to be an example for the world to follow. I have always believed that museums are inherently international places, where we understand our own cultures more fully when we see them in conversation with others. The Met’s longstanding relationships with colleagues and institutions throughout France have been enormously important during my time at The Met and throughout my career. I am grateful for this honor, which I also see as a recognition of the many colleagues and partners whose scholarship, generosity, and friendship make these meaningful exchanges possible. I look forward to deepening these connections with France and creating new opportunities for our institutions to collaborate.”

The Met and France

Hollein’s promotion to Officier follows a long history of cultural exchange between The Met, France and its cultural institutions, built over decades through the sharing of loans and scholarship, alongside major exhibition collaborations – including the famous 1963 exchange that brought Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Musée du Louvre to The Met, where more than one million visitors came to see the painting. Since joining The Met in 2018, Hollein has continued this legacy, strengthening ties with French cultural partners.

Under Hollein’s leadership, The Met has worked extensively with leading French museums to realize landmark exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Manet/Degas, organized by The Met and the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie and presented in New York in 2023, brought Édouard Manet’s Olympia to the United States for the first time. The institutions partnered again on Sargent and Paris, presented at The Met in 2025 before traveling to the Musée d’Orsay later that year, where it became the first monographic exhibition devoted to John Singer Sargent in France. The forthcoming exhibition Rembrandt and the Ancients, opening in the fall of 2027, will be presented in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, charting the Dutch artist’s lifelong fascination with the ancient world. 

These partnerships also extend to significant exchanges between collections. From 2024 to 2025, ten major works from The Met’s department of Ancient West Asian Art were displayed in the Louvre’s permanent galleries in The Met at the Louvre: Near Eastern Antiquities in Dialogue, creating new connections between the two museums’ collections while The Met’s Ancient West Asian Art galleries undergo renovation. This exchange reflects the particularly close and sustained relationship between the two museums: over the past 15 years, with the exception of 2020, the Louvre and The Met have exchanged loans every year. The Met’s forthcoming exhibition Across Wine-Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece explores the cultural interactions that shaped ancient Greek art from the eighth to the early fifth century BCE. Bringing together more than 180 works, the exhibition will include major loans from French collections. 

In 2026, The Met partnered with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris on Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur, bringing together 14 sculptures from the Fondation Giacometti and three works from The Met’s collection to explore the influence of ancient Egyptian art on the sculptor. The Met’s collaboration with the Mobilier national in Paris similarly brought about new scholarship on Louis XIV’s Savonnerie carpets. This partnership led to a landmark presentation at the Grand Palais, co-curated by scholars from both institutions, and A King’s Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie, currently on view at The Met. Scholars from The Met and the Mobilier national are also preparing a comprehensive new monograph on the carpets, to be published in 2027.

Max Hollein

As Director and CEO of The Met, Hollein is responsible for the leadership of the Museum, the most highly attended in the country with over 6.3 million yearly visitors. Hollein oversees The Met’s artistic and creative direction, its fiscal and institutional priorities, and the Museum’s local and international engagement. Since Hollein was appointed as Director in 2018, and then also as CEO in 2023, he has stewarded hundreds of scholarly exhibitions and programs, secured preeminent acquisitions and gifts from around the world—including the acclaimed landmark agreement for the Neue Galerie to merge with The Met in 2028—and reimagined the Museum’s approach to public outreach through education and digital initiatives. As part of a historic transformation of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue building, Hollein has spearheaded historic capital projects including the celebrated renovation of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and is leading a comprehensive redesign of the Museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art galleries, raising more than $670 million in support of the collection’s new home, the Tang Wing, which is now under construction and set to open in 2030. Hollein previously served as the Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  

About The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.

The Met is currently ushering the Museum into the future by renovating one-quarter of its two-million-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue galleries. These reimagined spaces will tell new stories through the breadth of the collection, while improving visitor experience, infrastructure, and sustainability. This remarkable $1.5 billion capital campaign includes: the acclaimed Michael C. Rockefeller Wing for the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Ancient Americas (opened summer 2025); the new Condé M. Nast Galleries (opened May 10, 2026, with the inaugural exhibition Costume Art); new galleries for the Arts of Ancient West Asia and Ancient Cyprus (opening 2027); reimagined spaces for dining and retail inside a newly reactivated entrance off The Met’s plaza (opening 2027); and the transformative Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art (opening 2030).

About the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Established on May 2, 1957, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is an Order of France administered by the French government’s Ministry of Culture, which recognizes individuals for their outstanding work in the fields of art and literature, as well as those who have contributed significantly to furthering cultural inheritance  in France and throughout the world. The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres comprises three grades: Chevalier, Officier and Commandeur.