Ashton Hawkins, Manager of the Rich and Powerful at the Met Museum, Dies at 84

It was Mr. Hawkins who, for instance, helped prepare for the development of a brand new wing to accommodate the Temple of Dendur, a present from the Egyptian authorities — a venture, opening in 1978, that was supported by the Sackler household, whom Mr. Hawkins had courted assiduously. (The household’s identify was faraway from the wing in 2021 over the position their firm, Purdue Pharma, performed within the opioid disaster.)

“All the most important items throughout his time had been initiatives that he was intimately concerned with and helped deliver to fruition,” Sharon Cott, a protégé of Mr. Hawkins and the Met’s present counsel, mentioned in an interview.

Mr. Hawkins was additionally the secretary to the board of trustees and later its counsel, a put up that pushed him past his official duties to turn into one thing of a cultural consigliere to the astronomically rich. Although not almost as wealthy as his unofficial expenses, he was steadily seen mingling with them at their events, wearing understated, completely tailor-made Savile Row fits.

If the museum discovered of a possible donor, it was usually as much as Mr. Hawkins to then reel them in, mentioned Emily Ok. Rafferty, who labored with him as the top of improvement on the Met and later served as its president.

“Generally it might be me and typically I might say, ‘Oh, I feel one of the best individual for that’s someone else,’ and sometimes that individual was Ashton,” she mentioned in an interview. “He was a multipurpose form of man.”

William Ashton Hawkins was born on Could 11, 1937, in Manhattan and grew up in Syosset, a well-heeled Lengthy Island suburb. His father, Ashton William Hawkins, was an funding dealer who had moved to New York from New Mexico, the place Ashton’s grandfather had helped discovered the town of Alamogordo in 1898.