Max Hollein is sitting in his airy fifth-floor office in New York. Through one window is a view of Central Park, through another the rolling roofscape of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he has led for the past five and a half years. On his office walls are paintings by Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock. There is also a Chola sculpture from India and the stone head of an Egyptian goddess. In other circumstances, it might seem trite to open an interview with a tour of interior decor, but this is not any old...