Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Type: Private
On the web: http://www.metmuseum.org
Employees: 2,372

One of the world's premier cultural institutions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires artwork (prehistoric to present-day) from around the world. With more than 2 million pieces in its collection, the Met hosts exhibits, loans artwork to other museums, publishes books and catalogs, and develops educational programs for all ages. The museum also displays art online. Highlights of the Met's collection include American and European paintings and Egyptian and Islamic art. The City of New York owns the museum's 2-million-sq.-ft. complex, which is located on the East side of Central Park; the museum itself owns its art collection. The Met was founded in 1870.

Key numbers for fiscal year ending June, 2008:
Sales: $306.9M

Officers:
Chairman: James R. (Jamie) Houghton
President: Emily K. Rafferty
SVP, CFO, and Treasurer: Olena Paslawsky

Incorporated: 1870
NAIC:712110 Museums

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ("The Met") is the non-profit organization that is responsible for the operation of one of the world's largest and most comprehensive art museums, visited by approximately five million people each year. Located in Central Park, the Met's two-million-square-foot main building is owned by the city of New York, while the collections are held for the benefit of the public by the corporation's trustees. In addition, the city pays for the museum's heat, light, and power, as well as funding a portion of the costs of maintenance and security. The corporation is responsible for its share of maintenance and security, plus the costs of acquisitions, conservation, special exhibitions, scholarly publications, and educational programs. The Met also receives an annual grant for basic operating expenses from the New York State Council on the Arts. Moreover, it receives funding through gifts and grants, endowment support, paid admissions, the selling of memberships, as well as ancillary income derived from merchandising, parking garage fees, auditorium admissions, and the museum's restaurants. Aside from its Central Park location, the Met owns and operates a branch museum, The Cloisters, located in northern Manhattan, one of the sites of the museum's Department of Medieval Art. Supplementing the Met's gift shop income are 13 satellite retail operations in the United States (with sales from the shop at Rockefeller Center ranking second to the museum itself) and 11 licensed shops around the world. Aside from the usual souvenirs of tee-shirts and postcards, Met merchandise includes expensive reproductions of the artwork found in the museum.

Since its founding on the southern tip of Manhattan, New York City has been very much devoted to the making of money. It also grew to harbor aspirations for culture, or at least the accolades that were accorded a cultural center. A strong theatrical tradition was born during the Colonial period, and by the 1840s four different theaters were presenting opera. The Academy of Music, which opened in 1854, would become the hub of fashionable society. When it came to the appreciation of the fine arts, however, New Yorkers showed little interest. At the opera, at least, the wealthy had a venue where it could appreciate itself. The New York Historical Society, founded in 1804, which collected and displayed a limited amount of art, was as close to an art museum as the city had to offer. The only serious collector of American art in New York at the time was a wholesale grocery merchant named Luman Reed, who exhibited the pictures he purchased on the third floor of his home one day a week. After his death in 1841 his collection formed the basis of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts. This early attempt to create an art museum failed to maintain sufficient funding, however, and closed in 1854. The non-profit American Art Union, established on lower Broadway in 1838, provided a place for artists to display their work and charged the public a nominal admission fee. Following legal problems it closed its doors in 1852, but during its short history was instrumental in establishing New York as the country's most important marketplace for American Art. In 1859 the Cooper Union was established in New York for the Advancement of Science and Art. It offered a public reading room where collections of arts and artifacts were displayed, destined one day to become part of the Smithsonian Institution. During this period New York boasted a number of museums, as did most large cities, but they were devoted to natural science rather than the display of the fine arts. The popular dime museums of the 19th century, epitomized by P.T. Barnum's American Museum, also specialized in the exhibition of "curiosities." The idea of establishing a New York museum dedicated to the fine arts finally came to fruition in the years following the Civil War, prompted in large part by the success of the 1864 Metropolitan Art Fair, a charity auction that benefited the U.S. Sanitary Commission, ancestor of the American Red Cross.

The seeds for a major New York art museum were actually planted in Paris in 1866 during a Fourth of July luncheon at which John Jay, a prominent lawyer and the grandson of the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, commented in a post-meal speech that it was "time for the American people to lay the foundations of a National Institution and Gallery of Art." Among the Americans gathered that day were a number of New Yorkers who responded to Jay's call and that very night agreed to create such an institution in their native city.

Several were members of the Union League Club, which had been created to support Abraham Lincoln but was also involved in nonpolitical matters. The club referred the idea of a museum to its art committee, which deliberated for three years before recommending the establishment of a metropolitan art museum, provided that it was "free alike from bungling government officials and from the control of a single individual." A plan for the museum was then developed and legal documents drawn up, so that on January 31, 1870, the Board of Trustees for the new museum was selected, their numbers including merchants, lawyers, city officials, as well as a few practicing artists. On April 13, 1870, the New York Legislature agreed to incorporate the Met, mandating that it serve an educational mission to the public.

The Met's first president, railroad tycoon John Taylor Johnston, initiated a $250,000 fundraising campaign, but in the first year succeeded in raising only $110,000, the largest donation of $10,000 coming out of his own pocket. After a second year of effort, the Met was still $24,000 short of its goal, while at the same time Philadelphia and Boston were making great strides in funding their own museums. At this point the Met had no art and no place to display it. A permanent home for the Met would be provided by the city in the new Central Park, which many of the trustees considered too remote, preferring instead the present-day site of Bryant Park. City funding also paid for the construction of a building, which was begun in 1874. In the meantime, the Met secured its first collection of art, due to William T. Blodgett, a member of the executive committee, who on his own initiative bought three private collections of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the cost of $116,000. To display these works as well as other gifts and loans, in 1871 the museum leased a temporary home at 681 Fifth Avenue, a townhouse that had previously been the site of Dodworth's Dancing Academy.

Even before the Met opened its first exhibition, it began merchandising, selling $25 sets of Old Masters engravings. After two years the Met relocated downtown to West 14th Street, an area that was still a fashionable residential neighborhood. The move to the former Douglas Mansion was made necessary in large part by the purchase of the Cesnola Collection of antiquities in 1874, excavated by the American Counsul to Cyprus, and amateur archaeologist, General Luigi Palma di Cesnola. He sold a second collection to the Met in 1876, and three years later was hired to become the museum's first paid director. His reign would last 25 years.

The Met's permanent building in Central Park opened in 1880 and was quickly found wanting. Over the next 100 years three master plans would be developed and abandoned for lack of funding, forcing the museum to make do with piecemeal improvements. (In 1888 the exhibition space was doubled by enlarging the southern end of the building; in 1894 a North Wing opened; in 1905 a Fifth Avenue facade was added; then in 1926 the present Fifth Avenue facade and entrance structure were completed.)

Although the Met now had a permanent home and city support for its upkeep, it still lacked the necessary funds to add to its collections and maintain them, as well as fulfill its educational mission. While many wealthy patrons donated art work to the museum, much was of inferior quality and more of a nuisance than a help. The Met made no secret that in most cases it preferred their patron's money over their art. When the museum received one of its most important bequests, however, it came from an entirely unexpected source. In 1901 New Jersey locomotive manufacturer Jacob S. Rogers, who had only been a supporter of the museum as a $10 per year member, died and left the bulk of his estate to the Met, totaling nearly $5 million. The result was an annual income of close to $200,000 that instantly transformed the institution into the richest museum in the world.

Cesnola died in 1904. The next day a new era began for the Met when famed banker J. Pierpont Morgan was named president of the corporation. With Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke serving as the museum's director, succeeded by his assistant Edward Robinson in 1910, the Met began to grow into a world-class organization supported by a strong professional staff. The publication of the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin began in 1905, and the Egyptian and Classical Departments were organized, as well as the Department of Decorative Arts. Over time other departments were spun off: Arms and Armor in 1912; Far Eastern Art in 1915; the American Wing in 1924; Near Eastern Art in 1932; and Medieval Art in 1933. Morgan was instrumental in naming other prominent millionaires to vacant board positions, an act that proved crucial as annual operating costs almost doubled to $362,000 during the eight years he served as president before his death in 1913. To make up the Met's budget deficit, Morgan simply bullied the board into making contributions. Despite his devotion to the museum, however, he left it no money in his will. A large portion of his wealth, which amounted to far less than anyone suspected, was tied up in his art collections. Much of Morgan's art was sold off to satisfy inheritance tax and other liabilities, and in the end just 40 percent came to the museum, albeit one of the most valuable bequests ever made to the Met.

The Met accumulated art at such a pace during the Morgan era that by 1915 the amount of city appropriations to maintain the collections had failed to keep pace, forcing the museum to turn to the public to raise additional funds. Nevertheless, the Met was able to acquire a considerable number of treasures that came available during the turbulence of World War I.

Despite increased funding from the city, the museum's money woes continued into the 1920s. By the end of the decade it boasted the highest attendance in its history, as well as its largest deficit. With the advent of the Great Depression, followed by the start of World War II, the Met struggled through the 1930s. Attendance fell off steadily as did memberships. City funding was cut from $501,495 in 1930 to $369,592 in 1939, although by the end of the decade it cost more to operate the museum, which now included the Cloisters, the northern Manhattan medieval museum created by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Moreover, 17 years had passed since the last improvement had been made to the main Central Park facilities. The buildings were improperly heated and ventilated, and the galleries poorly lit and maintained. The museum, whose trustees in 1939 averaged 60 years of age, was becoming regarded as stodgy, and other institutions began to challenge the Met's preeminence. The Museum of Modern Art, for instance, was organized in large part because of the Met's disinterest in contemporary works.

To rejuvenate the Met and lead it into a new era, the trustees named Francis Henry Taylor to become the museum's new director in the fall of 1939. Taylor, who had introduced exciting new ideas while serving as the director of the Worcester Museum, was devoted to the goal of getting as many people as possible to attend the Met. He abolished the turnstiles and instituted free admission for every day of the week, thus ending 70 years of Monday and Friday pay days. Much of Taylor's plans for construction and rehabilitation, however, were interrupted by the United States' entry into World War II. A large portion of the museum's most treasured items, in fact, were stored in a Pennsylvania mansion during the first three years of the war, a precaution against German air raids. Following the war Taylor began to organize a series of exhibitions that attracted people who had never before visited an art museum. The American people in the post-war years began to visit all museums in record numbers, resulting in greater news coverage for exhibits, which fueled even greater interest. By 1950 attendance at the Met's main museum reached 2 million, double the 1940 total.

One of Taylor's innovations was the opening of a restaurant in the Met, an idea that at the time occasioned scorn. Fundraising, however, proved not to be Taylor's strong suit. A 75th anniversary drive only netted a disappointing $1 million, one-fifth of its stated goal. The city agreed to help fund the costs of construction and rehabilitation of the museum buildings, but at only half of the total cost and none of the costs of installation. Moreover, it would budget no more than $1 million in a single year. Much needed renovations to the Met, as a result, had to be staggered. Finally in January 1954 remodeling was completed, and the Met featured six new period rooms and 95 renovated galleries. Despite this success, Taylor resigned as director of the Met by the end of the year, choosing to return to the Worcester Museum.

The Met was able to continue its acquisition of art through endowment funds earmarked for that purpose, and it was also able to take advantage of the liberal tax laws of the day that encouraged patrons to donate works to the museum in exchange for generous tax breaks. Raising money to air condition the galleries and fund much-needed construction, however, was difficult for director James Rorimer. The size of the Met collections had grown so large by now that only a small portion of it could be displayed.

Rorimer was replaced by Thomas Hoving, who was pivotal in transforming the Met into a business. He too created a master building plan for the Met, centered around its centennial celebration, but unlike his predecessors he was able to scrape together enough public and private money to achieve the goal, as well as to overcome strong opposition to the Met encroaching on Central Park land. He was so determined that he even threatened to take the Met's collections across the Hudson River to a new home in New Jersey. It was Hoving's search for income streams that resulted in the Met's parking garage, which became a important moneymaker for the museum. While construction of the master plan began he modernized the Met's merchandising, in particular growing a mail-order business, franchising sheets and other soft goods, as well as selling reproductions of choice clothing.

The first major part of the master plan to be completed was the Lehman Wing, which opened in 1975. Two years later Hoving resigned and would not see other phases completed, including the Sackler Wing in 1978, the American Wing in 1980, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in 1982, the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing in 1987, the Tisch Galleries in 1988, and the Henry R. Kravis Wing and Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court in 1990.

With the completion of the 1970 master plan, the Met was now a massive facility with resources that rivaled or surpassed anything available elsewhere in the world. It was also an institution that required a constant flow of money, which was supplied by its well-run business operations. Fundraising reached a new magnitude in the mid-1990s when a booming economy resulted in unprecedented levels of donations to all of the arts. In 1995 the Met launched a $300 million capital campaign. The response was so strong that two years later the museum more than doubled its goal. By the end of the decade the Met had an annual budget in excess of $200 million, which it was more than capable of meeting through its different lines of funding, endowments, and income. The terrorist attack that struck New York on September 11, 2001, had an adverse impact on museum attendance, as it had on other city institutions dependent on tourism. Moreover, the Met would now incur increased security costs. Although cutbacks were clearly in order, and the museum faced its most difficult period in many years, there was little doubt that it would remain a strong and healthy institution, capable of fulfilling the mission set forth by its founders so many years ago.

Principal Competitors

Museum of Modern Art.

Further Reading

Cox, Meg, "At The Metropolitan Museum, Artwork Is to Be Seen, Bought--and Manufactured," Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1985, p. 1.

Hibbard, Howard, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Harper & Row, 1980, 592 p.

Hoving, Thomas, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993, 447 p.

Lerman, Leo, The Museum: One Hundred Years and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Viking Press, 1969, 400 p.

Rosenbaum, Lee, "Museum Confronts an Altered Landscape," Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2001, p. A19.

Souccar, Miriam Kreinin, "Darkening Picture," Crain's New York Business, November 4, 2001, p. 3.

Tomkins, Calvin, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: H. Holt, 1989, 415 p.

— Ed Dinger

The founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hoped it would fill the need for a national art collection. Some had perceived this need for decades before the Civil War. In the 1860s sectional and industrial conflict intensified the desire of civic leaders to promote unification and class harmony through art. Thus, on 4 July 1866 diplomat John Jay proposed in Paris that New York City establish such a collection. In response the Union League, formed in 1863 to support Lincoln, sought to implement Jay's proposal, leading in 1869 to formation of a Provisional Committee assigned to establish such a museum. This committee, which included Union League members and other leading figures from New York's art world and social elite, elected a board of trustees for the new institution, which was incorporated in 1870 and soon housed in temporary quarters. Although from the beginning its board of trustees always has had a preponderance of businessmen, financiers, and lawyers, among the founders were poet William Cullen Bryant and artists such as Frederic E. Church and John Quincy Adams Ward.

During the Met's early decades, London's South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert) appealed to those who believed that the quality of American domestic life and manufacturing suffered from an absence of accessible examples of fine craftsmanship for study by artisans and others. However, because of the trustees' aesthetic preferences and their desire to present themselves and the United States as culturally advanced, the Met developed less as a design showcase than as a Louvre-like palace or temple of fine art. Mixed with hopes to use the museum's splendor to deepen faith in the existing social order was the more expansive idea, articulated by lawyer and founder Joseph H. Choate, that "knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate and refine a practical and laborious people."

These high expectations were backed by the Met's acquisitions, beginning with 174 European paintings in 1871, and by the efforts and donations of founders such as railroad millionaire John Taylor Johnston, the museum's first president. Yet when the Met moved to the site on the east side of Central Park between Eightieth and Eighty-fourth Streets where it has resided since 1880, it could not claim preeminence even among American museums, although they were few in number and mostly of recent origin. The appointment in 1879 of a paid director, Louis Palma di Cesnola, aided and complicated the quest for credibility. The vast collection of Cypriote antiquities that Cesnola sold to the museum in 1873 later occasioned embarrassing investigations that eventually confirmed the authenticity of most of the objects but revealed some careless reconstructions.

By the time Cesnola died in 1904, the Met had added an entrance on Fifth Avenue to the original one inside the park, and important collections such as the European paintings assembled by Henry G. Marquand. It had also created three curatorial departments, including one for casts and reproductions of art, mainly from antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, that was considered central to its early mission. It had also become rich, aided by a multimillion-dollar bequest from the New Jersey locomotive manufacturer Jacob Rogers.

Under J. P. Morgan's presidency (1904–1913), the museum moved away from an emphasis on individual collections and toward rigorous standards that involved arranging masterpieces in ways that depicted the development of art. In 1905 the museum's prominence and resources persuaded Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke to become director, for which he left a similar post at South Kensington. Edward Robinson resigned as director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he had built an especially strong Greek and Roman collection, to become assistant director. In 1910 Robinson became director, serving until 1931, and McKim, Mead and White completed a wing for decorative and medieval arts. Excavations in Egypt initiated by the Museum in 1906 contributed to a collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts that became the most important outside of Cairo. In 1913 the museum received thirteen Rembrandts and major works by Vermeer and others from a bequest of department store owner Benjamin Altman. Despite the new emphasis on integrating individual works into the general collection, they were displayed separately as the Altman collection. Several subsequently donated collections received similar treatment, leading critics such as artist Stuart Davis to conclude that the Met's primary concern remained glorifying the wealthy.

The wealthy responded; donations from the wealthy allowed the museum to establish a Far Eastern Art Department in 1915. Furthermore, perhaps the most valuable collection of all—medieval art acquired by Morgan and later installed in a Pierpont Morgan Wing—came the following year as a gift from his son. In the 1920s publisher Frank A. Munsey's bequest of approximately $10 million secured the Met's position as the wealthiest autonomous museum. Although the proliferation of American art museums vitiated the idea of a national collection, the Met provided a model for others. In his thirty-five years there beginning in 1905, most of them as secretary, Henry W. Kent created a card catalogue and photographic record of the collections, and established editorial and extension divisions. Curators such as William M. Ivins Jr., who headed the Department of Prints that was established in 1916, also set standards for museum practice.

Installing and Redefining the Canon

The issue of how to deploy the institution's growing power was a contentious one throughout the twentieth century. One consistent goal was building what an 1870 policy committee report called "a more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the History of Art from the earliest beginnings to the present time." As the twenty-first century began, the first words on the homepage of the Met's Web site were: "5000 years of art." What deserved inclusion, however, was more disputed in 1910 than in 1870, and most intensely in the 1960s and after.

In 1910 modernist painting and sculpture, which challenged prevailing, assumptions about what constituted "art, " presented the most troubling issues. Three years earlier conservative trustees, angered by the purchase of Renoir's Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878), almost fired Roger Fry, whose brief tenure as curator of painting was turbulent but productive, and assistant Bryson Burroughs, who went on to serve as curator from 1909 to 1934. The Met purchased one Cezanne painting from the controversial 1913 Armory Show, but presented itself as the alternative to modernism's excesses.

Although trustee George A. Hearn established a fund for purchasing American art, like modern art it remained a low priority. The Met mounted an historical survey of American art in conjunction with Hudson-Fulton celebrations in 1909 and growing public interest in American decorative arts encouraged the opening of the American Wing in 1924. However, a few years later the museum turned down Gertrude Whitney's offer of her collection of American art, and it was not until 1949 that it formed the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture. With some exceptions, like the elimination of the galleries of casts, additions supplemented rather than replaced established areas, with canonical European painting and sculpture and Greek and Roman art at the core. The latter became an area of strength under professionals such as Cambridge-educated Gisela A. M. Richter, who served as a curator from 1925 to 1948. In 1921 attendance surpassed one million for first time, leaving the Met second only to the Louvre. In 1929 and later, donations from the H. O. Havemeyer Collection strengthened the Met's holdings in many areas. The collection reflected the influence of Mary Cassatt, who advised Louisine Havemeyer, and nudged trustees toward accepting impressionism and what followed.

Archaeologist Herbert Winlock served as director throughout the 1930s, spending much of his time in Egypt. In 1938, with support from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum opened The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan. It was dedicated to medieval art and incorporated architectural elements from that period, many collected by the sculptor George Grey Barnard. From the 1930s to the 1960s the museum sponsored excavations in Iraq and Iran, from which the findings became part of the museum's collection. After World War II an experimental coalition with the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art failed in part because the Met had less enthusiasm for American and modern art than did the other museums. Yet leading modernists, aware of the canonical status conferred by a presence in the Met, enriched the collections with bequests in 1946 by Gertrude Stein of Picasso's iconic portrait of her and by Alfred Stieglitz of several hundred photographs. In 1928 Stieglitz had given the Met the first photographs admitted into its collection, but not until 1992 did the museum create a separate department for photography, which had previously been grouped with prints. The museum created its first department dedicated to contemporary art in 1967. The opening in 1987 of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, funded by the co-founder of Reader's Digest, gave twentieth-century art a more prominent position within the museum.

Expanding the Audience

In 1961 the Met attracted five million visitors, helped by publicity related to purchase of Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653) for a record price of $2.3 million. Equally important were the efforts of Francis Henry Taylor, director from 1940 to 1954, to make the Met attractive to a more diverse constituency. These efforts were maintained by James Rorimer, who had supervised the building of The Cloisters and who served as director from 1955 to 1966. They were taken to a new level by Thomas Hoving. A medievalist like Rorimer, Hoving had left the Met to serve briefly as New York City Parks Commissioner before returning as director from 1967 to 1977. He favored dramatic exhibitions, acquisitions, and building projects. Some, such as the acquisition of investment banker Robert Lehman's collection and the construction for it of one of several wings designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, augmented the traditional core. Others broadened the Met's purview. The Met's century of neglect of work later grouped in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas had led it to turn down Nelson Rockefeller's 1939 offer to finance an archaeological expedition to Mexico. In 1969, after the civil rights movement and Cold War concerns had redefined cultural significance, the museum accepted Rockefeller's gift of 3,300 works of non-Western art and supporting material, including a library.

Founders such as art historian George Fiske Comfort had imagined a museum that would innovate both in curatorial practices and in outward-looking activities such as programs for schoolchildren that would serve widely the city's population. Dependence on generous public funding, initially supported by William M. "Boss" Tweed just before his 1871 indictment, also encouraged democratic rhetoric. Often city contributions for operating expenses and construction accounted for over one-half of the Met's revenues. In the 1880s the museum had set up city schools for training in the crafts, but closed these in 1892. In 1897, when Cesnola defended the refusal of admission to a plumber in overalls because the Met was a "closed corporation" that set its own standards, critics declared this typical of the way it violated its charter requirement to furnish "popular instruction."

Slow steps toward broader access included, beginning in 1891, opening on Sundays despite conservative opposition on religious grounds. Like many institutions, in the 1930s the Met responded to economic and international crises with demonstrations of its Americanism, including an exhibition of 290 paintings called Life in America. After Pearl Harbor, fifteen-hundred works by American artists were featured in the Artists for Victory Show. The trustees added three women to their board in 1952. Two years later they added Dorothy Shaver, president of Lord and Taylor, who had guided the 1946 merger of the Met and the Costume Institute. White males remained dominant on the board, however, and in 1989 a poster by the Guerilla Girls—a feminist group formed in 1985 in New York to challenge the underrepresentation of women in collections and exhibitions—asked "Do women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?" and reported that "less than five percent of artists in the Modern Arts section are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female."

The Guerilla Girls poster typified an era of cultural conflict initiated by the 1969 photographic and sound exhibition, Harlem on My Mind: The Culture Capital of Black America, 1900–1968. Detractors considered the exhibition an outsider's take on Harlem, organized around demeaning stereotypes and omitting work by painters and sculptors from the community. Defenders celebrated the unprecedented number of African American visitors that it attracted and the attention it gave to Harlem photographers, notably James Van DerZee. Remarks by a Harlem teenager in her essay in the exhibition catalogue also sparked a controversy over whether or not the catalogue was anti-Semitic. The show revealed that although a seat on the museum's board was prized by New York City's social elite, in many communities the Met had little credibility.

Hoving's successor, Philippe de Montebello, led the Met into the twenty-first century, trying to make the collection more accessible through, for example, video productions and the Internet. He also facilitated the use of the museum to create a favorable public image for large corporations, whose donations were becoming increasingly essential. Traditionalists approved of his observation, in response to a 2001 gift from the Annenberg Foundation of $20 million to purchase European art, that "it goes right to the heart of what this museum is about: acquisition." Yet none could predict precisely the impact that the Met's unsurpassed collection would have on the increasing number of virtual as well as actual visitors who selectively experienced it, sometimes responding in ways different from those that could have been imagined by collectors and curators. Such was the case in the days after the World Trade Center's destruction in September 2001, when the painter Helen Marden found comfort in coming to the Met's Islamic galleries "to see the good that people do." The issues of who these visitors were, what type of art they encountered and in what context, and how they looked at it, continued to matter.

Bibliography

Dubin, Steven C. Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Includes a chapter on the Harlem on My Mind exhibition.

Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Harris, Neil. Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Hibbard, Howard. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

Hoving, Thomas. Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. The controversial director's controversial account of his tenure.

Lerman, Leo. The Museum: One Hundred Years and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Viking, 1969.

Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Dutton, 1970.

Wallach, Alan. Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Includes an historical account of the collection of casts and reproductions.

An art museum in New York City. One of the leading art museums in the world, it is known for its extensive collections, ranging from Egyptian temples to twentieth-century masterpieces.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Location of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
Established	1870[1][2]
Location	5th Avenue and 82nd Street, Manhattan, New York
Visitor figures	5.2 million[1]
Director	Thomas P. Campbell
Public transit access	86th Street (IRT Lexington Avenue Line)
Website	The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Coordinates: 40°46′46″N 73°57′47″W / 40.779447°N 73.96311°W / 40.779447; -73.96311

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, known colloquially as The Met, is an art museum located on the eastern edge of Central Park, along what is known as Museum Mile in New York City, USA. It has a permanent collection containing more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments.^[3] The main building, often referred to simply as "the Met," is one of the world's largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location in Upper Manhattan, at "The Cloisters," which features medieval art.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art.^[4] The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world.^[5] A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries.^[6]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people.^[2] It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue.

As of 2007, the Met measures almost a quarter mile long and occupies more than two million square feet.^[7]

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Collections 3.1 American decorative arts 3.2 American paintings and sculpture 3.3 Ancient Near Eastern art 3.4 Arms and armor 3.5 Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas 3.6 Asian art 3.7 The Costume Institute 3.8 Drawings and prints 3.9 Egyptian art 3.10 European paintings 3.11 European sculpture and decorative arts 3.12 Greek and Roman art 3.13 Islamic art 3.14 Robert Lehman Collection 3.15 Libraries 3.16 Medieval art 3.16.1 Main building 3.16.2 The Cloisters 3.17 Modern art 3.18 Musical instruments 3.19 Photographs 3.20 Roof Garden 3.21 Special exhibitions 4 Acquisitions and deaccessioning 5 In popular culture 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

Overview

The facade of the Metropolitan Museum is one of the main features of New York City's "Museum Mile".

The Met's permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as four dedicated conservation departments and a department of scientific research.^[3]

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art.^[4] The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world.^[5] A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries.^[6]

In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large travelling shows throughout the year.^[8]

As of January 2009, the current director of the museum is Thomas P. Campbell, a long-time curator, who replaced the legendary Philippe de Montebello following his retirement at the end of 2008.^[9][10]

History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
Elevation by Simon Fieldhouse
Built/Founded:	1874
Architect:	Calvert Vaux; Jacob Wrey Mould
Architectural style(s):	Gothic
Governing body:	Local
Added to NRHP:	January 29, 1972[11]
Designated NHL:	June 24, 1986[12]
NRHP Reference#:	86003556

Opening reception in the picture gallery at 681 Fifth Avenue, February 20, 1872. Wood engraving published in Frank Leslie's Weekly, March 9, 1872.

The New York State Legislature granted the The Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870 "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations."^[13]

The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue in New York City. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum, served as its first President, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam came on board as its founding Superintendent. The artist Eastman Johnson acted as Co-Founder of the museum. The former Civil War officer,Luigi Palma di Cesnola, was named as its first director.^[14] He served from 1879 to 1904. Under their guidance, the Met's holdings, initially consisting of a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 mostly European paintings, quickly outgrew the available space. In 1873, occasioned by the Met's purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum decamped from Fifth Avenue and took up residence at the Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street. However, these new accommodations proved temporary, as the growing collection required more space than the mansion could provide.

After negotiations with the city of New York in 1871, the Met acquired land on the east side of Central Park, where it built its permanent home, a red-brick stone "mausoleum" designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould.^[15] Vaux's ambitious building was not well-received; the building's High Victorian Gothic style was already going out of fashion by the time construction was completed, and the president of the Met termed the project "a mistake."^[16] Within 20 years, a new architectural plan, incorporating the Vaux building solely as an interior and stripping it of many of its distinctive design elements, was already being executed. Since that point, a host of new galleries and architectural elements, including the distinctive Beaux-Arts facade, designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1902, have continued to expand the museum's physical structure, with the Vaux-designed structure completely surrounded by later additions. (The Met's great entrance hall was also designed by Hunt, who died before it was finished. Hunt's son Richard Howland Hunt oversaw completion of the great hall to his father's specifications.)

As of 2007, the Met measures almost a quarter mile long and occupies more than two million square feet, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building.^[7]

On May 19, 2009, the Met re-opened its transformed American Wing, including a new presentation of 12 period rooms. One of the most dramatic changes was seen in the appearance of the Charles Engelhard Court, which has had a cafe overlooking Central Park added, as well as more internal glass windows.^[17]

Collections

American decorative arts

The American Decorative Arts Department includes about 12,000 examples of American decorative art, ranging from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Though the Met acquired its first major holdings of American decorative arts via a 1909 donation by Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, wife of the financier Russell Sage, a decorative arts department specifically dedicated to American works was not established until 1934. One of the prizes of the American Decorative Arts department is its extensive collection of American stained glass. This collection, probably the most comprehensive in the world, includes many pieces by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The department maintains twenty-five period rooms in the museum, each of which recreates an entire room, complete with furnishings, from a noted period or designer. The department's current holdings also include an extensive silver collection notable for containing numerous pieces by Paul Revere as well as works by Tiffany & Co.

American paintings and sculpture

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze

Since its founding, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has placed a particular emphasis on collecting American art. The first piece to enter the Met's collection was an allegorical sculpture by Hiram Powers titled California, acquired in 1870, which can still be seen in the Met's galleries today. In the following decades, the Met's collection of American paintings and sculpture has grown to include more than one thousand paintings, six hundred sculptures, and 2,600 drawings, covering the entire range of American art from the early Colonial period through the early twentieth century. Many of the best-known American paintings are held in the Met's collection, including a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Emanuel Leutze's monumental Washington Crossing the Delaware. The collection also includes masterpieces by such notable American painters as Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Thomas Eakins.

Ancient Near Eastern art

Beginning in the late 1800s, the Met started to acquire ancient art and artifacts from the Near East. From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sassanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Hittite, Sassanian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Elamite cultures (among others), as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects. The highlights of the collection include a set of monumental stone lammasu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II.

Arms and armor

Arms and armor, Middle Ages main hall

The Met's Department of Arms and Armor is one of the museum's most popular collections. The distinctive "parade" of armored figures on horseback installed in the first-floor Arms and Armor gallery is one of the most recognizable images of the museum. The department's focus on "outstanding craftsmanship and decoration", including pieces intended solely for display, means that the collection is strongest in late medieval European pieces and Japanese pieces from the fifth through the nineteenth centuries. However, these are not the only cultures represented in Arms and Armor; the collection spans more geographic regions than almost any other department, including weapons and armor from dynastic Egypt, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the ancient Near East, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, as well as American firearms (especially Colt firearms) from the nineteenth and 20th centuries. Among the collection's 15,000 objects are many pieces made for and used by kings and princes, including armor belonging to Henry VIII of England, Henry II of France and Ferdinand I of Germany.

Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands and the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot (4,000 m²) Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum. The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old Australian Aboriginal rock paintings, to a group of fifteen-foot high memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls.^[18] The range of materials represented in the Africa, Oceania, and Americas collection is undoubtedly the widest of any department at the Met, including everything from precious metals to porcupine quills.

Asian art

Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa

The Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art that is arguably the most comprehensive in the West^{[citation needed]}. The collection dates back almost to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, which contains more than 60,000 pieces and spans 4,000 years of Asian art. Every Asian civilization is represented in the Met's Asian department, and the pieces on display include every type of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking. The department is well-known for its comprehensive collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting, as well as for its Nepalese and Tibetan works. However, not only "art" and ritual objects are represented in the collection; many of the best-known pieces are functional objects. The Asian wing even contains a complete Ming Dynasty-style garden court, modeled on a courtyard in the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets in Suzhou.

The Costume Institute

The Museum of Costume Art was founded by Aline Bernstein and Irene Lewisohn.^[19] In 1937 they merged with the Met and became its Costume Institute department. Today, its collection contains more than 80,000 costumes and accessories. Due to the fragile nature of the items in the collection, the Costume Institute does not maintain a permanent installation. Instead, every year it holds two separate shows in the Met's galleries using costumes from its collection, with each show centering on a specific designer or theme. In past years, Costume Institute shows organized around famous designers such as Chanel and Gianni Versace have drawn significant crowds to the Met. The Costume Institute's annual Benefit Gala, co-chaired by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, is an extremely popular, if exclusive, event in the fashion world; in 2007, the 700 available tickets started at $6,500 per person.^[20]

Drawings and prints

Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer

Though other departments contain significant numbers of drawings and prints, the Drawings and Prints department specifically concentrates on North American pieces and western European works produced after the Middle Ages. Currently, the Drawings and Prints collection contains more than 11,000 drawings, 1.5 million prints, and twelve thousand illustrated books. The collection has been steadily growing ever since the first bequest of 670 drawings donated to the museum by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1880. The great masters of European painting, who produced many more sketches and drawings than actual paintings, are extensively represented in the Drawing and Prints collection. The department's holdings contain major drawings by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rembrandt, as well as prints and etchings by Van Dyck, Dürer, and Degas among many others.

Egyptian art

Hippo William is a mascot of the Met

Though the majority of the Met's initial holdings of Egyptian art came from private collections, items uncovered during the museum's own archeological excavations, carried out between 1906 and 1941, constitute almost half of the current collection. More than 36,000 separate pieces of Egyptian art from the Paleolithic era through the Roman era constitute the Met's Egyptian collection, and almost all of them are on display in the museum's massive wing of 40 Egyptian galleries. Among the most valuable pieces in the Met's Egyptian collection are a set of 24 wooden models, discovered in a tomb in Deir el-Bahri in 1920. These models depict, in unparalleled detail, a cross-section of Egyptian life in the early Middle Kingdom: boats, gardens, and scenes of daily life are represented in miniature. However, the popular centerpiece of the Egyptian Art department continues to be the Temple of Dendur. Dismantled by the Egyptian government to save it from rising waters caused by the building of the Aswan High Dam, the large sandstone temple was given to the United States in 1965 and assembled in the Met's Sackler Wing in 1978. Situated in a large room, partially surrounded by a reflecting pool and illuminated by a wall of windows opening onto Central Park, the Temple of Dendur is one of the Met's most enduring attractions. The oldest items at the Met, a set of Archeulian flints from Deir el-Bahri which date from the Lower Paleolithic period (between 300,000 - 75,000 BC), are part of the Egyptian collection.

European paintings

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher by Johannes Vermeer

Though the Met's collection of European paintings numbers only around 2,200 pieces, it contains many of the world's most instantly recognizable paintings. The bulk of the Met's purchasing has always been in this department, primarily focusing on Old Masters and nineteenth-century European paintings, with an emphasis on French, Italian and Dutch artists. Many great artists are represented in remarkable depth in the Met's holdings: the museum owns thirty-seven paintings by Monet, twenty-one oils by Cézanne, and eighteen Rembrandts including Aristotle With a Bust of Homer. The Met's five paintings by Vermeer represent the largest collection of the artist's work anywhere in the world. Other highlights of the collection include Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters, Georges de La Tour's The Fortune Teller, El Greco's View of Toledo, Raphael's Colonna Altarpiece, Botticelli's Last Communion of St Jerome, and Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates. In recent decades, the Met has carried out a policy of deaccessioning its "minor" holdings in order to purchase a smaller number of "world-class" pieces. Though this policy remains controversial, it has gained a number of outstanding (and outstandingly expensive) masterpieces for the European Paintings collection, beginning with Velázquez's Juan de Pareja in 1971. A more recent purchase is Duccio's Madonna and Child, which cost the museum more than $45 million, more than twice the amount it had paid for any previous painting. The painting itself is only slightly larger than 9 by 6 inches (150 mm), but has been called "the Met's Mona Lisa".

European sculpture and decorative arts

European sculpture court

The European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection is one of the largest departments at the Met, holding in excess of 50,000 separate pieces from the 1400s through the early twentieth century. Though the collection is particularly concentrated in Renaissance sculpture—much of which can be seen in situ surrounded by contemporary furnishings and decoration—it also contains comprehensive holdings of furniture, jewelry, glass and ceramic pieces, tapestries, textiles, and timepieces and mathematical instruments. Visitors can enter dozens of completely furnished period rooms, transplanted in their entirety into the Met's galleries. The collection even includes an entire sixteenth-century patio from the Spanish castle of Vélez Blanco, reconstructed in a two-story gallery. Sculptural highlights of the sprawling department include Bernini's Bacchanal, a cast of Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, and several unique pieces by Houdon, including his Bust of Voltaire and his famous portrait of his daughter Sabine.

Greek and Roman art

Roman gallery

The Amathus sarcophagus, from Amathus, Cyprus, arguably the single most important object in the Cesnola Collection

The Met's collection of Greek and Roman art contains more than 35,000^[21] works dated through A.D. 312. The Greek and Roman collection dates back to the founding of the museum—in fact, the museum's first accessioned object was a Roman sarcophagus, still currently on display. Though the collection naturally concentrates on items from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, these historical regions represent a wide range of cultures and artistic styles, from classic Greek black-figure and red-figure vases to carved Roman tunic pins. Several highlights of the collection include the Euphronios krater depicting the death of Sarpedon (whose ownership has since been transferred to the Republic of Italy), the monumental Amathus sarcophagus, and a magnificently detailed Etruscan chariot known as the "Monteleone chariot". The collection also contains many pieces from far earlier than the Greek or Roman empires—among the most remarkable are a collection of early Cycladic sculptures from the mid-third millennium BCE, many so abstract as to seem almost modern. The Greek and Roman galleries also contain several large classical wall paintings and reliefs from different periods, including an entire reconstructed bedroom from a noble villa in Boscoreale, excavated after its entombment by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. In 2007, the Met's Greek and Roman galleries were expanded to approximately 60,000 square feet (6,000 m²), allowing the majority of the collection to be on permanent display.^[22]

Islamic art

The Met's collection of Islamic art is not confined strictly to religious art, though a significant number of the objects in the Islamic collection were originally created for religious use or as decorative elements in mosques. Much of the 12,000 strong collection consists of secular items, including ceramics and textiles, from Islamic cultures ranging from Spain to North Africa to Central Asia. The Islamic Art department's collection of miniature paintings from Iran and Mughal India are a highlight of the collection. Calligraphy both religious and secular is well-represented in the Islamic Art department, from the official decrees of Suleiman the Magnificent to a number of Qur'an manuscripts reflecting different periods and styles of calligraphy. As with many other departments at the Met, the Islamic Art galleries contain many interior pieces, including the entire reconstructed Nur Al-Din Room from an early 18th century house in Damascus. The Islamic Arts galleries have been undergoing refurbishment since 2001 and are projected to be reopened early in 2011. Until that time, a narrow selection of items from the collection are on temporary display throughout the museum.^[23]

Robert Lehman Collection

On the passing of banker Robert Lehman in 1969, his Foundation donated close to 3,000 works of art to the museum. Housed in the "Robert Lehman Wing," the museum refers to the collection as "one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States".^[24] To emphasize the personal nature of the Robert Lehman Collection, the Met housed the collection in a special set of galleries which evoked the interior of Lehman's richly decorated townhouse; this intentional separation of the Collection as a "museum within the museum" met with mixed criticism and approval at the time, though the acquisition of the collection was seen as a coup for the Met.^[25] Unlike other departments at the Met, the Robert Lehman collection does not concentrate on a specific style or period of art; rather, it reflects Lehman's personal interests. Lehman the collector concentrated heavily on paintings of the Italian Renaissance, particularly the Sienese school. Paintings in the collection include masterpieces by Botticelli and Domenico Veneziano, as well as works by a significant number of Spanish painters, El Greco and Goya among them. Lehman's collection of drawings by the Old Masters, featuring works by Rembrandt and Dürer, is particularly valuable for its breadth and quality.^[26] Princeton University Press has documented the massive collection in a multi-volume book series published as "The Robert Lehman Collection Catalogues."

Libraries

The main library at the Met is the Thomas J. Watson Library, named after its benefactor. The Watson Library primarily collects books related to the history of art, including exhibition catalogues and auction sale publications, and generally attempts to reflect the emphasis of the museum's permanent collection. Several of the museum's departments have their own specialized libraries relating to their area of expertise. The Watson Library and the individual departments' libraries also hold substantial examples of early or historically important books which are works of art in their own right. Among these are books by Dürer and Athanasius Kircher, as well as editions of the seminal Surrealist magazine "VVV" and a copy of "Le Description de l'Egypte," commissioned in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte and considered one of the greatest achievements of French publishing.

Several of the departmental libraries are open to members of the public without prior appointment. The Library and Teacher Resource Center, Ruth and Harold Uris Center for Education, is open to visitors of all ages to study art and art history and to learn about the Museum, its exhibitions and permanent collection. The Robert Goldwater Library in the department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas documents the visual arts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Native and Precolumbian America. It is open to adult researchers, including college and graduate students. Most of the other departmental libraries are for museum staff only or are open to the general public by appointment only.

Medieval art

The Limbourg brothers' Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry

The Met's collection of medieval art consists of a comprehensive range of Western art from the 4th century through the early 16th century, as well as Byzantine and pre-medieval European antiquities not included in the Ancient Greek and Roman collection. Like the Islamic collection, the Medieval collection contains a broad range of two- and three-dimensional art, with religious objects heavily represented. In total, the Medieval Art department's permanent collection numbers about 11,000 separate objects, divided between the main museum building on Fifth Avenue and The Cloisters.

Main building

The medieval collection in the main Metropolitan building, centered on the first-floor medieval gallery, contains about six thousand separate objects. While a great deal of European medieval art is on display in these galleries, most of the European pieces are concentrated at the Cloisters (see below). However, this allows the main galleries to display much of the Met's Byzantine art side-by-side with European pieces. The main gallery is host to a wide range of tapestries and church and funerary statuary, while side galleries display smaller works of precious metals and ivory, including reliquary pieces and secular items. The main gallery, with its high arched ceiling, also serves double duty as the annual site of the Met's elaborately decorated Christmas tree.

The Cloisters

The Cloisters

Main article: The Cloisters

The Cloisters was a principal project of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was a major benefactor of the Met. Located in Fort Tryon Park and completed in 1938, it is a separate building dedicated solely to medieval art. The Cloisters collection was originally that of a separate museum, assembled by George Grey Barnard and acquired in toto by Rockefeller in 1925 as a gift to the Met.^[27]

The Cloisters are so named on account of the five medieval French cloisters whose salvaged structures were incorporated into the modern building, and the five thousand objects at the Cloisters are strictly limited to medieval European works. The collection exhibited here features many items of outstanding beauty and historical importance; among these are the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry illustrated by the Limbourg Brothers in 1409, the Romanesque altar cross known as the "Cloisters Cross" or "Bury Cross," and the seven heroically detailed tapestries depicting the Hunt of the Unicorn.

Modern art

With more than 10,000 artworks, primarily by European and American artists, the modern art collection occupies 60,000 square feet (6,000 m²), of gallery space and contains many iconic modern works. Cornerstones of the collection include Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, Jasper Johns's White Flag, Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), and Max Beckmann's triptych Beginning. Certain artists are represented in remarkable depth, for a museum whose focus is not exclusively on modern art: for example, the collection contains forty paintings by Paul Klee, spanning his entire career. Due to the Met's long history, "contemporary" paintings acquired in years past have often migrated to other collections at the museum, particularly to the American and European Paintings departments.

Musical instruments

The Met's collection of musical instruments, with about five thousand examples of musical instruments from all over the world, is virtually unique among major museums. The collection began in 1889 with a donation of several hundred instruments by Lucy W. Drexel, but the department's current focus came through donations over the following years by Mary Elizabeth Adams, wife of John Crosby Brown. Instruments were (and continue to be) included in the collection not only on aesthetic grounds, but also insofar as they embodied technical and social aspects of their cultures of origin. The modern Musical Instruments collection is encyclopedic in scope; every continent is represented at virtually every stage of its musical life. Highlights of the department's collection include several Stradivari violins, a collection of Asian instruments made from precious metals, and the oldest surviving piano, a 1720 model by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Many of the instruments in the collection are playable, and the department encourages their use by holding concerts and demonstrations by guest musicians.

Photographs

The Met's collection of photographs, numbering more than 20,000 in total, is centered on five major collections plus additional acquisitions by the museum. Alfred Stieglitz, a famous photographer himself, donated the first major collection of photographs to the museum, which included a comprehensive survey of Photo-Secessionist works, a rich set of master prints by Edward Steichen, and an outstanding collection of Stieglitz's photographs from his own studio. The Met supplemented Stieglitz's gift with the 8,500-piece Gilman Paper Company Collection, the Rubel Collection, and the Ford Motor Company Collection, which respectively provided the collection with early French and American photography, early British photography, and post-WWI American and European photography. The museum also acquired Walker Evans's personal collection of photographs, a particular coup considering the high demand for his works. Though the department gained a permanent gallery in 1997, not all of the department's holdings are on display at any given time, due to the sensitive materials represented in the photography collection. However, the Photographs department has produced some of the best-received temporary exhibits in the Met's recent past, including a Diane Arbus retrospective and an extensive show devoted to spirit photography.

Roof Garden

A Roof Garden scene in September 2008, exhibition by Jeff Koons.

The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden exists towards the southern end of the museum. It offers views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, and features a variety of outdoor sculpture exhibitions. With food and drinks available, the Roof Garden is a popular museum spot during the mild-weathered months, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings when the large crowds can lead to long lines at the elevators.

Special exhibitions

The museum often hosts special exhibitions, often focusing on the works of one artist that have been loaned out from a variety of other museums and sources for the duration of the exhibition.

Acquisitions and deaccessioning

During the 1970s, under the directorship of Thomas Hoving, the Met revised its deaccessioning policy. Under the new policy, the Met set its sights on acquiring "world-class" pieces, regularly funding the purchases by selling mid- to high-value items from its collection.^[28] Though the Met had always sold duplicate or minor items from its collection to fund the acquisition of new pieces, the Met's new policy was significantly more aggressive and wide-ranging than before, and allowed the deaccessioning of items with higher values which would normally have precluded their sale. The new policy provoked a great deal of criticism (in particular, from the New York Times) but had its intended effect.

Many of the items then purchased with funds generated by the more liberal deaccessioning policy are now considered the "stars" of the Met's collection, including Velázquez's Juan de Pareja and the Euphronios krater depicting the death of Sarpedon. In the years since the Met began its new deaccessioning policy, other museums have begun to emulate it with aggressive deaccessioning programs of their own.^[29] The Met has continued the policy in recent years, selling such valuable pieces as Edward Steichen's 1904 photograph The Pond-Moonlight (of which another copy was already in the Met's collection) for a record price of $2.9 million.^[30]

In popular culture

The Great Hall

• In Edith Wharton's 1920 novel The Age of Innocence set in the 1870s the two main protagonists have a clandestine meeting in the museum, during which one says "Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum"^[31]
• The Met was famously used as the setting for much of the Newbery Medal-winning children's book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which the two young protagonists run away from home and secretly stay several nights in the museum. However, Michelangelo's Angel statue, central to the book's plot, is purely fictional and not actually part of the museum's collection.
• The 1948 film Portrait of Jennie was filmed at the both the Museum and The Cloisters.
• The Met was featured as the first level in the tactical first-person shooter Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
• The 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair uses the Met as a major setting; however, only the exterior scenes were shot at the museum, with the interior scenes filmed on soundstages.
• In 1983, there was a Sesame Street special entitled Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the cast goes to visit the museum on-location.
• An episode of Inspector Gadget entitled "Art Heist" had Gadget and Penny and Brain travel to the Met, with Gadget being assigned to protect the artwork. But M.A.D. Agents steal the masterpieces and plan to replace them with fakes.
• In the 2007 movie I Am Legend, the main character, Dr. Robert Neville, is shown fishing in the reflecting pool in front of the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing.
• The Met is featured in a season four episode of Project Runway, where five remaining designers must create an outfit based on a work of art.
• In season 9 of the television show Friends, Joey takes his love interest, Charlie, to the museum to try to impress her. He does not know anything about the artwork at the Met, so he memorizes information about specific pieces, but takes Charlie in the wrong direction when they enter, so his plan backfires.
• GTA IV features a museum named the Libertonian, based on the Met.
• In the novel The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury, the Met is the setting for the crime scene at the start of the book and much of the story line is based around it.
• In the 1989 movie, When Harry Met Sally..., Harry and Sally are seen in the Met's Sackler Wing, having a conversation by the Temple of Dendur.
• On the CW TV series Gossip Girl, the main female characters, Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen, and a few select classmates at the Constance Billard School for Girls usually eat their lunch on the steps of the Met.

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See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Education in New York City
• List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City

References

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2. ^ ^{a b} Brief History of The Museum
3. ^ ^{a b} "The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Permanent Collection and Special Exhibitions". http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/noteToReader.asp. Retrieved 2007-04-17. 
4. ^ ^{a b} de Montebello, Philippe (1997). Masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 6–7. ISBN 0300106157. 
5. ^ ^{a b} Pyhrr, Stuart W. (2003). Arms and Armor: Notable Acquisitions 1991-2002 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 6. ISBN 0300098766. 
6. ^ ^{a b} Peck, Amelia (1996). Period Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 17,275. ISBN 0300105223. 
7. ^ ^{a b} The Metropolitan Museum of Art at HumanitiesWeb
8. ^ Current Special Exhibitions
9. ^ Miriam Kreinin Souccar (2008-09-10). "New Met Director has Lots of Company". Crain's New York Business. http://www.crainsnewyork.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080910/FREE/809109966/1055/keywords. Retrieved 2008-09-10. 
10. ^ Kelly Crow (2008-09-10). "Met Selects Curator to Run Museum". Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122100232542016979.html. Retrieved 2008-09-10. 
11. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2007-01-23. http://www.nr.nps.gov/. 
12. ^ "Metropolitan Museum of Art=2007-09-19". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?ResourceId=1967&ResourceType=Building. 
13. ^ Disturnell, John New York as it was and as it is, D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1876. "Metropolitan Museum of Art" page 101.
14. ^ C. Tomkins. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art--Second Ed., New York, Henry Holt, 1996, pp.49-57.
15. ^ Visitor's Information at the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
16. ^ Halford, Macy (2008-12). "At the Museums: Four Eyes". http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/12/01/081201ta_talk_halford?printable=true. 
17. ^ Apollo Magazine 01/05/09.
18. ^ Ezra, Kate (1992), Royal Art of Benin — The Perls Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ISBN 0-87099-632-0 
19. ^ "1944". Playbill. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/68652.html. Retrieved 2008-12-16. "Philanthropist Irene Lewisohn died today in New York City. She and her sister Alice built and endowed the Neighborhood Playhouse. With Aline Bernstein she founded the Museum of Costume Art on Fifth Avenue in 1937." 
20. ^ Postrel, Virginia (2007-05). "Dress Sense". The Atlantic. pp. 133. 
21. ^ Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
22. ^ Kimmelman, Michael (2007-04-20). "Classical Treasures, Bathed in a New Light". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/arts/design/20anci.html?ex=1334721600&en=d719d4e4c2744f72&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss. Retrieved 2007-04-25. 
23. ^ Temporary Installations of the Museum's Islamic Galleries
24. ^ Metropolitan Museum of Art press release, September 1999
25. ^ Thomas Hoving. Making the Mummies Dance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
26. ^ Art Review: Feast of Illuminations and Drawings, John Russell. New York Times, February 18, 2000
27. ^ Metropolitan Museum of Art website article on the Cloisters
28. ^ Thomas Hoving. Making the Mummies Dance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
29. ^ "Brimful museums put art under the hammer" James Bone, The Times Online. October 31, 2005
30. ^ "Rare photo sets $2.9m sales record", BBC News, February 16, 2006
31. ^ The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton chapter 31 (page 218 of Everyman edition published in 1993)

External links

• Metropolitan Museum of Art: official site
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a Timeline of Art History
• The New York Times Metropolitan Museum of Art Topic Page
• Watsonline: The Catalog of the Libraries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Artwork owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Coordinates: 40°46′46″N 73°57′47″W / 40.779447°N 73.96311°W / 40.779447; -73.96311

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