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.
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. The museum is also home to
encyclopedic collections of
musical
instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique
weapons and
armor from around
the world. A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century
Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in
the Met's galleries.
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.
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.
Overview
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.
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. The museum is also home to
encyclopedic collections of
musical
instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique
weapons and
armor from around
the world. A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century
Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in
the Met's galleries.
In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and
hosts large travelling shows throughout the year.
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.
History
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."
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. 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. 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." 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.
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.
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
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 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. 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
The Met's Asian department holds a collection of
Asian art that is arguably the most comprehensive in
the West . 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. 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.
Drawings and prints
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,
DĂĽrer, 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
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 , 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 Met's collection of Greek and Roman art contains more than
35,000 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 , allowing the
majority of the collection to be on permanent display.
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.
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". 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. 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
DĂĽrer, is particularly
valuable for its breadth and quality.
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
DĂĽrer 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 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 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.
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 , 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
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. 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. 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.
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"
- 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.
.
See also
References
External links