METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Description

Essentials about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in brief

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (often just called the “Met” for short) is an absolute must-see on a trip to New York City, even for philistines. With more than three million works of art from over 5,000 years of art history, the Met has one of the most important cultural and historical collections in the world. The museum’s exhibition space is a gigantic 16 acres, making the Metropolitan Museum of Art the largest art museum in the U.S. and one of the largest museums in the world. With so many superlatives, it’s no wonder that over seven million people visit the Met each year. This makes it the third most visited art museum in the world.

The branches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Opened in 1872, the museum is a so-called universal museum with a claim to completeness of its art collection areas and eras. The main location of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is on the eastern edge of Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In addition to the main building, there has been The Cloisters location for medieval and ecclesiastical art in Washington Heights since 1938 and the Met Breuer for contemporary art on Madison Avenue in the former Whitney Museum of American Art building since 2016.

The history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art historically dates back to an initiative by private citizen John Jay, who gave a speech to a group of American businessmen after a banquet in a Paris restaurant on the occasion of the U.S. National Day on July 4, 1866. He urged those present to create a museum that would bring both art and art education to the American people in a national institution. After five years of lobbying businessmen, bankers, and artists and intellectuals, the first building of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was occupied in 1870.

The main building of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Since 1880, the Met has been located at its current site on the grounds of Central Park. The building was designed by the American architect Richard Morris Hunt in neoclassical style. The monumental facade is made of light beige limestone. In 1975, there was another extensive enlargement of the exhibition area around the entire building in the direction of the park. As before, the museum consists of a first floor and two floors.

The departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

General information

The exhibits chronologically cover the most important art historical periods, from Stone Age cult objects to special exhibitions of contemporary art. The collections are divided into 19 departments and feature American art as well as extensive works of Egyptian, African, Islamic, and Asian art, and exhibits from the Middle East. The largest department is devoted to Europe, with extensive collections of paintings, decorative arts and architectural fragments to musical instruments and ancient weapons and medieval armor.

Due to the immense size of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is imperative to decide which departments you want to see no later than the entrance to the museum. To see the entire museum in one day is completely impossible. The following list of the individual departments serves (hopefully) as a small decision aid.

American Decorative Arts

Formally established only in 1934, this department includes some 12,000 examples of American (i.e., primarily the territory of the present-day United States) decorative arts from the late 17th century to the early 20th century. These include furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, and textiles. The department is housed together with the department of American painting and sculpture in the American Wing and has 25 so-called Period Rooms, rooms with complete room furnishings from a specific period. Among the most outstanding works in the department are silversmith works by Paul Revere and probably the most comprehensive collection of American stained glass.

American Paintings and Sculpture

Also housed in the American Wing, the collection includes more than 4,000 works of American art (paintings, sculptures, and works on paper) from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, making it one of the most extensive anywhere. Some of the most famous works of American art can be found here, such as the Gibbs-Channing-Avery Portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart or Emanuel Leutze’s monumental work Washington Crossing the Delaware. Other important American artists such as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Frederic Remington are also represented with major works.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

This department, which has been independent since 1956, covers an exceptionally large area, both geographically and chronologically, corresponding to the field of research of Near Eastern archaeology. The Metropolitan Museum is thus one of the few museums to present this field comprehensively. On display are archaeological finds from an area stretching from Turkey in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, and from the Black and Caspian Seas in the north to the Arabian Peninsula in the south, and cultures from the Neolithic Revolution through the advanced civilizations of the Indus and Mesopotamia to the advent of Islam or the fall of the Sassanid Empire in 651 after its conquest by the Arabs. The works came to the museum both through donations or purchases and through excavations, in which the museum has participated since the 1930s. Among the best-known objects in the collection are a series of monumental Neo-Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud, Sumerian sculptures, ivory carvings from Anatolia, and Persian and Anatolian goldsmith’s work.

Arms and Armor

Nominally, this department includes armor and blank and firearms from the period 400 BC to the 19th century, originating from Europe, Asia and North America. Thus, archaeological finds are also found here, but the focus is on elaborately designed objects that are examples of the arts and crafts of the respective era. Thus, they are often magnificent armor and weapons. One focus of the collection is European armor, for example for tournaments, from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Among them are several suits of armor made in the royal workshops of the Tudors in Greenwich, as well as several southern German suits of armor for “horse and rider”, which, presented free-standing, are the eye-catcher of the exhibition rooms. In addition, Islamic armor from 15th century Persia and Anatolia is on display, as well as jeweled weapons from the Ottoman court in Turkey and the Mughal court in India. The extensive collection of Japanese armor and weapons, beginning with works from the Middle Ages, is considered the most significant outside Japan.

Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

The works shown in this section were created in Africa, Oceania, and pre-colonial America, so they are objects that, in Germany, for example, are traditionally found in ethnology museums rather than art museums. Although some such objects had been collected at the Metropolitan Museum since 1882, the decisive impetus to present them on an equal footing with European or Asian art took place in 1969: Nelson A. Rockefeller offered his personal collection of non-European art, which until then had formed the basis of the Museum of Primitive Art he had founded, to the Metropolitan Museum as a donation. De facto, the former Museum of Primitive Art was incorporated into the Metropolitan Museum. In the process, the objects on display were deliberately regarded as works of art, not merely as documents of their respective cultures, and they were placed on an equal footing with Western art in terms of their valuation within the Metropolitan Museum. Since this step, the Metropolitan Museum has also fulfilled, from its own point of view, the claim to present the art of mankind in an encyclopedic manner. Through the endowment of the Rockefeller Collection, the department has numerous outstanding works of African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian art (e.g., a pendant mask carved from ivory from the Kingdom of Benin, a mosaic shield from the Solomon Islands, masks from the Torres Strait Islands, a Mayan stele), and it has since been further strengthened on the one hand by targeted acquisitions and on the other by donations.

Asian Art

With over 35,000 objects, the collection of Asian art is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the U.S. It features works of art from all cultural regions of Asia (China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Himalayas) and covers the period from the 4th millennium BC to the early 20th century. Asian art, although collected at the Metropolitan Museum since 1879 and organized as a separate department since 1915, was initially collected less intensively than European and American art. This changed in the 1970s. Through the active acquisition policy that began at that time, as well as through donations, the high level and comprehensive orientation of today’s collection of Asian art was achieved in the following years. The collection focuses on Chinese calligraphy and painting, Japanese folding screens and woodblock prints, as well as Chinese, South and Southeast Asian sculptures and early paintings from Nepal and Tibet. As in other departments, the presentation in the Asian wing combines works of art with handicrafts and objects of cultural history (metalwork, ceramics, lacquer work, textiles) to give a comprehensive impression of each cultural period. A resting place for the visitor is the Astor Courtyard, a courtyard designed in the style of the Ming Dynasty.

The Costume Institute

The collection includes over 35,000 garments from Europe, Asia, Africa and America, reflecting both the historical development of fashion and regional traditions. The collection is considered one of the most important of its kind in the world. Because of the objects’ sensitivity to light, the department does not have a permanent exhibition, but presents parts of its holdings in three temporary exhibitions each year. The rooms used for this purpose are located in the basement of the museum. Since the 1970s, exhibitions at the Costume Institute have also been devoted to current fashion topics and have been noticed and supported by the fashion industry, i.e. compared to the other departments of the museum, the Costume Institute is much more closely linked to current developments. For example, the annual benefit gala is one of the fixed points in the annual routine of New York high society.

Drawings and Prints

With a stock of around 15,000 drawings and 1.5 million prints, the collection represents one of the largest copperplate engraving cabinets in the world. Since these works on paper are sensitive to light and therefore cannot be permanently exhibited, the department shows changing cross-sections of its own collection in an exhibition room set up for this purpose. The department focuses on Western European and North American graphic works made after the Middle Ages. Important holdings include Italian and French drawings from the 15th to 19th centuries, early German prints, and 18th-century Italian and 19th-century French prints.

Egyptian Art

The collection of Egyptian art, with its approximately 36,000 objects, is one of the best outside Cairo. It covers the chronological development from the Stone Age through Pharaonic Egypt to the occupation by the Romans. More than half of the collection comes from the museum’s own archaeological campaigns in Egypt during the first half of the 20th century. Combining main and study galleries, virtually all objects in the collection are on permanent display. Highlights of the collection include from the Old Kingdom the Mastaba of Perneb (5th Dynasty), from the Middle Kingdom wooden models from the Tomb of Meketre at Thebes (ca. 1990 BC) and jewelry of Princess Sithathoriunet (ca. 1897-1797 BC), and from the New Kingdom sculptures of Pharaoh Hatshepsut. On display in a separate wing is the Temple of Dendur, a temple built under Emperor Augustus c. 15 B.C., dismantled during the construction of the Nasser Dam and donated to the United States by the Egyptian government in 1965 in gratitude for its assistance in saving Nubian cultural relics.

European Paintings

This department brings together works of Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, German, British and French painting from the 12th to the end of the 19th century and thus includes Old Masters as well as 19th century painting; these two areas are exhibited in separate galleries. The collection is based, on the one hand, on various important private collections given to the museum, especially in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and, on the other hand, on targeted purchases of individual works by the museum, some of which were among the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction or in the art trade.

Some of the artists represented in the Italian collection are Giotto, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini, Andrea Mantegna, Sassetta, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Titian, Raphael, Bronzino, Lorenzo Lotto, Veronese, Caravaggio and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

The important and extensive collection of Old Dutch art features works by Jan van Eyck, Gerard David, Petrus Christus, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, Hans Memling and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, among others. The very extensive collection of the Dutch Golden Age includes works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Jacob van Ruisdael, among others. Major works of Flemish painting are by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthonis van Dyck.

The small Old German collection includes works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger, for example. Important paintings in the collection of French Old Masters are by Jean Clouet, Valentin de Boulogne, Nicolas Poussin, Georges de la Tour, François Boucher, Antoine Watteau, Chardin, Fragonard and Jacques-Louis David. The rather small collection of Spanish old masters shows, for example, works by El Greco, Velazquez, Jusepe de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán and Goya. English painters represented include Thomas Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds, John Constable and William Turner.

As far as the 19th century is concerned, the emphasis is on painting from France, especially on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, where one of the best collections in the world can be found, in which its most important representatives are usually represented with several major works. Some of the artists from 19th century France are Ingres, Daumier, Delacroix, Courbet, Rosa Bonheur, Corot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Rousseau. In addition, the museum also has some works of 19th century European painting outside France, including Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

This department brings together some 50,000 Western European objects from the Renaissance to the early 20th century, including sculpture, furniture and other woodwork, ceramics, glass, metalwork, jewelry, clocks and scientific instruments, as well as tapestries and other textiles. Among the department’s focal points are Italian Renaissance sculptures, those from 18th- and 19th-century France, furniture and silver from England, Italian majolica, and German and French porcelain. Many works are displayed in Period Rooms or are historic rooms, such as the studiolo from the palace of Federico da Montefeltro in Gubbio (Italy, c. 1478-82), a courtyard from Vélez Blanco (Spain, 1506-15), and several 18th-century French salons.

Greek and Roman Art

Ancient art has been part of the museum’s collection program since its inception. The first object acquired was a Roman sarcophagus. Today, in the field of Greek art, the department includes works from ancient Greece, Cyprus and Greek-influenced Asia Minor, as well as from the then Greek colonies on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; in addition, there are objects from even earlier cultures on the territory of present-day Greece. In a corresponding way, Roman art from the entire Roman Empire is shown, as well as works of the earlier cultures in Italy (e.g. the Etruscans). The chronological endpoint of this section, following the conventions of the 19th century, is the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity. The art of late antiquity is consequently omitted and presented instead in the Byzantine collection. The collection focuses on Cypriot sculptures, the outstanding collection of Attic sculptures, Greek vase painting, Roman portrait busts, Roman wall paintings and goldsmith’s work.

Islamic Art

The department has more than 12,000 works of Islamic art representing all Islamic-influenced cultural areas, from Spain and Morocco in the west to India in the east. Chronologically, it spans from the founding of Islam in 622 A.D. to the 19th century. One focus of the collection is miniatures from Persia and the Mughal Empire in India. Also extensively represented are glass and metalwork from Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia, as well as ceramics and textiles, especially carpets, from throughout the Islamic world. An example of an Ottoman room ensemble is the Nur al-Din Room from 1707, installed in the museum and originating from Damascus.

The Robert Lehman Collection

This department oversees the former private collection of Robert Lehman (1891-1969, head of the one-time investment bank Lehman Brothers), which was transferred to the museum after his death and is displayed in a specially constructed wing whose ambience is modeled on that of Robert Lehman’s private residence. The collection includes some 2,600 works of Western European art-paintings, decorative arts, and drawings-from the fading Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

Among the paintings, one focus is early Italian painting, especially from Siena and Florence (including works by Ugolino di Nerio, Simone Martini, Giovanni di Paolo, and Sandro Botticelli), and another is Old Netherlandish painting (including works by Petrus Christus, Hans Memling, and Jean Hey). In addition, the Old Masters collection also includes important works from later periods, such as by El Greco, Rembrandt and Goya. French paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as by Ingres, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Fauvists, as well as Pierre Bonnard and Balthus, follow in chronological order. The decorative arts collection includes Renaissance majolica, Venetian glass, furniture, goldsmith and enamel work, jewelry, textiles, bronzes, and an extensive collection of historic picture frames. The collection of drawings, which is not on permanent display, is also very important; it is particularly extensive in Venetian drawings from the 18th century, but also includes numerous other masterpieces from the Renaissance to the 20th century (by Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, and Georges Seurat, among others), as well as some important miniatures.

Medieval Art

The Department of Medieval Art shows its works in two different spaces: One in the main building on Fifth Avenue and the other in The Cloisters in northern Manhattan.

With more than 6,000 objects, the collection in the Main Building covers the entire period of the European Middle Ages. A decisive point in its collection history was the donation of numerous sculptures and works of medieval treasure art from the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan in 1917. The current collection focuses primarily on smaller works such as Byzantine decorative arts (including several silver treasures), enamel and goldsmith work, and ivory carvings, as well as Gothic tapestries, stained glass, and stone sculptures (some from Saint-Denis Abbey, Notre-Dame in Paris, or Amiens Cathedral). Among the significant individual works in the department are the “Chalice from Antioch,” the ivory panel depicting a church endowment of Otto I from his series for Magdeburg Cathedral, a 12th-century wooden Madonna from Auvergne, a marble eagle lectern by Giovanni Pisano, a sculpture of the “Visitation” attributed to Master Henry of Constance, and figures from the tomb of Jean de Berry in Bourges.

For information on the collection at The Cloisters, see the following link.

Modern Art

The Modern Art Department displays works from circa 1900 to the present, with a geographic focus on Europe and North America. The Metropolitan Museum has always defined itself as collecting works of art up to the present, but acquisitions of then-contemporary art during the Museum’s first decades are now located in the “historical” departments on 19th-century American or European art. The modern art department currently contains more than 10,000 works, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, and design.

Prominent works of French classical modernism include those by, for example, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Roger de la Fresnaye, André Derain, Pierre Bonnard, Chaim Soutine, and Balthus. Classical Modernism from Germany is represented by works by Paul Klee, Kandinskys, Beckmanns, Emil Nolde and Otto Dix, among others. Several works by Umberto Boccioni represent Futurism. Significant examples of North American art of the first half of the 20th century are by Maurice Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Stuart Davis, among others. Post-World War II American art is also extensively represented, with the likes of Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Gabriele Evertz, Barnett Newman, Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, David Smith, and Louise Bourgeois. European contemporary art, on the other hand, is less extensively represented; here one finds paintings by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Lucian Freud, among others.

Musical Instruments

This department gathers about 5,000 musical instruments covering the period from 300 BC to the present day. The instruments are collected with consideration of technology, social significance, and tonal and visual beauty. Within the framework of the Metropolitan Museum as an art museum, there is an emphasis on musical instruments, which can also be considered outstanding examples of arts and crafts. The stated goal of this department is to provide an encyclopedic account of the development of musical instruments worldwide. As a result, musical instruments from non-Western countries are also extensively represented, including many made of precious materials. Among the Western musical instruments, special mention should be made of splendidly designed Renaissance and Baroque instruments, European and American keyboard instruments (including the oldest surviving piano by Bartolomeo Cristofori from 1720), wind instruments from the 17th to the 19th centuries, stringed instruments by famous violin makers such as Antonio Stradivari, Andrea Amati, Joachim Tielke and Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, an American organ by Thomas Appleton, and guitars used by Andrés Segovia.

Photographs

The Department of Photographs documents the development and artistic use of the medium of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present day. It includes over 20,000 works primarily from Europe and North America, but other parts of the world are also represented, such as Japan. As with the ”Drawings and Prints” department, the photographs are sensitive to light and therefore cannot be permanently exhibited; therefore, the photographs displayed in the exhibition rooms, each intended to represent a cross-section of the collection, are changed regularly.

The cornerstone of the photography collection was an initial donation of his own works by the American photographer, gallery owner and patron Alfred Stieglitz in 1928, which he followed up with others. As a result, the artists associated with Stieglitz’s ”Gallery 291” and the magazine ”Camera Work” are extensively represented, especially Edward Steichen, but also F. Holland Day, Adolphe de Meyer, Gertrude Käsebier, Paul Strand, and Clarence Hudson White. The collection also includes many important works of early British photography, French photography of the 1850s, works by important photographic artists from the period between the world wars, the period after the Second World War and contemporary artists.

Met Breuer

A new venue, the Met Breuer, opened in 2016. The Marcel Breuer-designed building at Madison Avenue and 75th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side exhibits modern and contemporary art. It previously housed the Whitney Museum of American Art, which moved to a new building designed by Renzio Piano in the Meatpacking District.