The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest museums in the world, with about two million works in its permanent collection. Today’s blog post looks at what has been described as “the most ambitious, complex, expensive and important single program of any museum in the United States.”
The Met Breuer, which opened to the public November 18, 2016, is a new 175,000-square-foot building designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Gluckman located at 32 East 63rd Street in Manhattan. It is now home to one of the world’s great art collections.
A blog about the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A blog about the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 as a museum of art and antiquities.
The present building is located in Central Park, adjacent to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s Sheep Meadow. The building was designed by the American architect Calvert Vaux (1824–95), with a conservatory by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) and is constructed of “Indiana Limestone” from the Marble Mountains near Bloomington, Indiana, which was transported to New York City via an experimental railroad built expressly for the purpose of transporting stone.
Ticket prices were originally ten cents for adults, five cents for children; admission now costs twenty-five dollars for adults.
1st floor: Ancient Near East; 2nd floor: Egypt; 3rd floor: Greece; 4th floor: Rome; 5th floor: Europe; 6th floor: Medieval and Renaissance Europe; 7th floor: Arms and Armor, Sculpture Hall8th floor: Paintings, Prints, Drawings9th floor: Musical Instruments10th floor: Decorative Arts11th floor: Architecture
The first object the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired was a collection of 134 prints, paintings, and sculptures by Correggio, Parmigianino, Rubens, Poussin, and others. The objects were sent from Paris in 1866 as a gift from a group of American citizens who had purchased them at auction; they had formerly been part of the estate of Count de Blacas d’Aulps. The collection was purchased by the museum for $100,000. The gift was announced in March 1866:
The Board of Regents on Saturday evening decided to accept the offer made by a committee appointed by the New-York citizens to purchase the fine collection of pictures recently sold at Paris.
The same announcement referred to another gift that had reached its destination—a large coin collection (approximately 5,000 coins) from James Lenox, which was transferred to the museum’s library. It was later established that his collection included eight hundred coins not owned by Lenox himself but removed from other collections or acquired privately. As a result, most of them were returned to their previous owners by 1920.[2] In 1876 another major donation arrived: a collection of ancient art consisting of about 450 objects in bronze and marble from the villa at Hadrian
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s most renowned museums. The Met’s collection includes more than two million works of art, dating from antiquity to the present and encompassing nearly every cultural tradition.
The Met presents special exhibitions throughout the year and has a vast research library open to the public that supports both its own scholarly activities and external academic programs. The museum welcomes more than 6 million visitors each year, including tourists, students, and school groups.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1870, is one of the world’s great art museums and houses encyclopedic collections of Egyptian, European, American, Asian, and ancient Near Eastern art. With more than 2 million works on view and many more in storage, the Met presents a vast panorama of human culture from all over the world.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the United States, and one of the largest in the world. It was founded in 1870, and located in New York City on the eastern edge of Central Park. The Met contains more than two million works of art from all different time periods and styles. Among its holdings are more than 1,000 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, and thousands of Native American artifacts.
The Met also has a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities that includes a large portion of the Temple of Dendur; it also houses 37,000 literary manuscripts, including resource material for Shakespeare studies.
The museum also owns the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts outside Egypt and the largest collection of Japanese artwork in America. There are even contemporary artworks on display at the Met; since 1969, it has had a program to loan out works by living artists to museums across the world.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s preeminent art museums. Its holdings include more than two million works of art spanning five thousand years of world culture, from prehistory to the present, and encompassing all media, including paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, armor, decorative arts, and decorative arts.
Tens of thousands of these works are on view at any given time in the Museum’s permanent collection galleries—sculpture in the Egyptian and Greek rooms; European painting in the West Wing; European sculpture (including arms and armor) in the Medieval Hall; European Decorative Arts in The Cloisters; Asian art in galleries on the Museum’s roof; African art in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing; Oceanic art in the Freer Gallery of Art—as well as in rotating exhibitions throughout the Museum.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, textiles and carpets, jewelry, armor and armaments, as well as one of the most comprehensive archives of photography and film available anywhere.
