Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5,727,258 visitors in 2024, it is the most-visited museum in the United States and the fourth-most visited art museum in the world.
In 2000, its permanent collection had over two million works; it currently lists a total of 1.5 million works. The collection is divided into 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870. The museum was established by a group of Americans, including philanthropists, artists, and businessmen, with the goal of creating a national institution that would inspire and educate the public. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art ranging from the ancient Near East and ancient Egypt, through classical antiquity to the contemporary world. It includes paintings, sculptures, and graphic works from many European Old Masters, as well as an extensive collection of American, modern, and contemporary art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and decorative arts and textiles, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries.
Collections
The Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes 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 maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, 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 great number of period rooms, ranging from first-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. Since the late 1800s, the Museum has been collecting diverse materials from all over the world. Its outreach to "exhibition designers, architects, graphic designers, lighting designers, and production designers" helps the museum to maintain its collection in good condition.Geographically designated collections
Ancient Near Eastern art
Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East. From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the museum'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 Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Hittite, Sasanian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Elamite cultures, as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects. The highlights of the collection include the Sumerian Stele of Ushumgal, the Elamite silver Kneeling Bull with Vessel, the Pratt Ivories, and a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II.Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, in addition to Mesoamerican antiquities, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman, philanthropist and then NY Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Before Rockefeller's collection was gifted to the Met, Rockefeller founded The Museum of Primitive Art in New York City with the intention of displaying these works, after the Met had previously shown little interest in his art collection. In 1968, the Met had agreed to a temporary exhibition of Rockefeller's work. However, the Met then requested to include the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in their permanent collection. The arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas opened to the public in 1982, under the title, "The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing". This wing is named after Nelson Rockefeller's son, Michael Rockefeller, who died while collecting works in New Guinea.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 Wing exhibits Non-Western works of art created from – present, including a wide range of particular cultural traditions. Significantly, this work was regarded as art, judged on aesthetic terms, in a Western art museum. Before then, objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas were often considered to be the work of "primitives" or ethnographic work, rather than art.
The Wing exhibits the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in an exhibition separated by geographical locations. The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 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.
Curator of African Art Susan Mullin Vogel discussed a famous Benin artifact acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972. It was originally auctioned in April 1900 by a lieutenant named Augustus Pitt Rivers at the price of 37 guineas.
In December 2021, the Met began its $70 million renovation of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing's African, ancient American, and Oceanic art galleries, originally planned to begin in 2020 but now set for completion in 2024. The 40,000 square-feet renovation includes the reinstallation of an exterior glass curtain, which had deteriorated, as well as the galleries in their entirety, which house 3,000 works.
Asian art
The Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, that is arguably the most comprehensive in the US. 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, and spans 4,000 years of Asian art. Major Asian civilizations are well-represented in the Met's Asian department. The pieces on display represent diverse types of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking. The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of Cambodian, Indian, and Chinese art, as well as for its Nepalese and Tibetan works, and the arts of Burma, and Thailand. Three ancient religions of India—Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism—are well represented in these sculptures. However, not only "art" and ritual objects are represented in the collection; many of the best-known pieces are functional objects. The Asian wing also contains the Astor Court, a complete Ming Dynasty-style garden court, modeled on a courtyard in the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou. Maxwell K. Hearn has been the current department chairman of Asian Art since 2011.Egyptian art
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 26,000 separate pieces of Egyptian art from the Paleolithic era through the Ptolemaic 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 rarest pieces in the Met's Egyptian collection are 13 wooden models, discovered in a tomb in the Southern Asasif in western Thebes 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. William the Faience Hippopotamus is a miniature that has become the informal mascot of the museum. Other notable items in the Egyptian collection include the Chair of Reniseneb, the Lotiform Chalice, and the Metternich Stela.However, the popular centerpiece of the Egyptian Art department continues to be the Temple of Dendur. Dismantled by the Egyptian government as part of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia 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 a new wing at the Met in 1978. Situated in a large room and partially surrounded by a reflecting pool and illuminated by a wall of windows opening onto Central Park, the Temple of Dendur has been one of the Met's most enduring attractions. Among the oldest items at the Met, a set of Archeulian flints from Deir el-Bahri which date from the Lower Paleolithic period, are part of the Egyptian collection. The first curator was Albert Lythgoe, who directed several Egyptian excavations for the museum. Since 2013 the curator has been Diana Craig Patch.
In 2018, the museum built an exhibition around the golden-sheathed 1st-century BCE coffin of Nedjemankh, a high-ranking priest of the ram-headed god Heryshaf of Heracleopolis. Investigators determined that the artifact had been stolen in 2011 from Egypt, and the museum returned it.