The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ~ Almost 3 Million Works Of Art Spanning 5 Thousand Years

Written by Alfred Margulies Wednesday, 16 February 2011 00:28

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially known as “The Met”) is one of the world's largest and finest art museums, visited by nearly five million people each year. Its collections include almost three million works of art spanning five thousand years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. The main building is located on the eastern edge of Central Park, along "Museum Mile" in New York City, but there is also a smaller second location, at "The Cloisters", in Upper Manhattan, which features much of the collection of medieval art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded on April 13, 1870, and first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Under the guidance of its first board of directors, the Met's holdings, initially consisting of a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 mostly European paintings, quickly outgrew the available space and in 1873 the museum moved from Fifth Avenue to the Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street. However the growing collection required still more space than the mansion could provide, and in 1880, the Metropolitan Museum moved to its current site in Central Park. The original purpose-built Gothic-Revival-style building designed by American architect Calvert Vaux 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 then the building has been greatly expanded in size and the various additions now completely surround the original structure. The present facade and entrance structure along Fifth Avenue were completed in 1926. The Met measures almost 1⁄4-mile (400 m) long and with more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2) of floor space is more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building. The City of New York owns the museum building and contributes utilities, heat, and some of the cost of guardianship, the collections are owned by a private corporation of Fellows and Benefactors. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.metmuseum.org

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 19th 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, eighteen Rembrandts including “Aristotle With a Bust of Homer” and numerous artworks by Auguste Renoir. 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”, Jacques-Louis David's “The Death of Socrates”, Velázquez's “Juan de Pareja” and Duccio's “Madonna and Child”. 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 15th through the early 20th centuries. Though the collection is particularly concentrated in Renaissance sculpture it also contains comprehensive holdings of furniture, jewelry, glass and ceramic pieces, tapestries, textiles, and timepieces and mathematical instruments. The collection even includes an entire 16th century patio from the Spanish castle of Vélez Blanco, reconstructed in a two-story gallery, and the intarsia studiolo from the ducal palace at Gubbio. 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.

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 20th 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. The American Decorative Arts Department includes about 12,000 examples of American decorative art, ranging from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries. One of the prizes of the 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, Henry E. Sharp, William Jay Bolton, and John LaFarge. 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 numerous pieces by Paul Revere as well as Tiffany & Co. In addition the Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art that is arguably the most comprehensive in the US. 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 Astor garden court, modeled on a courtyard in the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets in Suzhou.

The Met's fascinating collection of musical instruments, with about five thousand examples of musical instruments from all over the world, is virtually unique among major museums. Instruments are included in the collection not only on aesthetic grounds, but also insofar as they embodied technical and social aspects of their cultures of origin. 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. 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 gallery is one of the most recognizable images of the museum. The department's 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 19th and 20th centuries.In 1937 the Museum of Costume Art 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.

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 13 wooden models discovered in a tomb in the Southern Asasif in western Thebes in 1920. 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 becoming one of the Met's most enduring attractions. The Met's collection of Greek and Roman art contains more than 35,000 works dated through AD 312. 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". 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. The Met's collection of medieval art consists of a comprehensive range of Western art from the 4th through the early 16th centuries, as well as Byzantine and pre-medieval European antiquities not included in the Ancient Greek and Roman collection. 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. The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park 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.

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” alongside works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and many others. A highlight of the collection is the forty paintings by Paul Klee, which span his entire career. 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," this is one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States, and therefore the museum decided to keep it together, rather than splitting it between existing departments. 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. 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 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.

Amongst the many temporary exhibitions currently on view at the Met are, “Extravagant Display: Chinese Art in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” (until 1 May 2011) features the art of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Ruled by the Manchus, a non-Han Chinese people from the far northeast, the Qing dynasty, in particular the reign of the powerful and erudite Qianlong Emperor (1736–1795), was a period of peace and prosperity that witnessed a spectacular flowering of the visual arts. Textiles, lacquers, ivories, jades, porcelains, and other objects were created both in palace workshops in Beijing and in specialized artistic centers such as the enormous kiln complex at Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province. Works in all media exhibit an appreciation for multilayered surfaces covered with dense, disciplined designs, many drawn from earlier periods in Chinese art. Drawn largely from the Museum's permanent collection, this exhibition explores the vibrancy and innovation of Chinese art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, underscoring the taste for extravagant imagery that characterized the period. In one room, theatrical costumes used in lavish court performances are on display, while objects in another room demonstrate the mastery with which Qing artists manipulated natural materials such as lacquer (made from tree sap), ivory, and bamboo. The third room features works in more resilient materials, jade and other hard stones, metals, and enamels, that were made not only for the court but as part of the extensive global trade in Chinese objects that marked this period in world history. “Cézanne's Card Players” unites for the first time the works from Cézanne's series of card player canvases together with their associated oil studies and drawings. Also included is a carefully selected group of Cézanne's related paintings of peasants, several of which depict the same local models who appear in the card player compositions. The exhibition (on display until May 8, 2011) was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Courtauld Gallery, London. "Our Future Is In The Air: Photographs from the 1910s” surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air” is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order. “Our Future Is in the Air” runs through 10 April 2011.