Hi everyone!
In this post we are going to talk about The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York.
1. A description and some general information
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York (as known as Met) is situated in Manhattan, it is one of the world's largest and finest art museums and it is the second most visited (the first one is the Louvre of Paris).
The museum opened in February 1872 when Robert Lee Jenkins, a business man, donated his private collection. He was the first president of the museum and since then, the museum has increased its collection to more than two million objects from around the world. Actually, the president of the museum is Thomas P. Campbell, an important curator.
As you can see in the picture, the museum is very big. It is composed by a couple of buildings where you can visit multiples zones that are dedicated to art from many places and cultures.
If you want to visit the museum, it is opened to everybody from Tuesday to Sunday.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2. The collection
Met does not know what lack of creativity means. With more than two millions of pieces of art, we can find Egyptian, African, Byzantine, Islamic, Asian art and also pieces from Oceania and Middle East. If its collection is not enough for the museum, Met holds many exhibitions temporally of other artists from around the world too.
The collection is displayed in nineteen separate departments, each of which has a specialized staff of curators, scholars and art restorers. These departments are well organized and divided in the buildings the museum is composed.
Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aka Met.
3. Departments
As I said before, the museum has nineteen departments, which some of them are:
- Medieval
- Greek and Roman
- Asia
- Africa
- Egyptian art
- The America Wing
- Ancient Near Eastern art, etc.
We are going to talk about four of the departments.
3.1. European sculpture and decorative arts
This is one of the largest departments at the Met, holding in excess of 50,000 pieces from the 15th through the early 20th centuries.
Though the collection is quiet concentrated in Renaissance sculpture from Europe, it also contains holdings of furniture, jewelry, glass and ceramic pieces, tapestries, textiles, timepieces and mathematical instruments.
Here we can find art by Vélez Blanco, Bernini or Rodin.
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| Some of the European sculpture |
3.2. Drawings
This is the museum's largest department: his collection has over 11,000 drawings of various artists, for example, Monet, Cézanne or Rembrandt.
In this part of the collection you can find art from different styles.
But the museum has also given a particular emphasis to the collections of American art. The first piece in joining in this collection was a sculpture by Hiram Powers called California, acquired in 1870, which still is on display. In the following decades, the collection of paintings and sculptures from Americans grew to more than 1,000 paintings, 600 sculptures and 2,600 drawings, from early colonial period to the early twentieth century.
Many of the most famous paintings of the United States belong to the collection of Met, including the portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and "Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Emanuel Leutze. The collection also includes masterpieces of notable artists such as Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Eakins.
3.3. American Decorative Arts
This department includes about 12,000 American Decorative Art pieces, from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Though the Met acquired its first major collection of decorative art through a grant made in 1909 by Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, wife of financier Russell Sage, the department specifically dedicated to these objects was not created until 1934. One of the treasures of this department is a complete collection of stained glass. This collection includes many works by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The department is also well known for their rooms, where each one recreates an entire room, furnished or designed from a remarkable period. It also has a large collection of silverware, with numerous pieces of Paul Revere and works by Tiffany & Co.
3.4. Departments that are exclusive of this museum
Arms and Armor
The museum also offers a department with Arms and Armor. It is the only one of this kind in the United States and is one of the most popular collections. The parade of armored figures on horses is one of the most recognizable images of the museum. Among the collection of 15,000 objects, there are many pieces that were made for the use of kings and princes.
Modern Art
The part of modern art in in the Met collection is no quiet significant. With more than 10,000 works of art, mainly from European and American artists, the collection has many works that are icons of modernity. Among the outstanding pieces portrait of Gertrude Stein by Picasso, White Flag by Jasper Johns and Max Beckmann's triptych Beginning. Some artists are represented with works of great quality for a museum that is not dedicated to modern art.
A detail
Met also makes its collection to travel around the world because sometimes other museums from other cities hold an exhibition from it. So if you are interested in the museum, you may find an exhibition in your city.
As you have seen and read, this museum is very complete and you can explore many cultures, a plenty of styles, artistic pieces... Met does not offer just paintings, it offers a sight of the world in an artistic form.
Thank you for reading!
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