etropolitan Museum

The   Metropolitan Museum    was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens: businessmen and
financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first object, a Roman sarcophagus, in 1870, before it even had a building to exhibit it in. The Museum's paintings collection also began that year, when three private European collections, 174 paintings in all, came to the Museum. A number of excellent Dutch and Flemish paintings, including works by Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck, were supplemented with works by great European artists Nicolas Poussin, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Francesco Guardi, among others. The collections continued to grow for the rest of the nineteenth century. In 1873 the purchase of the Cesnola Collection excavated on the island of Cyprus established a firm foundation for the collection of antiquities. The Museum acquired two works by Edouard Manet in 1889; today the Museum has one of the world's great collections of Impressionist and Post Impressionist art. When the American painter John Kensett died in 1872, 38 of his canvases came to the Museum. But it is the twentieth century that has seen the Museum became one of the world's great art centers. Some highlights: A work by Renoir entered the Museum as early as 1907. In 1910 the Met was the first public institution in the world to accept a work of art by Matisse. William, the Egyptian hippopotamus, came to the Met in 1917. By 1979 the Museum owned five of the fewer than 35 known Vermeers. The Department of Greek and Roman Art now oversees thousands of objects, including one of the finest collections of ancient glass and silver in the world. The American Wing displays the most comprehensive collection of American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts in the world. The Egyptian art collection is the finest outside of Cairo. The Islamic art collection is exceptionally comprehensive. Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an encyclopedia of world art. Every culture from every part of the world: from Florence, Italy, to Papua, New Guinea, from the earliest times to the present and in every medium, is represented. In 1872, two years after it was founded, the Metropolitan Museum of Art moved into its first home, located in the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue in New York City. As the collection grew, more space was needed, and in 1873 the Museum relocated to the larger Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street. On March 30, 1880, the Metropolitan Museum moved to its current site in Central Park at 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue. The original Gothic Revival-style building has been greatly expanded in size since then, and the various additions, built since1888, now completely surround the original structure. The present facade and entrance structure along Fifth Avenue were completed in 1926. The building is now twenty times bigger than it was in 1880, and it has filled all of the space originally provided by the city. A comprehensive architectural plan for the Museum was approved in 1971 and completed in 1991. The architects for the project were Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, and the overall aim was to make the Museum's collections more accessible to the public, more useful to scholars, and more interesting and informative to all visitors. Among the additions to the Museum as part of the master plan are: the Robert Lehman Wing (1975), which houses an extraordinary collection of Old Masters, as well as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art; the installation in the Sackler Wing of the Temple of Dendur (1978), an Egyptian monument that was given to the United States by Egypt; The American Wing (1980), whose magnificent collection also includes twenty-five period rooms that offer an unparalleled view of American art history and domestic life; the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing (1982), for the display of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and Precolumbian America; the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing (1987), which houses twentieth-century art; and the Henry R. Kravis Wing, devoted to European sculpture and decorative arts from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century. With the building now complete, the Metropolitan Museum continues to refine and reorganize the collections in its existing spaces. In the fall of 1993 the Museum opened the newly renovated Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, and in spring of 1994 the Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for the Arts of South and Southeast Asia were opened to the public. A complete renovation and reinstallation of the Greek and Roman Galleries is under way; the first phase, the Robert and Renee Belfer Court for early Greek art, opened in June of 1996, and the additional work will be completed in stages over the next decade.