Read More

Read More

Read More

Read More

Read More

«Since its debut on January 5, Connections has allowed tens of thousands of viewers to become acquainted with members of our staff. Each episode sparkles with the personality of a narrator who weaves together works of art from the Met's collections, based on a theme that he or she finds particularly inspiring. Our viewers have been inspired as well.

Read More

«On February 6, 1871, a committee of the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art discussed the plan that led to the construction of the Museum's first building at its current site on the east side of New York's Central Park.

Read More

Read More

The Met is taking part in the Art Project, which Google launched today at a press conference in London. Seventeen museums from nine countries are currently participating in the Art Project, which can be accessed at www.googleartproject.com. This allows viewers both to explore the museums using Street Views technology and to view one iconic work from each museum's collection in a more in-depth way using state-of-the-art zooming technology.

Read More

Read More

Read More

Read More

Read More

Forty years ago this weekend, on January 1, 1971, The Metropolitan Museum of Art first distributed admission buttons, replacing the envelope-sized, two-color tickets that had been used during a transitional period in 1970.

Read More

Velázquez's portrait of Philip IV, king of Spain, went back on view in the European Paintings galleries today after an absence of more than a year, following the completion of a particularly complex restoration.

Read More

I'm pleased to share with you a video that takes you to some of my favorite works of art in our galleries and highlights why the Met belongs to all of us—families, students, scholars—visitors from across our nation and around the globe.

Read More

Our new and improved home page—which has beautiful, rotating images of our special exhibitions and permanent collections—launched today. In addition to listing general information about the Main Building and The Cloisters museum and gardens more prominently, the new design also makes it easy to buy online admission tickets directly from the Museum.

Read More

Thirty-five years ago today, on December 20, 1975, United States President Gerald R. Ford signed into law the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act, which gave the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities the authority to insure international exhibitions that traveled from overseas to U.S. museums. This legislation was a watershed moment in the history of art exhibitions in the United States, making it possible for museums around the world to collaborate with U.S. institutions on traveling loan shows while minimizing insurance costs to the participating institutions.

Read More

For visitors to the Metropolitan, the vast amount of amazing art on display may make it difficult to appreciate the main building's architecture as anything other than a backdrop. However, with a brief introduction, the Museum's rich architectural history comes to life and serves as a valuable complement to its collections.

Read More

In 1989, the World Health Organization designated December 1 World AIDS Day, a day of action and mourning in response to the pandemic. Along with other cultural institutions, the Met continues to participate in an annual observance of the day.

Read More

In eighteen months on the job, I have traveled all over the globe, and it is incredible to understand the scope of the Met's international reach. In fact, I have just returned from a tour of the Met's archaeological work in Egypt, activity that extends back to the earliest days of the Museum.

Read More

On November 21, 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art accessioned its first work of art—a Roman marble sarcophagus found in 1863 at Tarsus in Cilicia (modern southern Turkey).

Read More

Forty years ago this weekend, on November 14, 1970, the exhibition Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was the last in a series of five major exhibitions organized over the course of eighteen months (October 1969–February 1971) in celebration of the Museum's centennial.

Read More

Met Director Thomas P. Campbell and Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, announced jointly today that, effective immediately, the Museum will acknowledge Egypt's title to 19 ancient Egyptian objects in its collection since early in the 20th century.

Read More

The Museum announced yesterday that it will undertake a comprehensive, multi-year effort to redesign and rebuild the four-block-long outdoor plaza that fronts its landmark Fifth Avenue facade. The project will feature as one of its centerpiece elements the design and installation of all-new fountains outside the building. Following formal approval of the project at yesterday's meeting of its Board of Trustees, the Metropolitan further announced that it has named OLIN, the award-winning landscape architecture and urban design firm with studios in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, to lead this effort.

Read More

One hundred years ago today, Edward Robinson, curator of classical art and assistant director at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was named the Museum's third director.

Read More

Read More

The fall season is in full swing and the Met has never felt more vibrant. Our current exhibitions take our visitors through the full span of history, telling the story of art as no other museum can.

Read More

On October 18, 1880, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Luigi Palma di Cesnola urged the Museum's Trustees to create an art library that would help fulfill the institution's educational mission.

Read More

Jean Antoine Watteau's Mezzetin is among the Museum's most evocative works. Katharine Baetjer, curator in the Department of European Paintings, spoke with me about this small, striking painting.

Read More

We have just opened a new show, The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, one of the most complex and ambitious exhibitions ever mounted by the Metropolitan Museum.

Read More

In 1996 mosaics were accidentally uncovered during highway construction in the modern Israeli town of Lod, not far from Tel Aviv (see map). Lod is ancient Lydda, which was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 66 during the Jewish War. Refounded by Hadrian as Diospolis, Lydda was awarded the rank of a Roman colony under Septimius Severus in A.D. 200. It remained in Roman hands until becoming a Christian city and eventually succumbing to Arab conquerors in A.D. 636. The discovery of the mosaics immediately prompted a rescue excavation, undertaken by Miriam Avissar for the Israel Antiquities Authority, which revealed a series of mosaic floors that measured approximately fifty by twenty-seven feet.

Read More

Inside the museum—not just the Met but any art museum—photography has been birthed in hallways. It began to spring from the shoulders of museums' print departments in the 1920s and 1930s, when modernism was making a case for photography as an independent art form. Over the decades it has spread institutionally through the in-between spaces that architecturally mirror the medium's proudly mongrel status as both art and not art.

Read More

INDIA!, an exhibition of the art of India from the fourteenth through the nineteenth century, opened on this day in 1985 as part of a nationwide Festival of India jointly organized by the Government of India and the Indo-U.S. Sub-commission on Education and Culture.

Read More

The Met's permanent collection includes works of art that represent a wide variety of art styles, time periods, and geographic regions in Hispanic and Latin American countries, which makes celebrating these works no small task. But on Saturday, September 25, ¡Fiesta! will do just that.

Read More

On view in the Musical Instruments galleries is an arresting stringed object, an armadillo shell for its back. Ken Moore, the Frederick P. Rose Curator in Charge of Musical Instruments, spoke with me about this work.

Read More

The current exhibition Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980 features candid photographs of New Yorkers, with each of Levinstein's subjects representing a particular neighborhood. In the thirty years since these photographs were taken, New York City's neighborhoods have changed dramatically: new buildings have appeared, businesses have opened or closed, and a new generation has moved in. What would Levinstein see in the people of New York today?

Read More

Two years ago I had the good fortune of being in Florence when, at the Accademia, which every tourist visits for its collection of sculpture by Michelangelo, there was a marvelous exhibition devoted to the great fourteenth-century painter Giovanni da Milano (Italian, Lombard, active 1346–69). I spent hours in the exhibition and it was there that I first saw Christ and Saint Peter; the Resurrection; Christ and Mary Magdalen.

Read More

After days of viewing the entries and hours of narrowing the field, we have chosen four winners of the Teen T-Shirt Design Competition inspired by the special exhibition American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.

Read More

The Museum's Members just received their Summer Bulletin, which details the archaeological excavations in the ancient Near East that have been supported by the Metropolitan from 1931 to 2010. It reminds me that many people don't realize that the Met has been involved in the study of antiquity since the Museum's founding in 1870 (the Met's Egyptian Expedition began in 1906 and continued with extraordinary success for thirty years).

Read More

The signature image of the exhibition Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (closing August 15) is the Seated Harlequin, a masterpiece painted by Picasso when he was just nineteen years old. Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Chairman of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, spoke with me about the painting's imagery and style, as well as recent discoveries made by Metropolitan Museum conservators.

Read More

Among the gorgeous garments on display in the exhibition American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity (closing August 15) is an exquisite black evening dress attributed to Madame Marie Gerber of the house of Callot Soeurs. I spoke with Andrew Bolton, curator in the Met's Costume Institute, about the dress's bold design and glamorous, influential owner.

Read More

Summer visitors to the Met have only three more weeks—through Sunday, August 15—to view the popular exhibitions Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.

Read More

John D. Rockefeller Jr. once said, "I can think of nothing so unpleasant as a life devoted to pleasure." How extraordinary, then, that he would create perhaps the most idyllic retreat on the island of Manhattan: The Cloisters Museum and Gardens in Fort Tryon Park.

Read More

I recently posted an article about our twenty-two Summer College Interns (see "New Connections in the Permanent Collection"), and invited you to join us for one of our Highlight Tours or Special Topics Tours. In addition to these undergraduate-led tours, beginning July 23, our twelve Summer Graduate Interns will present Gallery Talks: hour-long lectures exploring single subjects in a carefully selected handful of rooms.

Read More

One hundred years ago today, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the doors of its library's new home to art historians, students, and the general public.

Read More

Each year, the Met holds four meetings at which curators present works of art to a special committee of Trustees for possible purchase by the Museum. It is a thoughtful and rigorous process, and it is always a thrill to see the acquired objects when they finally arrive in our galleries. This past year's purchases included four exquisite works of sculpture spanning from the ancient world to the mid-eighteenth century.

Read More

Attendance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art reached 5,240,000 visitors during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2010.

Read More

Exceptional works of art by sixty-nine New York City public school students, ages four to twenty, are on view now through August 8 in the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education through P.S. Art, a collaborative program between the New York City Department of Education and Studio in a School Association, Inc. This is the third consecutive year that the Met has hosted the juried exhibition, P.S. Art 2010: Celebrating the Creative Spirit of NYC Kids.

Read More