In 1866, a group of New York’s finest decided that their fair city needed a museum.
it will be huge archive. An important museum. A “national” museum that would bring great art and art education to the American people.
A museum like the National Gallery in London or the Louvre in Paris. (Never mind that Washington had already opened a national museum, the Smithsonian, in 1846 – everyone knew New York City was America’s true cultural capital.)
It will make Manhattan a world-class city; To promote American manufacturing and crafts by exposing American citizens to the finest designs and arts; And give visitors a reason to be proud of their country.
According to Jonathan Conlin’s scholarly new book, this is – very simply put – how the Metropolitan Museum of Art was bornThe Met: A History of a Museum and Its People” (Columbia University Press, out now).
It was incorporated in 1870, with no works of art in its collection and no home. Two years later, the museum had 174 paintings and a temporary exhibition space at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.
Today the Metropolitan is home to more than 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years and a majestic 2 million square foot palace in Central Park.
And yet, as Conlin makes clear in his book, we are still asking the same questions the founding trustees grappled with at its beginning: What is the purpose of a museum? who is it for? Who can have a say in how it’s run or what kind of art it contains? And is the idea of a comprehensive “universal” survey museum – whose purpose is to showcase the history of civilization through art – even a good one?
Conlin grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and has fond memories of spending time at the Met.
And yet, her book sheds light on some of the museum’s more unsavory elements: looted goods, fakes, predatory donors, racism, sexism, classism, striking guards, and more.
Beautiful American Wing? Largely motivated by exclusionary immigration policies and a desire to promote an Anglo-Saxon definition of national art. Those excellent Impressionist oils? Possibly donated by a Gilded Age sugar refiner.
The book also hasn’t come to fruition, following protests led by artist Nan Goldin against the opioid manufacturing family at the Met in 2021 to remove the Sackler name from seven exhibition spaces.
“I did all this as an important friend of the Met,” Conlin – who now teaches history at the University of Southampton in the UK – told The Post. “In the current climate, it can be difficult to be an important ally, because you are either a friend or you are an enemy. But I wouldn’t have spent so much time researching the history of the Met if I hadn’t thought that it had a future that needed to be informed by looking at the past.
When the Met first emerged, you couldn’t go to a university and study art history or curation. So most of the people in charge were very, very rich men who could travel to Europe and buy expensive art. There were actually no artists on board.
Fortunately for the Met – but unfortunately for the 99% – industrialization after the Civil War ushered in an era of robber barons and greedy capitalism.
The oligarchs made millions from low-paid workers, while paying little or no taxes. (The income tax was allowed to expire in 1872 and did not return for good until 1916.)
These fat cats saw themselves as the new royalty, and wanted art collections and associations with places like the Met or the MFA in Boston that could reflect their new status.
“At first, there was a feeling that there were more restrictions on the export of art, and the basic idea was that [the museum] There will be casts or copies,” Conlin said. “And then quickly, I think through the influence of these oligarchs, they set their sights higher to want the prestige of origin.”
By the early 1900s, the Met had a number of plutocrats who had purchased masterpieces on loan through their capitalist profits.
Henry Havemeyer of the American Sugar Refining Company – was known for his shady business deals, but he collected French art. He and his wife Luisine donated more than 300 objects to the Met, including a trove of Impressionist paintings by Manet, Degas, and Renoir.
Famous financier JPMorgan served as president of the Met and funded its first Egyptian excavations. Yet the museum was disappointed upon his death that he did not leave his vast art collection to the institution. (His son bequeathed a good portion of it to the Met four years later.)
“I think traditionally historians of collecting don’t look at where the money came from before they spend it,” Conlin said. ,[But] There is a connection between how Havemeyer collected art and how he collected his fortune – that is, aggressively, ruthlessly.
“It was about the chase, it was about the fight,” especially during public auctions, when the crowd would cheer as the bids went up. “It was almost like the WWF approach to art acquisition.”
The Met’s first director was then Luigi Palma di Cesnola: a former Union cavalry officer who had gone to Cyprus to search for treasures, most of which he sold to the Met.
Subsequent archaeological excavations found even more treasures, although he was accused of altering the statues, manipulating and inflating numbers and dates, and admitted trying to circumvent and circumvent Ottoman restrictions on excavations and exports. Was done.
Conlin compared him to circus impresario PT Barnum. “He brought a kind of theater to the Met,” she said.
The Met – despite its rarified air – sometimes likes some good old glitz. Of course, there’s the Met Gala each May, which became famous in the 1970s under the tutelage of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
Today, the event is a showcase of avant-garde fashion, such as Katy Perry walking down the museum’s Fifth Avenue staircase as a chandelier in 2019. But in 1961, museum director James J. Rorimer shuddered as he watched the patrons dance. turn.
Sometimes the Met’s huge, explosive swings are missed. Take the 1969 show “Harlem on My Mind,” a landmark multimedia exhibit about black life in downtown Manhattan that outraged much of the African-American community.
Museum leaders were shocked when, before the show’s opening in January, black artists and community members staged a sit-in at the Met. He protested HMM’s “exclusion of black art and appropriation of black history” and called for the show’s cancellation. He also demanded that the museum hire black curators and “explore more viable relationships with the overall black community.”
The exhibition included photographs by Harlem Renaissance portrait artist James Van Der Zee, but all paintings and other “fine art” depicting Harlem and black life were created by non-blacks. Then, the exhibit’s catalog included an essay by a Harlem teenager that contained a quote that some read as anti-Semitic. In response, Mayor John Lindsay threatened to withdraw funding to the Met.
Yet the Met was slow to learn its lesson.
Its director, Thomas Hoving, responded in 1972 by hiring Lori Stokes Sims, a young black woman, as assistant curator. But most of Sims’ groundbreaking shows about black art were held outside the Met. And he was promoted to full curator only in 1995.
One interesting thing about “The Met” is that many of its historical debates and troubles still hold true today. Now in 2023, the Met Costume Institute honors the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, A controversial figure who made anti-fat, anti-Islamic and generally non-PC comments throughout his lifeIn 2020 and 2021, amid COVID lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, advocates on social media called on the Met to hire more curators of color and “decolonize” their collections. (The Met had promised to produce a report to address and improve this controversial past. “Four years later, the report they promised to produce in two years still hasn’t come out,” Conlin said drily. Said.) There is a more diverse curatorial staff, but there are still white men in charge.
And yet, there have been many improvements. The American Wing has a more comprehensive view of American art, including art from Native and Latino cultures. There are also more thoughtful shows, such as this year’s “Harlem Renaissance” portrait show, a long-awaited and insightful correction of the “Harlem on My Mind” debacle.
Rather than cancel the Met, Conlin said, we should “cherish” it and other universal survey museums like it.
“These institutions, like the Met, the British Museum or the Louvre, are celebrating shared human creativity,” Conlin said. “Much of the art here was, at one time, the trophy of a few: kings, learned mandarins or aristocrats. I guess my concern is that art is still seen as a trophy – so black art belongs to black people; Chinese art belongs to the Chinese people; And it’s not about the rest of us.”
Today, amid the noise of identity politics, “making these arguments feels progressive,” Conlin adds. “But it’s ultimately dividing us and encouraging us to ignore the things we have in common, which is that we are a uniquely creative species.”
