Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is the largest art museum in the United States. It includes more than 2 million works of art. The city of New York owns the building, but the collections belong to a corporation that runs the museum under a charter granted in 1870. The museum offers concerts and lectures in a 700-seat auditorium. Its shops sell art books, posters, and reproductions of works of art from the collections.
The collections of ancient art
include Egyptian prehistoric pottery, wall paintings, sculpture, and jewelry, and an original Egyptian tomb dated about 2450 B.C. Greek and Roman objects include vases and stone sculptures, bronzes, gems, jewelry, glass, and wall paintings. Etruscan art includes terra cotta work. Art from Mesopotamia, Persia, and Turkey is represented by sculptures, ivories, bronzes, and works in silver and gold.
The collections of Asian art
include works from China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia dating from 2000 B.C. to the present. They contain paintings, sculpture, ceramics, bronzes, jades, decorative arts, and textiles. The Chinese galleries include monumental Buddhist sculpture and a Chinese scholar’s garden court. The collection of Islamic art is the largest in the world. An entire wing is devoted to the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas.
The collections of European paintings
date from the 1100’s through the 1800’s. The decorative arts collection dates from the Renaissance to the 1900’s and includes entire rooms from the palaces and great houses of France, England, and Spain.
The American art collections
contain paintings, prints, drawings, decorative arts, and architecture from the colonial period to the 1800’s. The museum also has 24 period rooms dating from 1640 to a Frank Lloyd Wright living room built from 1912 to 1915.
Art of the 1900’s and early 2000’s
includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts. These items are mostly European and American works.
The Costume Institute
collection contains clothing from the 1600’s to the present. This clothing is from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education
provides facilities for the museum’s educational activities. It offers a library, an auditorium, and classrooms.
The Cloisters
, located in Fort Tryon Park, is a branch of the museum devoted to medieval art. Its collections include paintings, tapestries, metalwork, sculpture, ivories, and stained glass. The Cloisters also features parts of monasteries and churches from France and Spain, and a lovely outdoor garden.
The Met Breuer
opened in 2016 in the building that formerly housed the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Met Breuer is the home of works in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art. The building is named for architect Marcel Breuer, who designed the structure.
