Inside the Met Museum’s intriguing past and glorious future

In 1866, a group of New York’s finest decided that their fair city needed a museum.

it would be big museum. It is an important museum. A “national” museum that will 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 opened a national museum called the Smithsonian in 1846; everyone knew that New York City was the true cultural capital of the United States.)

It will make Manhattan a world-class city; To advance American manufacturing and craftsmanship by demonstrating excellent design and artistry to U.S. citizens; and give visitors reasons to be proud of their country.

This is, loosely speaking, how the Metropolitan Museum of Art was born, according to Jonathan Conlin’s new scholarly book:The Met: The History of a Museum and Its People” (Columbia University Press, out now).

It was founded in 1870 with no art in its collection and no home. Two years later, the museum opened with 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 dating back 5,000 years and a magnificent 2 million square meter palace in Central Park.

And yet, as Conlin makes clear in his book, we still ask the questions that the founding trustees grappled with in the beginning: What is the purpose of the museum? For whom? Who will have any say in how it is run or what kind of artwork it owns? So, is the idea of ​​a comprehensive “universal” research museum that claims to showcase the history of civilization through art a good idea?

Conlin grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has fond memories of spending time at the Met.

But still, her book examines some of the museum’s more unsavory elements: looted goods, fakes, robber baron donors, racism, sexism, classism, striking guards, and more.

Beautiful American Wing? It was largely inspired by exclusionary immigration policies and the desire to promote the Anglo-Saxon definition of national art. Those gorgeous Impressionist oils? It was probably donated by a sugar refinery in the Gilded Age.

The book doesn’t even make it into the Met, with the Sackler name removed from seven exhibition spaces in 2021 following protests launched by artist Nan Goldin against the opioid-manufacturing family.

“I did all this as a critical friend of the Met,” Conlin, who now teaches history at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, told The Post. “Being a critical friend in the current environment can be difficult because you are either friend or foe. “But I wouldn’t have spent so much time researching the history of the Met if I didn’t think it had a future that needed to be informed by the past.”

When the Met first came about, you couldn’t go to university and study art history or curation. So most of those responsible were very, very rich men who had the money to go to Europe and buy expensive works of art. In fact, there were no artists on the board.

Fortunately for the Met—but unfortunately for the 99%—post-Civil War industrialization ushered in the era of robber barons and rapacious capitalism.

Oligarchs have made millions off the backs of underpaid workers, paying little or no taxes. (The income tax was allowed to expire in 1872 and did not fully return until 1916.)

These fat cats considered themselves the new royalty, and they wanted art collections and associations with places like the Met or the MFA in Boston that would showcase their newfound status.

“At first, there was a feeling that there were greater restrictions on art exports, and so the original idea was for (the museum) to have casts or replicas,” Conlin said. “And then quickly, I think under the influence of these oligarchs, they set their sights on wanting the prestige of the original.”

There were plenty of plutocrats at the Met in the early 1900s, loaning out and dangling masterpieces they had purchased thanks to their capitalist profits.

Henry Havemeyer of the American Sugar Refining Company was known for his thuggish business dealings, but he also collected French art. He and his wife, Louisine, donated more than 300 objects to the Met, including Impressionist paintings by Manet, Degas, and Renoir.

Legendary financier JP Morgan served as chairman of the Met and financed the first Egyptian excavations. But the museum was dismayed that he did not leave his extensive art collection to the institution upon his death. (His son donated a significant portion of the money to the Met four years later.)

“I think traditionally historians of collecting have tended not to look at where money comes from before it is spent,” 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 at public auctions, as crowds cheered as bids increased. “This was almost similar to the WWF approach to art acquisition.”

Then there was Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the Met’s first director: a former Union cavalry officer who went to Cyprus to dig for treasure and eventually sold most of it to the Met.

A later archaeological dig revealed even more treasure, but he was accused of altering statues, exaggerating and inflating figures and dates, and admitted that he had tried to cheat and evade Ottoman excavation and export restrictions.

Conlin compared him to ringmaster P.T. Barnum. “He brought a kind of theater to the Met,” he said.

Despite its rarefied air, the Met occasionally enjoys some good old dazzle. Of course, there’s the Met Gala, held every May and made famous in the 1970s under the patronage of famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland.

Today, the event is a showcase of avant-garde fashion, such as when Katy Perry walked the museum’s Fifth Avenue steps dressed as a chandelier in 2019. But in 1961, museum director James J. Rorimer was startled when he saw patrons dancing. Twist.

Sometimes the Met’s huge, flashy swings miss. Take the 1969 show “Harlem on My Mind”; this show is a landmark multimedia exhibition about black life in midtown Manhattan, which ultimately offended much of the African-American community.

Ahead of the exhibition’s opening in January, black artists and community members choosing the Met shocked museum leaders. They protested HMM’s “exclusion of black art and appropriation of black history” and called for the show to be cancelled. They also demanded that the museum appoint black curators and “establish a more sustainable relationship with the Total 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 made by non-blacks. The exhibition’s catalog then included an essay written by a Harlem teenager that included a quote that some read as anti-Semitic. In response, Mayor John Lindsay threatened to cut the Met’s funding.

But the Met was slow to learn its lesson.

Director Thomas Hoving responded by hiring Lowery Stokes Sims, a young black woman, as assistant curator in 1972. But most of Sims’s groundbreaking shows of black art were held outside the Met. And only in 1995 was he promoted to full curator.

One of the striking things about “The Met” is that many of the historical controversies and grievances are still relevant today. In 2023 alone, the Met Costume Institute hosted the late designer Karl Lagerfeld. a controversial person who has made anti-fat, anti-Islam, and generally un-PC comments throughout his life. In 2020 and 2021, during COVID lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, advocates on social media called for the Met to hire more black curators and “decolonize” its collections. (The Met promised to produce a report to address and repair this controversial past. “Four years later, the report they promised to produce within two years has still not appeared,” Conlin noted dryly.) There is a more diverse curatorial. staff, but those in charge are still white men.

However, there have still been many developments. The American Wing has a broader vision of American art, including art from Native and Latinx cultures. There are also more thoughtful shows, like this year’s “Harlem Renaissance” portrait exhibition; A long overdue and cheerful corrective to the “Harlem on My Mind” debacle.

Far from canceling the Met, Conlin said, we should “value” it and other universal research museums like it.

“These institutions, like the Met, the British Museum or the Louvre, celebrate shared human creativity,” Conlin said. “Most of the art here was at one point the spoils of a few people: kings, academic mandarins or oligarchs. 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; and it does not belong to the rest of us.”

Today, amid the clamor of identity politics, “it seems progressive to make these arguments,” Conlin continues. “But ultimately it compartmentalizes us and encourages us to lose sight of what we have in common: that we are a uniquely creative species.”