New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum?
This book is a groundbreaking bottom-up history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exploring both its triumphs and its failings. Jonathan Conlin tells the stories of the people who have shaped the museum—from curators and artists to museumgoers and security guards—and the communities that have made it their own. Highlighting inequalities of wealth, race, and gender, he exposes the hidden costs of the museum’s reliance on “robber barons” and oligarchs, the exclusionary immigration policies that influenced the foundation of the American Wing, and the obstacles faced by women curators. Drawing on extensive interviews with past and current staff, Conlin brings the story up to the present, including the museum’s troubled 150th anniversary in 2020. As the Met faces continued controversy, this book offers a timely account of the people behind an iconic institution and a compelling case for the museum’s vision of shared human creativity.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Innocents Abroad: The Founding Trustees, 1866–1880
2. General Cesnola and the Temple of Curium: Showmanship and Scholarship in the Age of Barnum, 1865–1895
3. Indentured Gratitude: The Havemeyers and Other Oligarchs, 1869–1913
4. Downtown: Artist-Artisans Between Commerce and Philanthropy, 1880–1914
5. The Guards: Ethnicity, Class, and Labor, 1880–1958
6. Colonial Flatware: Judge Clearwater and the Limits of Americanization, 1906–1933
7. The Ladies Lunch Club: Women and the Curatorial Profession, 1900–1940
8. The Modernists: The Museum and Modern Art, 1921–1950
9. Pupils on Parade: Museum Education as Theater, 1907–1973
10. Uptown: The Met and the “Total Black Community, ” 1943–1977
11. Self-Culture for Out-of-Towners: From Miniatures to the Annenberg Center, 1948–1977
12. Changing Occupations: Mannequins at the Met, 1942–2004
13. Legacy Systems: From Multimedia to Digital, 1983–2019
Conclusion: 2020 Vision?
Abbreviations
Notes
Sources and Select Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jonathan Conlin is professor of modern history at the University of Southampton. His books include
Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London, and the Birth of the Modern City (2014) and
Mr. Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World’s Richest Man (2019).
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