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Venue
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
6 moments on Art Journal
About
Founded in 1870 by a group of businessmen, financiers, and artists who wanted New York to have a collection to rival Europe's great museums, the Met has grown into one of the most genuinely encyclopedic museums on Earth, roughly two million objects spanning five thousand years, from Egyptian temples to American period rooms to a full suit of Japanese armor. It sits directly on Central Park, and the building itself has been added onto so many times since 1880 that walking through it means passing through a rough timeline of American museum architecture as much as a timeline of art.
The scale is the whole challenge: nobody sees the Met in one visit, so it helps to pick two or three departments in advance rather than wandering and hoping. The Temple of Dendur, an actual Egyptian temple reassembled inside a glass-walled hall overlooking the park, is worth building a route around. Note that the old pay-what-you-wish policy now only applies to New York State residents, everyone else pays a fixed admission, and that ticket also covers the Met Cloisters, the museum's medieval art branch further uptown in Fort Tryon Park, a genuinely worthwhile trip built around cloisters shipped over from actual French and Spanish monasteries.
Artworks at this venue
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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