The Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York, NY

212-535-7710

http://www.metmuseum.org/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world's largest and finest art museums. Its collections include more than two million works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, New York 10028-0198. For hours and admission fees please see the museum's website.

Collections

The Museum's two-million-square-foot building has vast holdings that represent a series of collections, each of which ranks in its category among the finest in the world. The American Wing, for example, houses the world's most comprehensive collection of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, presently including 24 period rooms that offer an unparalleled view of American history and domestic life. The Museum's approximately 2,500 European paintings form one of the greatest such collections in the world -- Rembrandts and Vermeers alone are among the choicest, not to mention the collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases. Virtually all of the 36,000 objects constituting the greatest collection of Egyptian art outside Cairo are on display, while the Islamic art collection is one of the world's finest. Other major collections belonging to the Museum include arms and armor, Asian art, costumes, European sculpture and decorative arts, medieval and Renaissance art, musical instruments, drawings, prints, antiquities from around the ancient world, photography, and modern art.

Exhibitions

The Metropolitan Museum presents more than 30 exhibitions each year, representing a wide range of artists, eras, and cultures.

Education

The Museum serves New York City, the United States, and people around the world with a large variety of educational training programs, fellowships, and loans of works of art. The Museum's educational programs are attended annually by approximately 350,000 general Museum visitors, students from the grade school to the university level, and teachers. These programs include tours, lectures, symposia, film showings, teacher-training workshops, visitor information, reference library services, and apprenticeship and fellowship programs.

In addition, more than 5,000 works of art are loaned each year by the Metropolitan Museum to other museums and cultural institutions throughout the United States and the world.

The American Wing

The American Wing houses one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of American art in existence -- more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts objects -- all of which are accessible to the public on four floors of gallery and study areas. It also features one of the Museum's loveliest and most popular spaces, The Charles Engelhard Court, a glassed-in garden featuring large-scale American sculptures, leaded-glass windows, and other architectural elements.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired important examples of American art since its establishment in 1870. Today the collection is supervised by two curatorial departments: American Paintings and Sculpture, established in 1948, and American Decorative Arts, organized in 1934. (Paintings and sculpture created by artists born after 1876, as well as decorative arts created after 1916, are part of the Museum's Department of Modern Art.)

The American Wing's collection of paintings, comprehensive in scope and extraordinary in quality, illustrates almost all phases of the history of American art from the late 18th to the early 20th century. It includes masterworks by such artists as John Singleton Copley, Ralph Earl, Gilbert Stuart, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and James McNeill Whistler. Among the most celebrated paintings are Stuart's portrait of George Washington, Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, Cole's The Oxbow, Church's Heart of the Andes, Eakins's The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), and Sargent's Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau). The wing also is home to one of the best known works in American art, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's monumental 1851 canvas, Washington Crossing the Delaware.

The sculpture collection is equally distinguished and is especially strong in Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts works. Artists represented include Erastus Dow Palmer, John Quincy Adams Ward, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Frederic Remington, and Frederick William MacMonnies.

Works in the decorative arts extend in date from the late 17th to the early 20th century. Among the 25 furnished period rooms that span this period and offer an unparalleled view of American domestic architecture are the grand rococo pre-Revolutionary Van Rensselaer hall (1769), a McKim, Mead & White stair hall (1884), and a Frank Lloyd Wright living room (1915). Furniture includes masterpieces from the leading 18th-century cabinetmaking centers of Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, as well as works by Duncan Phyfe, Charles Honoré Lannuier, John Henry Belter, Alexander Roux, and the Herter Brothers created in 19th-century New York City. Highlights in the silver collection include the work of Paul Revere and Tiffany & Company. The extensive glass collection incorporates blown- and pressed-glass vessels, with superb works by the New England Glass Company, the Dorflinger Works, and Tiffany Studios. The collection of American stained glass, from the 17th through the early 20th century, is perhaps the most comprehensive anywhere and features the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The ceramics holdings incorporate a wide variety from Pennsylvania-German redware to Rookwood Pottery. The textiles collection includes over 100 quilts, 18th- and early-19th-century needlework samplers, and fabrics designed by Candace Wheeler.

The American Wing also houses The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, which puts on view the Museum's entire reserve collection of American objects -- about 850 paintings, 100 sculptures, 600 pieces of furniture, and 7,000 works in other decorative media, including silver, glass, and ceramics.

TFAO also suggests these DVD or VHS videos:

New World Visions: American Art and the Metropolitan Museum. A two-part 1984 series, 58 minutes each, interweaves painting, sculpture, decorative arts

and architecture in an exploration of uniquely American art forms. Using the collections of the Museum as a starting point, the programs were shot on location in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and New England. Part 1 covers the years 1650-1820 and Part 2 covers the years 1820-1914. Part I begins in the 17th-century Hart Room of The Metropolitan Museum's American Wing, continues through Colonial times, and ends with the emergence of the Hudson River School around 1820. Part II explores 19th-century landscape and portrait painting in depth, and takes viewers to the Frank Lloyd Wright room at The Metropolitan Museum." A co-production of WNET and the BBC.

TFAO does not maintain a lending library of videos or sell videos. Click here for information on how to borrow or purchase copies of VHS videos and DVDs listed in TFAO's Videos -DVD/VHS, an authoritative guide to videos in VHS and DVD format.

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