The Met

About the Book

"The Met is one of the greatest museums in the world, housing the artifacts whose images are instantly recognizable ciphers of civilization. But what about those who made and restored, bought and sold, catalogued, guarded and visited those artifacts? In The Met, historian Jonathan Conlin has mined the papers of directors and trustees, curation and secretary archives, municipal records, and oral histories to compile the first scholarly, single-author survey of the 150-year-old institution. This is a history of the Met that runs counter to the great-man style institutional biographies that are typical of museums: looking at the tenures of directors and curators as top-down histories. Instead, Conlin looks at the people and forces inside and outside the Met that shaped it and its collections. The Met is a window through which we can see New York history, art history, colonial politics, Anglo-American relations, and more. He ventures beyond the Met's walls to trace its far-reaching impact, without neglecting the great collectors and curators or all the communities who made the Met their own: Black and white, rich and poor, young and old, Manhattanites and tourists. The Met is the story of the people behind and in front of the familiar objects. The story of how a diverse set of communities in the "third great city of the civilized world" collected an astonishing wealth of remarkable objects and made them their own. This is an episodic history capturing pivotal moments in the birth and growth of the Met: the initial European acquisitions swept up during the calamities of the Franco-Prussian War; the infighting within the American art and museum scene at the close of the nineteenth century; the railroad baron benefactors and board members who changed the Met's style of art connoisseurship; the ideas of Americanness that emerged during the isolationist period after World War I, which slowed European art acquisitions; the colonial looting of Egyptian artifacts and their route to British and American museums; and all the other tensions between social class, old money and new money, schools of art, old world and new world, modernity and tradition that played out in the curation of the museum's exhibits"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A tour de force of original research and critical insight, Jonathan Conlin's The Met is a fascinating study, a must read for anyone interested in the multifaceted history of the United States' premier art museum.--Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States

As well researched and illustrated as it is written, Conlin's The Met offers a rich, incisive, original, and highly entertaining account of the evolution of America's most famous museum.--Andrew McClellan, author of The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao

Conlin has written a remarkably wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and scholarly history of the Metropolitan Museum from a variety of intellectual perspectives, including examination of those who have visited it, paid for it, and run it--directors, staff, educators, trustees, and museum attendants.--Charles Saumarez Smith, former director of the National Gallery, London

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).