Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 1. Introduction

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  The Metropolitan Museum of Art sits on Fifth Avenue at number 1000, along a stretch of Manhattan sidewalk known as Museum Mile, and it draws more visitors than any other museum in the United States. In fiscal year 2025, that number reached 5,727,258 people. The building spans more than two million square feet, making it the fourth-largest museum in the world by floor area and the largest art museum in the Americas. Inside, a permanent collection of one and a half million works is tended by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each staffed by its own scholars and conservators. What kind of institution accumulates that much, across that many centuries and continents? And how does a museum founded in 1870 by a group of philanthropists, artists, and businessmen become the place where an ancient Egyptian temple, a Ming Dynasty garden court, and the oldest surviving piano all share the same address? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Founding and First Decades

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  On the 13th of April 1870, the New York State Legislature granted the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation, defining its purpose as establishing a museum and library of art, encouraging the study of the fine arts, and furnishing what the Act called "popular instruction and recreations." The founders included businessmen, artists, and thinkers, among them Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of the man who would become the 26th president of the United States. The artist Eastman Johnson and landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church served as co-founders, as did railroad executive John Taylor Johnston, whose personal art collection seeded the institution and who became its first president.

  The museum first opened on the 20th of February 1872, housed at 681 Fifth Avenue. Its initial holdings were modest: a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 mostly European paintings purchased from European dealers in 1871. The Civil War veteran Luigi Palma di Cesnola was named its first director and served from 1879 to 1904. A 1873 purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities forced the museum to move to larger premises on West 14th Street. That too proved insufficient, and in 1880 the museum moved into the current building, the first portion of which was built that year. A later 1893 Act of the New York State Legislature formally required that the collections be kept open and accessible to the public free of charge throughout the year.

• 3. The Collectors Who Built It

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  Henry Gurdon Marquand donated major gifts to the European paintings collection in 1889, 1890, and 1891, and his example, according to museum historians, helped cultivate a broader taste for Old Master paintings among wealthy American collectors. The Benjamin Altman bequest arrived in 1913, and the Jules Bache gift followed in 1949. Yet it has been written that "the Wrightsman paintings are highest in overall quality and condition": over several decades, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman donated 94 works of unusually high quality to the Department of European Paintings, with Mrs. Wrightsman's bequest arriving in 2019.

  For Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work, the foundation was the collection assembled by Louisine Havemeyer (1855-1929) and Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847-1907). The most important portion came to the museum after Louisine died in 1929, with particular strength in works by Courbet, Corot, Manet, Monet, and Degas. Walter Annenberg and his wife Leonore added a complementary collection; before promising it to the Met in 1991, Annenberg annually loaned it to the museum for half a year at a time. He described his choice as an example of "strength going to strength." The Annenberg collection filled specific gaps, bringing rare works by Seurat and an impressive group of Van Goghs to a holding already rich in that artist.

  The Robert Lehman collection followed a different path. Banker Robert Lehman built upon a collection his father began in 1911. After Lehman's death in 1969, his Foundation donated roughly 2,600 works. Rather than integrate them into existing departments, the Met housed them in a dedicated wing evoking the interior of Lehman's own townhouse at 7 West 54th Street. The museum called it "one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States."

• 4. Collections Across Continents

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  Nelson A. Rockefeller, an American businessman, philanthropist, and then-governor of New York, donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum in 1969. It became the seed of what is now called the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, named for his son Michael, who died while collecting works in New Guinea. The wing opened to the public in 1982 and today holds more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas in 40,000 square feet on the museum's south end. The collection spans 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings through a group of 15-foot memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea.

  The Asian department holds more than 35,000 pieces, spanning 4,000 years and described by the museum as arguably the most comprehensive collection of Asian art in the United States. It includes the Astor Court, a complete Ming Dynasty-style garden court modeled on a courtyard in the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou. Maxwell K. Hearn has been the department's chairman since 2011.

  The Egyptian collection numbers more than 26,000 pieces, from the Paleolithic era through the Ptolemaic era, displayed across 40 galleries. The museum conducted its own archaeological excavations in Egypt between 1906 and 1941, and those digs contributed nearly half of the current holdings. Among the oldest objects are a set of Acheulian flints from Deir el-Bahri dating to between 300,000 and 75,000 BCE. The popular centerpiece is the Temple of Dendur, a large sandstone structure given to the United States in 1965 after the Egyptian government dismantled it to save it from rising waters caused by the building of the Aswan High Dam. It was assembled in a new wing at the Met in 1978 and now sits partially surrounded by a reflecting pool, illuminated by a wall of windows opening onto Central Park.

  The Islamic Art galleries, known since their 2011 reopening as the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, hold a collection of about 12,000 objects. They include the reconstructed Nur Al-Din Room from an early 18th-century house in Damascus, and a substantial share of the miniatures from the manuscript known as the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp I, regarded as the most luxurious of all surviving Islamic manuscripts.

• 5. Armor, Instruments, and Fashion

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  The Arms and Armor department was built on the 1904 purchase of the collection of Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, duc de Dino. The first curator, Bashford Dean, not only built the collection through gifts from himself and his circle but also arranged the purchase of his own personal collection for the museum. A subsequent curator, Stephen V. Grancsay, bought important works from Clarence H. Mackay, described as the greatest contemporary private collector of the material, who had been "wiped out by the Great Depression." Grancsay later resold some of those works to the museum at cost. The 14,000-object department contains armor belonging to Henry VIII of England, Henry II of France, and Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, and its oldest items are flint bifaces dating to 700,000-200,000 BCE. In 2020, Ronald S. Lauder promised a gift of 91 objects, described as "the most significant grouping of European arms and armor given to the Museum since 1942."

  The Musical Instruments collection began in 1889 with a donation of 270 instruments by Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown, who became the museum's first curator of musical instruments. By the time she died, that collection had grown to 3,600 instruments and filled five galleries. Today the department holds about 5,000 instruments from every continent, including several Stradivari violins and the oldest surviving piano, a 1720 model built by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

  The Costume Institute traces its roots to the Museum of Costume Art, founded by Aline Bernstein and Irene Lewisohn. In 1946, with financial support from the fashion industry, it merged with the Met. Its collection of more than 35,000 costumes and accessories does not have a permanent installation because of the fragile nature of the items. Instead, it mounts two shows each year, and its annual Benefit Gala is co-chaired by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. In 2007, the 700 available tickets started at $6,500 each. On the 14th of January 2014, the Met named the entire Costume Institute complex after Wintour.

• 6. Money, Crisis, and Change

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  In September 2016, reports surfaced of financial setbacks related to the museum's outstanding debts. By April 2017, the annual debt was approaching $40 million, alongside an outstanding bond for $250 million. A commissioned report from the Boston Consulting Group attributed the 2015-2017 difficulties to "slowing revenue, rising costs, and too many projects at once." The shortfall forced an indefinite postponement of a planned $600 million architectural expansion of the modern art galleries.

  In January 2018, museum president Daniel Weiss announced that the Met would end its century-old free-admission policy for out-of-state and foreign visitors, setting a charge of $25 per person effective March 2018. That same year, Max Hollein was named director in April. In August 2022, the museum announced that Hollein would also become CEO in July 2023.

  The museum also faced pressure over its philanthropic relationships. In 2019, under pressure from the activist group P.A.I.N., the museum announced it would review its policy for receiving financial donations, particularly those connected to the Sackler family. In December 2021, the Met announced it would remove the Sackler name from its facilities. That November brought different news: a $125 million donation from Oscar L. Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang, described as the largest gift in the museum's history. In exchange, the Met named its modern and contemporary art galleries after the Tangs. By 2024, the museum had raised $550 million toward the renovation of what is now called the Tang Wing, with Mexican architect Frida Escobedo hired to lead the redesign. In January 2026, the museum's workers voted to form a union affiliated with the United Auto Workers.

• 7. Architecture and Expansion

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  The first portion of the Met's current building was a red-brick and stone structure designed by Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. The Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway came later, designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Richard Morris Hunt and his son Richard Howland Hunt in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The firm of McKim, Mead and White completed the wings on the Fifth Avenue facade in 1910. Today the building, an accretion of more than 20 structures most of which are invisible from the exterior, measures nearly two million square feet, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building.

  The City of New York owns the building and contributes utilities, heat, and some of the cost of guardianship. The collections themselves are owned by a private corporation of fellows and benefactors totaling about 950 people. The main building was designated a New York City landmark in 1967, with its interior separately recognized in 1977. In 1986 it became a National Historic Landmark.

  A much smaller second location, The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, was completed in 1938 as a dedicated building for medieval European art. Its name reflects the five actual medieval French cloisters whose salvaged structures were incorporated into the modern building. Its founding collection was assembled by George Grey Barnard and acquired by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 as a gift to the Met. Among the Cloisters' holdings are the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, illustrated by the Limbourg Brothers in 1409, and the seven tapestries depicting the Hunt of the Unicorn. A third location, currently the Neue Galerie New York, is set to become part of the Met in 2028, when it will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, absorbing that institution's collection of early 20th-century Austrian and German art.