The Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of
curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from
classical antiquity and
ancient Egypt; paintings and sculptures from nearly all the
European masters; and an extensive collection of
American and
modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of
African,
Asian,
Oceanian,
Byzantine, and
Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of
musical instruments,
costumes and accessories, and antique
weapons and
armor from around the world. A great number of
period rooms, ranging from
first-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. Since the late 1800s, the Museum has been collecting diverse materials from all over the world. Its outreach to "exhibition designers, architects, graphic designers, lighting designers, and production designers" helps the museum to maintain its collection in good condition.
Geographically designated collections Ancient Near Eastern art Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the
Near East. From a few
cuneiform tablets and
seals, the museum's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the
Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the
Sasanian Empire and the end of
Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the
Sumerian,
Hittite, Sasanian,
Assyrian,
Babylonian, and
Elamite cultures (among others), as well as an extensive collection of unique
Bronze Age objects. The highlights of the collection include the Sumerian
Stele of Ushumgal, the Elamite silver
Kneeling Bull with Vessel, the
Pratt Ivories, and a set of monumental stone
lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king
Ashurnasirpal II.
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas , Iyoba, 16th-century Nigeria Though the Met first acquired a group of
Peruvian antiquities in 1882, in addition to Mesoamerican antiquities, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from
Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman,
philanthropist and then NY Gov.
Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Before Rockefeller's collection was gifted to the Met, Rockefeller founded
The Museum of Primitive Art in New York City with the intention of displaying these works, after the Met had previously shown little interest in his art collection. In 1968, the Met had agreed to a temporary exhibition of Rockefeller's work. However, the Met then requested to include the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in their permanent collection. This wing is named after Nelson Rockefeller's son,
Michael Rockefeller, who died while collecting works in
New Guinea. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from
sub-Saharan Africa, the
Pacific Islands, and the
Americas and is housed in the Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum. The Wing exhibits Non-Western works of art created from – present, including a wide range of particular cultural traditions. The Wing exhibits the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in an exhibition separated by geographical locations. The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old
indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of memorial poles carved by the
Asmat people of
New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the
Nigerian
Court of Benin donated by
Klaus Perls. Curator of African Art
Susan Mullin Vogel discussed a famous
Benin artifact acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972. It was originally auctioned in April 1900 by a lieutenant named
Augustus Pitt Rivers at the price of 37
guineas. In December 2021, the Met began its $70 million (~$ in ) renovation of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing's African, ancient American, and Oceanic art galleries, originally planned to begin in 2020 but now set for completion in 2024. The 40,000 square-feet renovation includes the reinstallation of an exterior glass curtain, which had deteriorated, as well as the galleries in their entirety, which house 3,000 works.
Asian art Chola Statue of
Nataraja, 11th century,
Tamilnadu The Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, that is arguably the most comprehensive in the US. The collection dates back almost to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, and spans 4,000 years of Asian art. Major Asian civilizations are well-represented in the Met's Asian department. The pieces on display represent diverse types of
decorative art, from painting and
printmaking to
sculpture and
metalworking. The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of
Cambodian,
Indian, and
Chinese art (including
calligraphy and
painting), as well as for its
Nepalese and
Tibetan works, and the arts of
Burma (Myanmar), and
Thailand. Three ancient religions of India—
Hinduism,
Buddhism and
Jainism—are well represented in these sculptures. However, not only "art" and ritual objects are represented in the collection; many of the best-known pieces are functional objects. The Asian wing also contains 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 current department chairman of Asian Art since 2011.
Egyptian art is a mascot of the Met. Though the majority of the Met's initial holdings of
Egyptian art came from private collections, items uncovered during the museum's own archeological excavations, carried out between 1906 and 1941, constitute almost half of the current collection. More than 26,000 separate pieces of Egyptian art from the
Paleolithic era through the
Ptolemaic era constitute the Met's Egyptian collection, and almost all of them are on display in the museum's massive wing of 40 Egyptian galleries. Among the rarest pieces in the Met's Egyptian collection are 13 wooden models (of the total 24 models found together, 12 models and 1 offering bearer figure is at the Met, while the remaining 10 models and 1 offering bearer figure are in the
Egyptian Museum in
Cairo), discovered in a tomb in the Southern Asasif in western
Thebes in 1920. These models depict, in unparalleled detail, a cross-section of Egyptian life in the early
Middle Kingdom: boats, gardens, and scenes of daily life are represented in
miniature.
William the Faience Hippopotamus is a miniature that has become the informal mascot of the museum. Other notable items in the Egyptian collection include the
Chair of Reniseneb, the
Lotiform Chalice, and the
Metternich Stela. However, the popular centerpiece of the Egyptian Art department continues to be the
Temple of Dendur. Dismantled by the Egyptian government as part of the
International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia to save it from rising waters caused by the building of the
Aswan High Dam, the large
sandstone temple was given to the United States in 1965 and assembled in a new wing at the Met in 1978. Situated in a large room and partially surrounded by a reflecting pool and illuminated by a wall of windows opening onto Central Park, the Temple of Dendur has been one of the Met's most enduring attractions. Among the oldest items at the Met, a set of Archeulian flints from
Deir el-Bahri which date from the
Lower Paleolithic period (between 300,000 and 75,000 BCE), are part of the Egyptian collection. The first curator was
Albert Lythgoe, who directed several Egyptian excavations for the museum. Since 2013 the curator has been Diana Craig Patch. In 2018, the museum built an exhibition around the golden-sheathed 1st-century BCE
coffin of Nedjemankh, a high-ranking priest of the ram-headed god
Heryshaf of
Heracleopolis. Investigators determined that the artifact had been stolen in 2011 from Egypt, and the museum returned it.
European paintings In 2012 the Met's collection of European paintings numbered "more than 2,500 works of art from the thirteenth through the early twentieth century." As of December 2021, it had 2,625. These paintings are housed in the Old Masters galleries (newly installed in 2023), the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century galleries reinstalled in 2007 (both on the second floor of the main building), the Robert Lehman Collection, and the Jack and Belle Linsky Collection (both on the first floor); a number of paintings also hang in other departmental galleries. Some of the medieval paintings are permanently exhibited at the Met Cloisters.
Old Master paintings The collection began when 174 paintings were purchased from European dealers in 1871. Major gifts from Henry Gurdon Marquand in 1889, 1890 and 1891 The Robert Lehman Collection, which came to the museum in 1975, included many significant paintings, and is particularly strong in early Renaissance material. Over a period of decades, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman donated 94 works of unusually high quality to the Department of European Paintings, the last of which came with Mrs. Wrightsman's bequest in 2019. Notwithstanding the contributions made by Marquand, Altman, Bache, and Lehman, it has been written that "the Wrightsman paintings are highest in overall quality and condition." The latter "collected expertise as well as art," and advanced technology made better choices possible. The museum terms its nineteenth-century French paintings "second only to the museums of Paris," with strengths in "Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and others." It was particularly strong in works by Courbet, Corot, Manet, Monet, and, above all, Degas. The other remarkable gift of this material came from Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, who, before they promised their collection to the Met in 1991, annually loaned it to the Met for half a year at a time. Walter Annenberg described his choice of gifting his collection to the Met as an example of "strength going to strength." The two collections are highly complementary: "The Annenberg collection serves as a second, complementary core collection of blue chip Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. Most importantly, it strengthened the Met's relatively sparse holdings of Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, it added needed late works by Cézanne and Monet as well as a rare Seurat, and it brought a very impressive group of Van Goghs to a collection already rich in works by the Dutchman." Although the collection is particularly concentrated in
Renaissance sculpture—much of which can be seen
in situ surrounded by contemporary furnishings and decoration—it also contains comprehensive holdings of furniture, jewelry, glass and
ceramic pieces, tapestries, textiles, and timepieces and
mathematical instruments. In addition to its outstanding collections of English and French furniture, visitors can enter dozens of completely furnished period rooms, transplanted in their entirety into the Met's galleries. The collection even includes an entire 16th-century
patio from the Spanish castle of
Vélez Blanco, reconstructed in a two-story gallery, and the intarsia
studiolo from the ducal palace at
Gubbio. Sculptural highlights of the sprawling department include
Bernini's
Bacchanal, a cast of
Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, and several unique pieces by
Houdon, including his
Bust of Voltaire and his famous portrait of his daughter Sabine.
American Wing '' by
Emanuel Leutze The museum's collection of American art returned to view in new galleries on January 16th, 2012. The new installation provides visitors with the history of
American art from the 18th through the early 20th century. The new galleries encompasses for the display of the museum's collection. The curator in charge of the American Wing since September 2014 is Sylvia Yount. In July 2018,
Art of Native America opened in the American Wing. This marked the first appearance of
Indigenous American art in the museum's vast American wing.
Art of Native America was accompanied by a statement from the institution. "The American Wing acknowledges the sovereign Native American and Indigenous communities dispossessed from the lands and waters of this region. We affirm our intentions for ongoing relationships with contemporary Native American and Indigenous artists and the original communities whose ancestral and aesthetic items we care for." This was followed by the hiring of a new curator of Indigenous American art for the museum,
Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby, who is of
Purépecha descent.
Greek and Roman art The Met's collection of
Greek and
Roman art contains more than 17,000 objects. The Greek and Roman collection dates back to the founding of the museum—in fact, the museum's first accessioned object was a Roman
sarcophagus, still currently on display. Though the collection naturally concentrates on items from
ancient Greece and the
Roman Empire, these historical regions represent a wide range of cultures and artistic styles, from classic Greek
black-figure and
red-figure vases to carved Roman
tunic pins. , from
Amathus,
Cyprus, arguably the single most important object in the Cesnola Collection Highlights of the collection include the monumental
Amathus sarcophagus and a magnificently detailed
Etruscan chariot known as the "
Monteleone chariot". The collection also contains many pieces from far earlier than the Greek or Roman empires—among the most remarkable are a collection of early
Cycladic sculptures from the mid-third millennium BCE, many so abstract as to seem almost modern. The Greek and Roman galleries also contain several large classical wall paintings and reliefs from different periods, including an entire reconstructed bedroom from a noble
villa in
Boscoreale, excavated after its entombment by the eruption of
Vesuvius in . In 2007, the Met's Greek and Roman galleries were expanded to approximately , allowing the majority of the collection to be on permanent display.
Islamic art showing Chapter 30: 28–32 The Metropolitan Museum owns one of the world's largest collection of works of art of the Islamic world. The collection also includes artifacts and works of art of cultural and secular origin from the time period indicated by the rise of Islam predominantly from the
Near East and in contrast to the
Ancient Near Eastern collections. The biggest number of
miniatures from the "
Shahnameh" list prepared under the reign of
Shah Tahmasp I, the most luxurious of all the existing
Islamic manuscripts, also belongs to this museum. Other rarities include the works of
Sultan Muhammad and his associates from the
Tabriz school "The Sade Holiday", "Tahmiras kills divs", "
Bijan and Manijeh", and many others. The Met's collection of
Islamic art is not confined strictly to
religious art, though a significant number of the objects in the Islamic collection were originally created for religious use or as decorative elements in
mosques. Much of the 12,000 strong collection consists of secular items, including ceramics and
textiles, from Islamic cultures ranging from
Spain to
North Africa to
Central Asia. The Islamic Art department's collection of miniature paintings from
Iran and
Mughal India are a highlight of the collection.
Calligraphy both religious and secular is well represented in the Islamic Art department, from the official decrees of
Suleiman the Magnificent to a number of
Quran manuscripts reflecting different periods and styles of calligraphy. Modern calligraphic artists also used a word or phrase to convey a direct message, or they created compositions from the shapes of Arabic words. Others incorporated indecipherable cursive writing within the body of the work to evoke the illusion of writing. Islamic Arts galleries had been undergoing refurbishment since 2001 and reopened on November 1, 2011, as the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Until that time, a narrow selection of items from the collection had been on temporary display throughout the museum. As with many other departments at the Met, the Islamic Art galleries contain many interior pieces, including the entire reconstructed
Nur Al-Din Room from an early 18th-century house in
Damascus. In September 2022 the Met revealed that it had received a substantial gift from
Qatar Museums on the occasion of its 10th anniversary of the opening of its Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, which would benefit its Department of Islamic Art and some of the museum's other principal projects. As a token of its appreciation the name
Qatar Gallery was adopted for the museum's Gallery of the
Umayyad and
Abbasid Periods. This followed the announcement that the Met and Qatar Museums had entered into a partnership to foster their exchange with regards to exhibitions, activities, and scholarly cooperation.
Non-geographically designated collections Arms and armor The Met's Department of Arms and Armor is one of the museum's most popular collections. Several early trustees of the museum were armor enthusiasts. The 1904 purchase of the collection of Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, duc de Dino, served as the foundational collection. It became a great collection with the gift and bequest of the Henry Riggs collection of 2,000 pieces, which was one of the finest assembled by a single person. It came to the museum in 1913 and 1925. Another collection landmark took place in 1936, when George Cameron Stone bequeathed 3,000 pieces of Asian armor. Bashford Dean, the first arms curator, did much to build up the collection, including with gifts he and his friends made directly to the Met, which enabled the purchase of his personal collection. The department's focus on "outstanding craftsmanship and decoration," including pieces intended solely for display, means that the collection is strongest in
late medieval European pieces and
Japanese pieces from the 5th through 19th centuries. However, these are not the only cultures represented in Arms and Armor; the collection spans more geographic regions than almost any other department, including weapons and armor from
dynastic Egypt,
ancient Greece, the
Roman Empire, the ancient
Near East, Africa,
Oceania, and the
Americas, as well as American firearms (especially
Colt firearms) from the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the collection's 14,000 objects are the oldest items in the museum: flint bifaces which date to 700,000–200,000 BCE. There are also many pieces made for and used by kings and princes, including armor belonging to
Henry VIII of England,
Henry II of France, and
Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. A. Hyatt Mayor called the Met's collection "the only single collection from which one might illustrate the whole history of the subject. a senior research associate specializing in arms and armor. In 2020 the Met announced Ronald S. Lauder's promised gift of 91 objects from his collection, describing it as "the most significant grouping of European arms and armor given to the Museum since 1942," one that is "outstanding for the exceptional rarity and quality of the objects, their illustrious origins, and their typological variety." Lauder, who noted that he had begun collecting with the assistance of curator Grancsay almost 55 years earlier, also donated money for the study and presentation of arms and armor. The 11 galleries were named in Lauder's honor.
Costume Institute The Museum of Costume Art was founded by
Aline Bernstein and
Irene Lewisohn. In 1946, with the financial support of the fashion industry, the Museum of Costume Art merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as The Costume Institute, and in 1959 became a curatorial department. Today, its collection contains more than 35,000 costumes and accessories. The Costume Institute used to have a permanent gallery space in what was known as the "Basement" area of the Met because it was downstairs at the bottom of the Met facility. However, due to the fragile nature of the items in the collection, the Costume Institute does not maintain a permanent installation. Instead, every year it holds two separate shows in the Met's galleries using costumes from its collection, with each show centering on a specific designer or theme. The Costume Institute is known for hosting the annual
Met Gala and in the past has presented summer exhibitions such as
Savage Beauty and
China: Through the Looking Glass. In past years, Costume Institute shows organized around designers such as
Cristóbal Balenciaga,
Chanel,
Yves Saint Laurent, and
Gianni Versace; and style doyenne like
Diana Vreeland,
Mona von Bismarck,
Babe Paley,
Jayne Wrightsman,
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,
Nan Kempner, and
Iris Apfel have drawn significant crowds to the Met. The
Costume Institute's annual Benefit Gala, co-chaired by
Vogue editor-in-chief
Anna Wintour, is an extremely popular, if exclusive, event in the fashion world; in 2007, the 700 available tickets started at $6,500 (~$ in ) per person. Exhibits displayed over the past decade in the Costume Institute include: Rock Style, in 1999, representing the style of more than 40 rock musicians, including
Madonna,
David Bowie, and
the Beatles; Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed, in 2001, which exposes the transforming ideas of physical beauty over time and the bodily contortion necessary to accommodate such ideals and fashion; The
Chanel Exhibit, displayed in 2005, acknowledging the skilled work of designer
Coco Chanel as one of the leading fashion names in history; Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, exhibited in 2008, suggesting the metaphorical vision of superheroes as ultimate fashion icons; the 2010 exhibit on the American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, which exposes the revolutionary styles of the American woman from the years 1890 to 1940, and how such styles reflect the political and social sentiments of the time. The theme of the 2011 event was "
Alexander McQueen:
Savage Beauty". Each of these exhibits explores fashion as a mirror of cultural values and offers a glimpse into historical styles, emphasizing their evolution into today's own fashion world. On January 14, 2014, the Met named the Costume Institute complex after
Anna Wintour. The curator is
Andrew Bolton.
Drawings and prints '' by
Albrecht Dürer Though other departments contain significant numbers of
drawings and
prints, the Drawings and Prints department specifically concentrates on
North American pieces and
Western European works produced after the
Middle Ages. The first gift of Old Master drawings, comprising 670 sheets, was presented as a single group in 1880 by
Cornelius Vanderbilt II, though most proved to be misattributed. Ivans opened three galleries and a study room in 1971. He curated almost sixty exhibitions, and his influential publications included
How Prints Look (1943) and
Prints and Visual Communication (1953), in addition to almost two hundred articles for the museum's
Bulletin. Ivans and his successor
A. Hyatt Mayor (hired 1932, 1946–66 Curator of Prints) collected hundreds of thousands of works, including photographs, books, architectural drawings, modern artworks on paper, posters, trade cards, and other ephemera. Finally, in 1993, a unified Department of Drawings and Prints was created for all works on paper, chaired by
George Goldner, who sought to rectify collecting imbalances by adding works by Dutch, Flemish, Central European, Danish, and British artists. The department has been led by
Nadine Orenstein, Drue Heinz Curator in Charge since 2015. A particularly important recent gift was that of the Leslie and Johanna Garfield Collection of British Modernism in 2019. Currently, the Drawings and Prints collection contains about 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas. Many of the great masters of European painting, who produced many more sketches and drawings than actual paintings, are represented in the Drawing and Prints collection, sometimes in great concentrations. Prints are also represented in multiple states. Many artists and makers whose work is in the prints and drawings collection are otherwise not represented in the museum's holdings.
Robert Lehman Collection On the death of banker
Robert Lehman in 1969, his Foundation donated 2,600 works of art to the museum, which had been collected by Robert and his father. Housed in the "Robert Lehman Wing", on the ground floor and the basement level, the museum refers to the collection as "one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States". To emphasize the personal nature of the Robert Lehman Collection, the Met housed the collection in a special set of galleries, some of which evoked the interior of Lehman's richly decorated
townhouse at
7 West 54th Street. This intentional separation of the Collection as a "museum within the museum" met with mixed criticism and approval at the time, though the acquisition of the collection was seen as a coup for the Met. Some have argued that it would be educationally more beneficial to have works from given schools of painting in the same section of the museum. Unlike other departments at the Met, the Robert Lehman collection does not concentrate on a specific style or period of art; rather, it is a reflection of Lehman's personal collecting interests. The Lehmans concentrated heavily on paintings of the
Italian Renaissance, particularly the
Sienese school. Sienese highlights include multiple major paintings by Ugolino da Siena,
Simone Martini,
Sano di Pietro, and
Giovanni di Paolo, as well as a remarkable work by the
Osservanza Master. Other choice Italian paintings in the collection include masterpieces like
Botticelli's
Annunciation, a pair of stunning portraits by
Jacometto Veneziano, and a stellar
Madonna and Child by
Giovanni Bellini. The Northern school of painting is represented by
Petrus Christus,
Hans Memling, the Master of Moulins (
Jean Hey),
Hans Holbein, and
Lucas Cranach and his studio. Dutch and Spanish Baroque highlights include the
Spanish painters
El Greco and
Goya, and the Dutch masters
Rembrandt,
Ter Borch, and de Hooch. Lehman's collection of 700 drawings by the
Old Masters, featuring works by
Rembrandt and
Dürer, is particularly valuable for its breadth and quality. The collection also has French 18th and 19th century drawings, as well as nearly two-hundred 18th century Venetian drawings, mostly by the Tiepolos. The collection of bronzes, furniture, Renaissance
majolica,
Venetian glass, enamels, jewelry, textiles, and frames is outstanding. The Lehman collection of Italian majolica is regarded as the best in the country. Robert Lehman also collected many nineteenth and twentieth century paintings. These include works by
Ingres,
Corot, the
Barbizon School,
Monet,
Renoir,
Cezanne,
Gauguin,
Van Gogh,
Seurat, and a number of Fauve painters, including
Matisse.
Princeton University Press has documented the massive collection in a multi-volume book series published as
The Robert Lehman Collection Catalogues.
Medieval art and the Cloisters '
Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry The Met's collection of medieval art consists of a comprehensive range of Western art from the 4th through the early 16th centuries, as well as
Byzantine and pre-medieval European antiquities not included in the Ancient Greek and Roman collection. Like the Islamic collection, the Medieval collection contains a broad range of two- and three-dimensional art, with religious objects heavily represented. In total, the Medieval Art department's permanent collection numbers over 10,000 separate objects, divided between the main museum building on Fifth Avenue and
The Cloisters.
Main building The medieval collection in the main Metropolitan building, centered on the first-floor medieval gallery, contains about 6,000 separate objects. While a great deal of European medieval art is on display in these galleries, most of the European pieces are concentrated at the Cloisters (see below). However, this allows the main galleries to display much of the Met's Byzantine art side by side with European pieces. The main gallery is host to a wide range of tapestries and church and funerary statuary, while side galleries display smaller works of precious metals and ivory, including
reliquary pieces and secular items. The main gallery, with its high arched ceiling, also serves double duty as the annual site of the Met's elaborately decorated Christmas tree.
The Cloisters museum and gardens from the Hudson River The Cloisters was a principal project of
John D. Rockefeller Jr., a major benefactor of the Met. Located in
Fort Tryon Park and completed in 1938, it is a separate building dedicated solely to medieval art. The Cloisters collection was originally that of a separate museum, assembled by
George Grey Barnard and acquired
in toto by Rockefeller in 1925 as a gift to the Met. The Cloisters are so named on account of the five medieval French
cloisters whose salvaged structures were incorporated into the modern building, and the five thousand objects at the Cloisters are strictly limited to medieval European works. The collection features items of outstanding beauty and historical importance; among these are the
Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry illustrated by the
Limbourg Brothers in 1409, the
Romanesque altar cross known as the "
Cloisters Cross" or "Bury Cross", and the seven
tapestries depicting the
Hunt of the Unicorn.
Modern and contemporary art With some 13,000 artworks, primarily by European and American artists, the modern art collection occupies , of gallery space and contains many iconic modern works. Cornerstones of the collection include
Picasso's portrait of
Gertrude Stein,
Jasper Johns's
White Flag,
Jackson Pollock's
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), and
Max Beckmann's
triptych Beginning. Certain artists are represented in remarkable depth, for a museum whose focus is not exclusively on modern art: for example, ninety works constitute the museum's Paul Klee collection, donated by
Heinz Berggruen, spanning the entirety of the artist's life. Due to the Met's long history, "contemporary" paintings acquired in years past have often migrated to other collections at the museum, particularly to the American and European Paintings departments. In April 2013, it was reported that the museum was to receive a collection worth $1 billion (~$ in ) from cosmetics tycoon
Leonard Lauder. The collection of
Cubist art includes work by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris and went on display in 2014. The Met has since added to the collection, for example spending $31.8 million (~$ in ) for Gris' ''The musician's table'' in 2018.
Musical instruments , The Met's collection of musical instruments, with about 5,000 examples of musical instruments from all over the world, is virtually unique among major museums. The collection began in 1889 with a donation of 270 instruments by
Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown, who joined her collection to become the museum's first curator of musical instruments, named in honor of her husband,
John Crosby Brown. By the time she died, the collection had 3,600 instruments that she had donated and the collection was housed in five galleries. Instruments were (and continue to be) included in the collection not only on aesthetic grounds, but also insofar as they embodied technical and social aspects of their cultures of origin. The modern Musical Instruments collection is encyclopedic in scope; every continent is represented at virtually every stage of its musical life. Highlights of the department's collection include several
Stradivari violins, a collection of
Asian instruments made from precious metals, and the oldest surviving
piano, a 1720 model by
Bartolomeo Cristofori. Many of the instruments in the collection are playable, and the department encourages their use by holding concerts and demonstrations by guest musicians.
Photographs The Met's collection of
photographs, numbering more than 25,000 in total, is centered on five major collections plus additional acquisitions by the museum.
Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer himself, donated the first major collection of photographs to the museum, which included a comprehensive survey of
Photo-Secessionist works, a rich set of master prints by
Edward Steichen, and an outstanding collection of Stieglitz's photographs from his own studio. The Met supplemented Stieglitz's gift with the 8,500-piece
Gilman Paper Company Collection, the Rubel Collection, and the Ford Motor Company Collection, which respectively provided the collection with early French and American photography, early British photography, and post-
WWI American and European photography. The museum also acquired
Walker Evans's personal collection of photographs, a particular coup considering the high demand for his works. The department of photography was founded in 1992. Though the department gained a permanent gallery in 1997, not all of the department's holdings are on display at any given time, due to the sensitive materials represented in the photography collection. However, the Photographs department has produced some of the best-received temporary exhibits in the Met's recent past, including a
Diane Arbus retrospective and an extensive show devoted to spirit photography. In 2007, the museum designated a gallery exclusively for the exhibition of photographs made after 1960.
Film The Met has an extensive archive consisting of 1,500 films made and collected by the museum since the 1920s. As part of the museum's 150 anniversary commemoration, since January 2020, the museum uploads a film from its archive weekly onto YouTube.
Digital representation of collections Beginning in 2013, the Met organized the Digital Media Department for the purpose of increasing access of the museum's collections and resources using digital media and expanded website services. The first Chief Digital Officer
Sree Sreenivasan from 2013 departed in 2016 and was replaced by Loic Tallon at the time that the department became known by its simplified designation as the Digital Department. At the start of 2017, the department began its Open Access initiative summarized on the Met's website titled "Digital Underground" stating: "It's been six months since the Met launched its Open Access initiative, which made available all 375,000+ images of public-domain works in the Met collection under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). During what is just the dawn of this new initiative, the responses so far have been incredible." At that time, more than 375,000 photographic images from the museum's archival collection were released for public domain reproduction and use both by the general public and by large public access websites such as those available at Google BigQuery. In May 2022, the Met and the
World Monuments Fund announced a collaboration of digital work for the 2024 reopening of the African, ancient American, and Oceanic art galleries. The digital project "aims to bolster the understanding of several historic sites in sub-Saharan Africa", in particular sites that have been minimally explored by Western museums. Open access images and data have been viewed over 1.2 billion times with over 7 million downloads. == Libraries ==