In 1866, a group of New York’s finest decided that their beautiful city needed a museum.
It would be a big one the museum. An important museum. A “national” museum that would bring great art and art education to the American people.
A museum like the National Gallery in London, or the Louvre in Paris. (Never mind that Washington had already opened a national museum, the Smithsonian, in 1846—everyone knew that New York City was the true cultural capital of the US.)
It would elevate Manhattan into a world-class city; fostering American manufacturing and craftsmanship by showing American citizens great design and art; and give visitors reason to be proud of their country.
That’s — very broadly speaking — how the Metropolitan Museum of Art came to be, according to Jonathan Conlin’s new scholarly book “The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People” (Columbia University Press, out now).
It was incorporated in 1870, with no artwork in its collection and no home. Two years later, the museum had 174 paintings and a temporary exhibition space at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.
Today the Metropolitan is home to more than 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years and a magnificent 2 million square foot palace in Central Park.
And yet, as Conlin makes clear in his book, we are still asking the questions that the founding trustees wrestled with at its inception: What is the purpose of a museum? Who’s away? Who can say how it is run or what kind of art it has? And is the idea of a wide-ranging “universal” study museum—which aims to showcase the history of civilization through art—even a good one?
Conlin grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has fond memories of spending time at the Met.
And yet, his book delves into some of the museum’s most unsavory elements: looted goods, forgeries, robber baron donors, racism, sexism, classism, hit guards, and more.
The beautiful American arm? Mainly inspired by exclusionary immigrant policies and the desire to promote an Anglo-Saxon definition of a national art. Those sublime impressionist oils? Probably donated by a Gilded Age sugar refiner.
The book doesn’t even make it into the Met removing the Sackler name from seven exhibition spaces in 2021, following protests led by artist Nan Goldin against the opioid manufacturing family.
“I did all this as a critical friend of the Met,” Conlin – who now teaches history at the University of Southampton in the UK – told The Post. “In the current climate, it can be difficult to be a critical friend because you are either friend or foe. But I wouldn’t have spent all this time researching the history of the Met if I didn’t think there was a future that needed to be informed by looking at the past.”
When the Met first appeared, you couldn’t go to a university and study art history or curation. So most of the people at the top were very, very rich men who could afford to travel to Europe and buy expensive art. There wasn’t really any artist on board.
Fortunately for the Met—but unfortunately for the 99%—post-Civil War industrialization ushered in the age of the robber baron and predatory capitalism.
Oligarchs made millions from underpaid workers while paying little or no taxes. (The income tax was allowed to lapse in 1872 and was not permanently reinstated until 1916.)
These fat cats saw themselves as young royalty and wanted art collections and associations with places like the Met or the MFA in Boston that would showcase their new status.
“In the beginning there was a feeling that there were greater restrictions on the export of art, and so the original idea was [the museum] there would be casts or copies,” Conlin said. And then quickly, I think through the influence of these oligarchs, they decided higher that they wanted the prestige of the original.
By the early 1900s, the Met had numerous plutocrats loaning and hanging masterpieces they purchased through their capitalist profits.
Henry Havemeyer – of the American Sugar Refining Company – was known for his illicit business dealings but collected French art. He and his wife, Louisine, donated more than 300 objects to the Met, including a host of Impressionist paintings by Manet, Degas and Renoir.
Legendary financier JP Morgan served as president of the Met and financed the first Egyptian excavations. However, the museum was shocked after his death that he did not leave his large art collection to the institution. (His son ended up giving a good piece to the Met four years later.)
“I think traditionally fundraising historians tend not to look at where the money came from before it was spent,” Conlin said. “[But] there is a connection between the way Havemeyer collected art and the way he collected his fortune”—that is, aggressively, ruthlessly.
“It was for the chase, it was for the fight,” especially during public auctions, as crowds cheered as the bids escalated. “It was almost like a WWF approach to buying art.”
Then there was the Met’s first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola: a former Union cavalry officer who traveled to Cyprus to dig for treasure, much of which he ended up selling to the Met.
A later archaeological dig yielded even more treasures, although he was accused of altering statues, cheating and inflating numbers and dates, and admitted to trying to cheat and evade Ottoman restrictions on excavations and exports.
Conlin compared him to circus impresario PT Barnum. “He brought a kind of theater to the Met,” he said.
The Met – despite its rarefied air – likes a good old dazzle every now and then. Of course, there’s the Met Gala every May, which became famous in the 1970s under the tutelage of famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
Today, the event is a showcase for avant-garde fashion, like Katy Perry walking down the steps of the museum’s Fifth Avenue dressed as a chandelier in 2019. But in 1961, museum director James J. Rorimer shuddered at the sight of patrons who danced The Twist.
Sometimes the Met’s big, bombastic swings are missing. Take the 1969 show “Harlem on My Mind,” the landmark multimedia exhibit about black life in the city of Manhattan that ended up offending most of the African-American community.
Museum leaders were shocked when, before the show opened in January, black artists and community members attended the Met. They protested HMM’s “exclusion of black art and appropriation of black history” and called for the show to be canceled. They also demanded that the museum appoint black curators and “seek a more sustainable relationship with the Total Black Community.”
The exhibit included photographs by Harlem Renaissance portrait artist James Van Der Zee, but all the paintings and “other fine art” depicting Harlem and black life were done by non-blacks. The exhibition catalog then included an essay by a Harlem teenager that featured a quote that some read as anti-Semitic. In response, Mayor John Lindsay threatened to defund the Met.
However, Met was slow to learn his lesson.
Its director, Thomas Hoving, responded by hiring Lowery Stokes Sims in 1972, a young black woman, as assistant curator. But most of Sims’ groundbreaking shows about black art were mounted outside the Met itself. And she was promoted to full curator only in 1995.
One of the amazing things about The Met is that so many of its historical controversies and problems still ring true today. Just in 2023, the Met Costume Institute celebrated the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, a controversial figure who spouted anti-fat, anti-Islam and generally un-PC comments throughout his life. In 2020 and 2021, amid COVID lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, advocates on social media called for the Met to hire more curators of color and “decolonize” their collections. (The Met promised to come out with a report to address and repair this contested past. “Four years later, the report they promised to produce in two years has yet to appear,” Conlin dryly noted.) There a more diverse curatorial staff, but those in charge are still white men.
And yet, there have been many improvements. The American wing has a broader vision of American art, including art from Native and Latino cultures. There are more thoughtful shows, such as this year’s Harlem Renaissance portrait show, a belated and joyful corrective to the Harlem on My Mind debacle.
Far from canceling the Met, Conlin said, we should “nurture” it and other universal survey museums like it.
“These institutions, like the Met, the British Museum or the Louvre, are celebrating a shared human creativity,” Conlin said. “Most of the art here was, at one point, a trophy of some people: kings, scholarly mandarins or oligarchs. I guess my concern is that art is still seen as a trophy – so black art belongs to black people; Chinese art belongs to the Chinese people; and it does not belong to the rest of us.”
Today, amid the din of identity politics, “it seems progressive to make those arguments,” Conlin continues. “But ultimately it’s dividing us and encouraging us to lose sight of what we have in common, which is that we are a uniquely creative species.”
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Image Source : nypost.com