The Metropolitan Museum

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

In the twentieth century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's, affectionately called the MET, had become one of the world's most appreciated arts center just as much as the British Museum(1753) and the Louvre (1793). The Met is the second most visited Museum in the world. With the British Museum in London they had about 5 million visitors a year each in 2010 behind the Louvre, who had over 8 million visitors. It is one of the largest museums in the world (180,000m2) after the Louvre (210,000m2 exposing on only 68,000m2) and before the British Museum (135,000m2).

Who and what was at the origin of this huge project and why was the museum a success? What is now the primary mission of the MET? To highlight this accomplishment we need to study its history and the heart and work the founders put in the endeavor as well as the choice of art works and masterpieces since the beginning.

We can trace the roots of the project that gave birth to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's in Paris France around the year 1866. A group of Americans fond of all sorts of arts, archeology and antiquities got together to create a “National Institution and Gallery of Art” to share their love of art and educate the American people. Son of a New York banker, lawyer and art collector John Taylor Johnston was one of the instigators of the project and its first president. With his background and enthusiasm, civic leaders such as the Union League Club in New York, businessmen, artists, art collectors, and philanthropists easily rallied to the cause.

On April 13, 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public in the dance Academy of Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue with three private collections from Europe; in those days, they had no gallery space, and no professional curatorial staff. On November 20 of the same year they acquired their first object, a Roman sarcophagus.

The American vice consul at Tarsus, J. Abdo Debbas, gifted this attractive example of Roman funerary art to the Museum. The sarcophagus was found in 1863 at Tarsus in Turkey dated to the early third century before Christ. It arrived on October 24, 1871, and was installed at the Metropolitan. The marble sarcophagus remains today a centerpiece of the Museum's galleries of Greek and Roman art.

John Taylor Johnston, acute businessman, lover and collector of Art, knew that to earn the name of "Museum" more than a concept, the Metropolitan would require a solid foundation so, he found 174 European paintings to add to the collection, including works by Anthony van Dyck, Nicolas Poussin, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. That group of 174 paintings became known as the "Purchase of 1871”.

The chosen artists were not random. They each marked their time in their mastery of their craft, mastery that traveled years, centuries and continents.

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was probably chosen by John Taylor and William T. Blodgett, (cofounder, patron, and chairman of the first executive committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1870s,) because even three hundred years after his death he was still the most gifted portrait painters. The Flemish Baroque painter, pupil of Rubens, was highly prized by the nobility for his portraits, he was commissioned by the majority of Italian, Dutch, French and English peers. In England he was considered as the creator of the English school of painting. Van Dyck invented Pigment oil painting, the Van Dyck brown, was named after him, same with the process Vandyke, a photographic process.

But the Metropolitan has made only two van Dyck purchases, one in 1871 and the other in 1922, the first painting to enter the Metropolitan was the oil of canvas “The Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo” (1624), and “The Study Head of an Old Man With a White Beard” (1617-20), an oil on wood.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has now 23 works by Van Dyck and owes its collection, the most important in the country, to gifts and donations.

French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was the one asked to oversees the design of the building of the Louvre royal palace's new “galerie du bord de l'eau” by King Louis XIII in 1640. He was appointed first painter to the king, chief embellisher of royal houses and was regarded as the reviver of painting under Louis XIV. Poussin's paintings served as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century; he would have a profound influence on many later artists, in particular classical and classicizing painters as Jacques-Louis David, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso.

As a connoisseur, John Taylor Johnston probably appreciated Poussin’s art for its marriage of poetry and reason, sensitivity and intelligence, a balance between two aspects of a character. Frequently his paintings carry a moral or philosophical message, or draw attention to man's precarious position in the universe. The richness of his compositions and the beauty of his expressions have earned him the nickname of “The painter of intellectual people.” He was a sort of European genius. The Metropolitan Museum added his works to the collection and the first painting by Poussin it acquired was “Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus" (1624).

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was an Italian engraver. He was famous and considered early in his carrier as the most promising artist in Venice. His favored themes almost always included a reference to death and magic. He influenced Goya through his notable technique which was : the light, "lighting" of specific parts of the painting with bright colors to bring out feelings or ideas, like purity or the divine. “Allegory of the Planets and Continents” (1752) is often considered the artist's greatest achievement. He executed ten canvases of Roman battles in 1726–29 and these monumental works are now in the Metropolitan Museum.

From the 16th to 17th century, the Spanish nation had glorified into one of the leading European powers, politically, geographically and culturally. John Taylor Johnston knew that Tiepolo was one of the few European painters of his generation who worked on a monumental scale and realized extensive interior decorations. Tiepolo’s most famous work that made his reputation are the great series of frescoes he painted in Venice.

Allegory of the Planets and Continents, oil on canvas, 1752 where the gods symbolize the planets and the allegorical figures on the cornice are represent four continents, Europe, Africa, Asia and America.

The Triumph of Marius, 1729, oil on canvas

Victim of its own success

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