On This Day: 50 industrialists, artists, and scientists found the Met art museum. Recent controversies. - Apr. 13, 1870
(edited from Wikipedia)
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Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an art museum in New York City. It is the largest art museum in the Americas and fourth-largest in the world.
In 2023, the museum welcomed 5,800,000 visitors, making it the most-visited museum in the United States and the fourth most visited art museum in the world. In 2000, its permanent collection was said to have over two million works; it currently lists a total of 1.5 million objects. The collection is divided into 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 with its mission to bring art and art education to the American people. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art ranging from the ancient Near East and ancient Egypt, through classical antiquity to the contemporary world. It includes paintings, sculptures, and graphic works from many European Old Masters, as well as an extensive collection of American, modern, and contemporary art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and decorative arts and textiles, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries.
[Founding]
The New York State Legislature granted the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870, "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations".
This legislation was supplemented later by the 1893 Act, Chapter 476, which required that its collections "shall be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year".
The founders included businessmen and financiers, among them Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the US, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people.
Also instrumental in the founding of the museum was Henry Gurdon Marquand, who donated an important part of his collection of Old Masters paintings to the fledgling institution. The Marquand family maintained a diverse interest in art based philanthropy, having donated large sums of money to Princeton University, as well as establishing Southport's Pequot Library, a special collections institution.
The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum, served as its first president, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam came on board as its founding superintendent. The artist Eastman Johnson acted as co-founder of the museum, as did landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.
Various other industrialists, artists, and scientists of the age served as co-founders, including Howard Potter, Salem Howe Wales, and Henry Gurdon Marquand. Marquand's donated works are known as the Marquand Collection.
[First holdings]
The former Civil War officer, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, was named as its first director. He served from 1879 to 1904. Under their guidance, the Met's holdings, initially consisting of a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 mostly European paintings, quickly outgrew the available space.
[Relocation]
In 1873, occasioned by the Met's purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum decamped from Fifth Avenue and took up residence at the Mrs. Nicholas Cruger Mansion at 128 West 14th Street. However, these new accommodations proved temporary, as the growing collection required more space than the mansion could provide. It moved into the current building in 1880. Between 1879 and 1895, the museum created and operated a series of educational programs, known as the Metropolitan Museum of Art Schools, intended to provide vocational training and classes on fine arts.
John Taylor Johnston
John Taylor Johnston (1820–1893) was an American businessman and patron of the arts. He served as president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey and was one of the founders of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Both of his parents were of Scottish ancestry, and his father was a prominent businessman. Johnston grew up in Greenwich Village, where he was born, and was educated at Edinburgh High School in Edinburgh, Scotland. He graduated from the University of the City of New York, an institution founded by his father and several other civic-minded New Yorkers, in 1839.
He was the driving force behind the acquisition of the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, and also endeavored to develop the suburbs of central New Jersey through which his railroads passed. According to his obituary, "[h]is expenditures to secure low grades and good alignment to avoid grade crossings were far in advance of the railroad science of his time and were ridiculed by some of his competitors."
Johnston was the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. Together with William Tilden Blodgett, he financed the initial "1871 purchase" of 174 paintings for the museum. He held this position until ill health forced him to retire in 1889, at which point he was succeeded by Henry Gurdon Marquand and the museum's Trustees voted him Honorary President for Life. He was also a patron to living American artists and was an avid collector, including many French academic paintings. His personal art collection in his Fifth Avenue mansion, which included works by Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, John Frederick Kensett, and Winslow Homer.
Henry Gurdon Marquand
Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819–1902) was an American financier, philanthropist and art collector known for his extensive collection.
Marquand was born in New York City on April 11, 1819. At the age of fifteen, Henry began working for his family's prestigious jewelry business, Marquand & Co. At the time, the business was headed by his older brother Frederick, a liberal benefactor of Yale College, Union Theological Seminary, and founder of Pequot Library.
Following the death of their father in 1838, Frederick sold the business, and took up real estate investment and other financial ventures. Henry established himself as a banker on Wall Street, became Director of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, and eventually made a fortune speculating on foreign currency exchange and railroads. With a profit of one million dollars, Marquand effectively retired from the business world in 1880 and focused his energies on the acquisition of art and the management of the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[Founders consisted of 50 men]
Marquand was a member of the Provisional Committee of fifty men assembled in 1869 to establish a museum of art in New York City. As a member of the building committee and president of the Museum's board of trustees, he witnessed the physical growth of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from various temporary quarters to its permanent home on the eastern edge of Central Park. Marquand, a personal friend and client of museum architect Richard Morris Hunt, was in large part responsible for the realization of the project to extend and reorient the distinctive Beaux-Arts façade entrance east to Fifth Avenue.
[Vermeer painting]
Marquand was also a significant contributor to the Museum's collection, particularly in the area of European paintings. This donation included, among other old master works, Johannes Vermeer's Woman with a Water Jug, the first Vermeer to enter a United States collection and which scholars now agree is one of only thirty-seven known works by the artist.
Marquand was also a benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Schools and Princeton University.
Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views.
[Church's paying audiences]
He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
In 1844, aged 18, Church became the pupil of landscape artist Thomas Cole in Catskill, New York. Church studied with him for two years; by this time his talent was evident. Cole wrote that Church had "the finest eye for drawing in the world". During his time with Cole he travelled around New England and New York to make sketches, visiting East Hampton, Connecticut, Long Island, Catskill Mountain House, The Berkshires, New Haven, Connecticut, and Vermont.
[Church's lucrative career]
By 1860, Church was the most renowned American artist. In his prime, Church was a commercial as well as an artistic success. Church's art was very lucrative; he was reported to be worth half a million dollars at his death in 1900.
...
[Met's selling art controversy - AG gets involved]
In the early 1970s, under the directorship of Thomas Hoving, the Met revised its deaccessioning policy. It sought to acquire "world-class" pieces, including through the sale of mid- to high-value items from its collection. Hoving's deaccessioning practices, including secretive non-public sales that violated donor wishes, was exposed in the New York Times. These exposés provoked widespread criticism when they came to light, and they were compounded by deceitful and misleading statements made by Hoving. This resulted in an investigation of the museum by the New York State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz. As a result of these hearings, the museum agreed to list in its annual report the total cash proceeds from art sales each year, and to itemize any deaccessioned objects valued at more than $50,000 each. It also agreed to sell those pieces at public auction and provide advance public notice of a work being sold if it had been on view in the last ten years.
Two of the objects purchased with funds generated by Hoving's deaccessions were highlights of the Met's collection. Diego Velázquez's 1650 Portrait of Juan de Pareja (bought in part through deaccessioned works) and a classical Greek vase, the Euphronios Krater, which depicted the death of Sarpedon (funded by the sale of the museum's classical coin collection). The latter, which proved to be looted, was repatriated to Italy in 2006.
Hoving was criticized for selling important works from the museum to fund his acquisitions, including a Henri Rousseau and a Van Gogh, and he planned to sell many more, including 14 Monet paintings he characterized as "routine." During the tenure of director Philippe de Montebello, the sale of a single Monet (together with the construction of purpose-built galleries) eventually led to the acquisition of two collections totaling 220 paintings, which established the museum's remarkable plein-air paintings collection.
[Covid era]
Another deaccessioning controversy broke out in 2021, when the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) temporarily relaxed its guidelines due to hardships suffered by museums during the COVID pandemic. Previously, funds from deaccessioned works were only to be used to purchase other works for the permanent collection. The temporary guidelines, however, permitted these monies to be used for the "care" of the collection. The Met decided to use funds from deaccessions for collection care (to pay salaries). It was roundly criticized for this decision by the Met's former director Thomas P. Campbell (Montebello's successor), by cultural critic Lee Rosenbaum, and by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Christopher Knight, among others. They argued that the practice set a bad example for other museums and that the Met did not truly need these monies.
[Looted art]
One of the most serious and daunting challenges to the Metropolitan Museum's respectable reputation has been a series of allegations and lawsuits about its known status as an institutional buyer of looted and stolen antiquities. Since the 1990s the Met has been the subject of countless investigative reports and books critical of the Met's laissez-faire attitude to acquisition. The Met has lost several major lawsuits, notably against the governments of Italy and Turkey, which successfully sought the repatriation of hundreds of ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities, with a total value in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
In December 2023, the museum announced it will return 14 Khmer sculptures to Cambodia and 2 to Thailand after determining they were stolen and linked to art dealer Douglas Latchford.
In April 2023, ProPublica published a report detailing the Indigenous American collections of the Met Museum. The report exposed the loophole of loan vs. own that the Met was using to cling onto objects that they had an ethical and legal responsibility to repatriate.
Collecting practices
In response to many controversies, the museum issued a statement on collecting practices. The statement encompasses all 1.5 million works of art held by the Met. Referencing research, transparency, and collaboration, this statement is a clear redefining of the Met's outlook on looted art and artwork with unknown histories. “As a pre-eminent voice in the global art community, it is incumbent upon the Met to engage more intensively and proactively in examining certain areas of our collection,” stated Max Hollein, the directer of the museum. The Met hired a manager of provenance research with a team of three staff to assist the already-employed curators and historians.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Johnston
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Gurdon_Marquand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Edwin_Church
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