The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Fifth Avenue

Article By: Dan Hill

4 years ago

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Culture-Art Gallery Culture-Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Fifth Avenue

2020 marked the 150th anniversary of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York - often referred to simply as "The Met". The Met has 1.5 million works of art - spanning 5,000 years of human creativity - divided over its two locations: Fifth Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and The Met Cloisters in the north - at Fort Tryon Park. This article focuses on The Met Fifth Avenue. The Met Fifth Avenue is one of the world's largest art galleries - and it had nearly 6.5 million visitors in 2019. Not only will you find masterful paintings, drawings and sculptures, but the museum also places a focus on interior design, and even houses an antique weapons collection. The permanent collections include ancient Egyptian artefacts, works from the European masters, classical antiquities and American art through the ages. There are 35,000 art works from Asia, 17,000 works from ancient Greece and the Roman period, one of the world's largest collections of Islamic art, and a 4,000 square metre exhibition hall (The Rockefeller Wing) including 11,000 pieces of work from sub-Saharan Africa, The Pacific Islands and The Americas. With the museum having a specific focus on modern art, needless to say there are some incredible pieces to see: Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, Picasso's Gertrude Stein and cubist works by Picasso, Braque and Gris. The modern day building contains nearly 2 million square feet of floor space, and is nearly 1/4 of a mile long (400 meters) - but it wasn't always this way. The original building of 1880 was 20 times smaller - but the modern day building (owned by The City of New York) - has been expanded over the years. The Beaux-Arts front to the museum was a later addition - and its iconic appearance, in my opinion, couldn't be improved upon for a museum of this significance. How long should you spend at The Met? The answer to that depends entirely on you. The museum is huge - and one could easily spend an entire day here. Several hundred thousand works of art from The Met have now been digitised and made available online by the museum - so if you miss something - you can check it out from home. During Covid restricted times, The Met is open to guests who have pre-booked at the museum website (link on this page), at the following times: Tuesdays and Wednesdays: Closed Thursdays and Fridays: 12-7 Saturday–Monday: 10-5 The Met has made available an audio guide on the SoundCloud.com website. Image by anielbaez0 from Pixabay