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Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)

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Arts & Attractions Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)

The Metropolitan Museum is extraordinary in scope and size, and a visitor to this world-famous museum should plan on staying the entire day. In formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum's collection now contains more than three million works of a... more

The Metropolitan Museum is extraordinary in scope and size, and a visitor to this world-famous museum should plan on staying the entire day. In formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum's collection now contains more than three million works of art from all points of the compass, ancient through modern times. At their website, about 3,500 objects—fifty highlights from each of the Museum's curatorial departments as well as the entire department of European Paintings—can be searched by artist, period, style, or keyword. Following is a list of the permanent exhibitions. American Decorative Arts Furniture, silver, pewter, glass, ceramics, and textiles from the late 17th to early 20th century, as well as domestic architecture in furnished period rooms American Paintings and Sculpture Portraits, landscapes, history paintings, still lifes, folk art, and sculpture from colonial times through the early 20th century Ancient Near Eastern Art Stone reliefs and sculpture, ivory, and objects of precious metal from a vast area and time span: Anatolia to the Indus Valley, Neolithic period (ca. 8000 B.C.E.) to the Arab conquest (7th century C.E.) Arms and Armor Armor for m... more

The Metropolitan Museum is extraordinary in scope and size, and a visitor to this world-famous museum should plan on staying the entire day. In formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum's collection now contains more than three million works of art from all points of the compass, ancient through modern times. At their website, about 3,500 objects—fifty highlights from each of the Museum's curatorial departments as well as the entire department of European Paintings—can be searched by artist, period, style, or keyword.

Following is a list of the permanent exhibitions.

American Decorative Arts
Furniture, silver, pewter, glass, ceramics, and textiles from the late 17th to early 20th century, as well as domestic architecture in furnished period rooms

American Paintings and Sculpture
Portraits, landscapes, history paintings, still lifes, folk art, and sculpture from colonial times through the early 20th century

Ancient Near Eastern Art
Stone reliefs and sculpture, ivory, and objects of precious metal from a vast area and time span: Anatolia to the Indus Valley, Neolithic period (ca. 8000 B.C.E.) to the Arab conquest (7th century C.E.)

Arms and Armor
Armor for men, horses, and children, weapons, and martial accoutrements of sculptural and ornamental beauty from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and America

Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
Ritual objects and monuments, articles of personal adornment, and utensils for daily life from three continents and dozens of Pacific islands, 2500 B.C.E. to the present

Asian Art
Paintings, calligraphy, prints, sculpture, ceramics, bronzes, jades, lacquer, textiles, and screens from ancient to modern China, Japan, Korea, and South and Southeast Asia

The Cloisters
Art and architecture of medieval Europe, including sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, metalwork, enamels, ivories, paintings, and tapestries (see also "Medieval Art")

The Costume Institute
Seven centuries and five continents of fashionable dress, regional costumes, and accessories for men, women, and children, up to the present

Drawings and Prints
Graphic art of the Renaissance and after, encompassing prints in all techniques, sketches to highly finished drawings, illustrated books, and other works on paper

Egyptian Art
Statuary, reliefs, stelae, funerary objects, jewelry, daily implements, and architecture from prehistoric Egypt through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms to the Roman period (4th century C.E.)

European Paintings
Major canvases, panels, triptychs, and frescoes by Italian, Flemish, Dutch, French, Spanish, and British masters, from the 12th through the 19th century

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Sculpture, furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork, scientific instruments, textiles, and period rooms of the major Western European countries from the Renaissance through the early 20th century

Greek and Roman Art
Arts of Greece, Rome, Etruria, Cyprus, and Greek and Roman settlements until the 4th century C.E., including marble, bronze, and terracotta sculpture, vases, wall paintings, jewelry, gems, glass, and utilitarian objects

Islamic Art
Manuscripts and miniatures, carpets, intricately decorated objects in many media, and architectural elements from the founding of Islam in the 7th century C.E. onward, from Morocco to India

The Robert Lehman Collection
A private collection of paintings, drawings, and decorative arts given to the Museum, rich in works from the Italian and Northern Renaissance through the 20th century

The Libraries
Rare first editions, artists' treatises and manuals, illustrated atlases, scrapbooks, fine bindings, and seminal works of art history from the Museum's research libraries

Medieval Art
Early European, Byzantine, Carolingian, Romanesque, and Gothic works from the 4th to 16th century, including sculpture, tapestries, reliquaries, liturgical vessels, and more (see also "The Cloisters")

Modern Art
American and European paintings, works on paper, sculpture, design, and architecture representing the major artistic movements since 1900

Musical Instruments
An international array of instruments of historical, technical, and social importance, as well as tonal and visual beauty, from accordions to koras to zithers.

Photographs
Prints and daguerreotypes from the early history of the medium, European and American avant-garde works, and contemporary contributions from around the world.

Antonio Rotti Textile Center
Tapestries, velvets, carpets, embroideries, laces, samplers, quilts, and woven and printed fabrics from all periods and civilizations, dating back to 3000 B.C.E.

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Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

The art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central, and South America are overseen by a single curatorial department at the Metropolitan. More than 11,000 works of art of varied materials and types represent at least four millennia of greatly diverse cultural tradi... [ + ]tions. The department's holdings range from ritual sculpture and monuments of wood and stone to gold and silver ornaments, masks, costumes, and other textiles. At one end of the department's vast chronological range are archaeological American objects from 2000 B.C.E.; at the other are African and Pacific works from our own time. Strengths of the collection include decorative and ceremonial objects from the Court of Benin in Nigeria; sculpture from West and Central Africa; sculpture in wood from New Guinea and the island groups of Melanesia and Polynesia; and objects of gold, ceramic, and stone from the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central and South America.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Asian Art

The collection of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum is the largest and most comprehensive in the West. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works that provide—in both quality and breadth—an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world. T... [ + ]he collection of more than 35,000 objects, which range in date from the second millennium B.C. to the early twentieth century, includes paintings, prints, calligraphy, sculptures, metalwork, ceramics, lacquers, works of decorative art, and textiles from East Asia, South Asia, the Himalayan kingdoms, and Southeast Asia. The department is renowned for its Chinese calligraphy and paintings—both monumental landscapes and more intimate glimpses of nature—as well as for its Japanese folding screens and woodblock prints and its assemblage of functional, ritual, and luxury objects in many media. Stone and metal sculptures from South and Southeast Asia and early paintings from Nepal and Tibet are other areas of strength within the collection.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Costume Institute Collection

The Costume Institute houses a collection of more than thirty thousand costumes and accessories spanning five continents and as many centuries. Arguably the preeminent institution of its kind in the world, the matrix of The Costume Institute collection was the Museum of Costume Art, an independent e... [ + ]ntity formed in 1937. Led by Neighborhood Playhouse founder Irene Lewisohn, the Museum of Costume Art benefited from gifts from Irene Lewisohn and her sister Alice Lewisohn Crowley, as well as from theatrical designers Aline Bernstein and Lee Simonson, among many others. In 1946, with the financial support of the fashion industry, the Museum of Costume Art merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Costume Institute became a department in its own right in 1959. The legendary fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland, who served as special consultant from 1972 until her death in 1989, created a spectacular suite of costume exhibitions, including “The World of Balenciaga” (1973), “Hollywood Design” (1974), “The Glory of Russian Costume” (1976), and “Vanity Fair” (1977), galvanizing audiences and setting the international standard for the opulent exhibition of costume, chiefly based on loan items.

Today, The Costume Institute's five thousand square feet of gallery space, refurbished in 1992, house two special exhibitions a year based on The Costume Institute's peerless collection. These exhibitions have achieved the defining stature of the earlier Vreeland exhibitions by developing a critical discourse of fashion.

No other institution in the world has as ambitious a suite of exhibitions on fashion as The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Between exhibitions, The Costume Institute offers a docent-led tour, as well as “The Art of Dress,” a Family Guide that discusses fashion history within the context of the Museum’s vast permanent collection of paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, armor, and textiles.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
$
For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Drawings and Prints

The Metropolitan Museum owns approximately fifteen thousand drawings and 1.5 million prints. The Department of Drawings and Prints focuses almost exclusively on works of graphic art produced after the Middle Ages in Western Europe and in North America. The collection of drawings is known particularl... [ + ]y for its works by Italian and French artists of the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. One corollary of its impressive scope is that artists whose paintings are extremely rare—such as Michelangelo, Pontormo, and Altdorfer—are represented at the Metropolitan by splendid sheets that demonstrate their fluency with chalk, ink, and wash. The collection of northern Gothic and Renaissance prints is one of the finest in the world, and eighteenth-century Italian and nineteenth-century French prints are richly represented. Also in the department's care are more than twelve thousand illustrated books and a comprehensive collection of designs for Renaissance and Baroque architecture and the decorative arts.

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Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Ancient Egyptian Art

The collection of ancient Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum ranks among the finest outside Cairo. It consists of approximately 36,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from the Paleolithic to the Roman period (ca. 300,000 B.C.–4th century A.D.). More than half of... [ + ] the collection is derived from the Museum's thirty-five years of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing public interest in the culture of ancient Egypt. Today, virtually the entire collection is on display in thirty-two major galleries and eight study galleries, with objects arranged chronologically. Overall, the holdings reflect the aesthetic values, history, religious beliefs, and daily life of the ancient Egyptians over the entire course of their great civilization.

The Department of Egyptian Art is particularly well known for the Old Kingdom mastaba (offering chapel) of Perneb (ca. 2450 B.C.); a set of Middle Kingdom wooden models from the tomb of Meketre at Thebes (ca. 1990 B.C.); jewelry of Princess Sit-hathor-yunet of Dynasty 12 (ca. 1897–1797 B.C.); royal portrait sculpture of Dynasty 12 (ca. 1991–1783 B.C.); and statuary of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut of Dynasty 18 (ca. 1473–1458 B.C.). The department also exhibits its invaluable collection of watercolor facsimiles, most of which are copies of Theban tomb paintings produced between 1907 and 1937 by members of the Graphic Section of the Museum's Egyptian Expedition.

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Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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European Paintings - Old Master and Nineteenth-Century

The Metropolitan Museum's collection of Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings—one of the greatest such collections in existence—numbers approximately 2,200 works, dozens of which are instantly recognizable worldwide. The French, Italian, and Dutch schools are most strongly represented... [ + ], with fine works also by British, Netherlandish, German, Spanish, and Flemish masters. The department's holdings—which consist not only of paintings on canvas and wood but also of frescoes, oil sketches, and finished pastels on paper, as well as a small number of Greek and Russian icons—range in date from the twelfth through the nineteenth century. Among its many masterpieces are exceptional assemblages of the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; of the French Impressionists (the Museum owns thirty-seven Monets and twenty-one oil paintings by Cézanne); and of Vermeer, whose five canvases at the Metropolitan surpass the number at any other museum in the world.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

The 50,000 objects in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts constitute a comprehensive and important historical collection, one of the Metropolitan Museum's largest, reflecting the development of a number of art forms in the major Western European countries from the early fifteent... [ + ]h through the early twentieth century. The department's holdings cover the following areas: sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also collected by the department.

Distinguished works of Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century French sculpture abound in a series of gallery spaces, ranging from the soaring and sunlit Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court to beautifully appointed period rooms. Among the department's best-known masterpieces in marble are Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Bacchanal and Houdon's portrait of his infant daughter, Sabine. From the nineteenth century there is an extensive collection of sculptures by Rodin and Degas. Displays of furniture and smaller objects provide a lavish and comprehensive survey of styles in the decorative arts, documenting the achievements of master craftsmen across Europe in this era.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Greek and Roman Art

The collection of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum—more than seventeen thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312—includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in... [ + ] North America. The areas represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: much of Asia Minor on the periphery of Greece was settled by Greeks; Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized in the course of its long history; and Greek colonies were established around much of the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the political expansion of Rome. The department also exhibits the pre-Greek art of Greece and the pre-Roman art of Italy.

Today, the objects in the department range from small, engraved gemstones to black-figure and red-figure painted vases to over-life-size statues and reflect virtually all of the materials in which ancient artists and craftsmen worked: marble, limestone, terracotta, bronze, gold, silver, and glass, as well as such rarer substances as ivory and bone, iron, lead, amber, and wood.

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Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Islamic Art

The Metropolitan Museum's collection of Islamic art, which ranges in date from the seventh to the nineteenth century, reflects the great diversity and range of Islamic culture and offers perhaps the most comprehensive permanent installation of Islamic art on view anywhere. Nearly 12,000 objects crea... [ + ]ted in the cultural tradition of the world's youngest monotheistic religion (Islam, founded in A.D. 622, means "submission to God") have been assembled at the Metropolitan from as far westward as Spain and Morocco and as far eastward as Central Asia and India. While many of these objects were originally intended for decoration of a mosque or for use during worship, domestic and luxury objects in the collection reveal the mutual influence of artistic practice in the sacred and secular realms. In particular, the traditions of calligraphy, vegetal ornament (the arabesque), and geometric patterning are strongly expressed in most pieces on view.

To dispel a common misconception: Islam's supposed prohibition against figural art is confined to the religious sphere. As just one example, many representations of people are to be found in the department's outstanding assemblage of miniature paintings—strictly secular in nature—from the courts of Iran and Mughal India. Other strengths of the Metropolitan's collection include ceramics and textiles from all parts of the Islamic world; some of the finest Islamic carpets in existence from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and glass and metalwork from Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia.

The galleries are currently projected to reopen in 2011. While they are closed, important objects from the collection can be seen throughout the Museum in various locations.

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Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
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Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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European Art - The Robert Lehman Collection

The Robert Lehman Collection—one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States—was presented to the Metropolitan Museum by the Robert Lehman Foundation in 1969, following Mr. Lehman's death. The collection of nearly three thousand works of art, which had been ... [ + ]assembled by Mr. Lehman, a longtime Museum trustee, and by his father, Philip, is housed today in The Robert Lehman Wing. The galleries, which opened to the public in 1975, were designed to evoke the ambience of Lehman's own house on West 54th Street in New York City, with wall fabrics, draperies, furniture, and rugs that set the objects in an intimate, personal context.

Thanks to Lehman's acute connoisseurship and adroit negotiation of the art market, the collection is extremely strong in several areas of European art. Its approximately three hundred paintings favor the Italian Renaissance, especially the Sienese school, and the early northern masters, but range as far afield as the Fauves and beyond. Its more than seven hundred Old Master drawings include a rich trove of eighteenth-century Venetian works as well as other important Italian, French, and northern examples. The remaining two thousand objects in many media in the collection fall into the category of decorative arts; the concentrations of Venetian glass and Renaissance majolica are particularly noteworthy.

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Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Medieval Art

The period between ancient and modern times in Western civilization, known as the Middle Ages, extends from the fourth to the early sixteenth century—that is, roughly from the Fall of Rome to the beginning of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. The Metropolitan Museum's collection of medieval art, o... [ + ]ne of the richest in the world, encompasses the art of this long and complex period in all of its many phases, from its pre-Christian antecedents in Western Europe through the early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic periods. Though administered by a single curatorial department, the Museum's medieval holdings are exhibited in two different locations: in several galleries on the first floor of the Main Building on Fifth Avenue, and at The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan devoted to the art of medieval Europe in northern Manhattan's Fort Tryon Park.

The medieval objects in the Main Building, of which there are more than six thousand, display a somewhat broader geographical and temporal range—pre-medieval European antiquities (that are not Greek or Roman) from as early as the Bronze Age fall under the department's purview and are exhibited here, as are works of Byzantine art from the Middle East and North Africa—while the collection of about five thousand objects housed at The Cloisters is strictly European and starts in the year 800, with particular emphasis on the twelfth through the fifteenth century. Both locations exhibit two- and three-dimensional works of art in a wide range of media, from wooden and stone free-standing and architectural sculpture to stained glass, metalwork, enamels, ivories, manuscript illuminations (typically tempera and gold leaf on parchment or vellum), oil paintings, tapestries, and more.

The collection of medieval art exhibited at the Main Building is particularly strong in Byzantine silver, enamels, glass, and ivories; medieval jewelry; Romanesque and Gothic metalwork, stained glass, sculpture, enamels, and ivories; and Gothic tapestries.

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Sun, December 15
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Visitors from outside of NY State:
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Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Modern Art

The Department of Modern Art surveys painting, sculpture, drawings and watercolors, decorative arts, design, and architectural representations from about 1900 to the present day in more than 10,000 works, primarily by European and American artists. The Metropolitan Museum has been concerned with the... [ + ] art of its own time, as well as that of the past, since its founding in 1870. Many of the objects acquired as contemporary in the early decades of the Museum's existence are now in the collections of other departments—The American Wing, for instance, or the Department of European Paintings.

Those works that entered the collection before the turn of the century and still qualify as "modern" join many, many more acquired over the past hundred years. The strengths of the modern-art collection are housed in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Of particular note are the paintings by members of the School of Paris, such as Braque, Picasso, and Modigliani; paintings and drawings by the circle of early American modernists around Alfred Stieglitz; over ninety works by Paul Klee; large-scale paintings by the postwar Abstract Expressionists; bronzes by Elie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise; as well as paintings, drawings, and prints by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. The modern design collection features prominently the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh; the work of Josef Hoffmann and other members of the Wiener Werkstätte; Art Nouveau jewelry by René Lalique; Art Deco furniture by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann; and Italian and Japanese objects of the 1970s.

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Visitors from outside of NY State:
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$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Musical Instruments

Only one curatorial department at the Metropolitan Museum exhibits objects originally meant to appeal as much to the ear as to the eye. It is the Department of Musical Instruments, which holds approximately five thousand examples from six continents and the Pacific Islands, dating from about 300 B.C... [ + ]. to the present. The collection, which is unsurpassed in its comprehensive scope, illustrates the development of musical instruments from all cultures and eras. The instruments, selected for their technical and social importance as well as for their tonal and visual beauty, may be approached in a number of ways: as art objects, as ethnographic record, and as documents of the history of music and performance.

Although the greatest strength of the department lies in its encyclopedic nature, categories that are particularly well represented include European and American keyboards, wind instruments from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and instruments of all sorts from non-Western societies. Fifty highlights from the department are presented online, organized by instrument type and, within types, alphabetically by the name of the country of origin. The basic instrument types, or classifications, are aerophones (which generate sound through the vibration of air), chordophones (through the vibration of strings), membranophones (through the vibration of a stretched membrane), and idiophones (which are made of naturally sonorous materials that require no additional tension to produce sound). A fifth type—electrophones, which generate sound electronically or through amplified means—is represented among the highlights by a single guitar.

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Sun, December 15
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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History of Photography

The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs surveys the history of photography from its invention in the 1830s to the present. The collection of more than 20,000 works is largely European and American, with some representation of other parts of the world, particularly Japan. The Metropolitan... [ + ]'s department includes several important collections: The Gilman Paper Company Collection, comprising exceptionally rich holdings in early French, British, and American photography, as well as masterpieces from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods; The Rubel Collection, with superb examples of British photography from the first three decades of the medium's history; The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, with masterpieces of the Photo-Secession movement (1902–17) and related Pictorialist photography; The Ford Motor Company Collection of American and European photography between the World Wars; and the personal archive of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975). All told, the Museum's collection reveals the medium's breadth of form and function—from documentation to refined aestheticism and from intimate explorations of identity to majestic expressions of the sublime.

Nearly every permutation of technique and support is represented: early experimental "photogenic drawings" of the 1830s; daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes (one-of-a-kind images exposed on silver-plated copper, glass, and iron, respectively); salted paper prints from paper negatives; albumen silver prints from glass negatives; gum bichromate prints; platinum and palladium prints; gelatin silver prints (the standard black-and-white photograph of the twentieth century); and a variety of types of color photography.

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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Textile Arts - Antonio Ratti Textile Center

The Metropolitan Museum of Art possesses one of the finest collections of textiles in the world. Encyclopedic in scope, it includes examples from all of the world's civilizations and from almost every period in history. Among the 35,000 pieces (a number which does not reflect the holdings of The Cos... [ + ]tume Institute) are archaeological fragments, tapestries, carpets, quilts, ecclesiastical vestments, silks, embroideries, laces, velvets, and more, dating from 3000 B.C. to the present. Highlights include late Antique domestic textiles made in Egypt by Christians and pagans alike during the fourth to seventh centuries; silk tapestries and embroideries of the Yuan dynasty, a peak of refinement and complexity in Chinese textiles; a five-medallion "compartment carpet" crafted in Persia during the Safavid period in the early sixteenth century; and the opulent and rare seventeenth-century French embroidered wall panels in the Museum's Louis XIV bedchamber.

Previously dispersed among the various curatorial departments according to the cultures that produced them, most of the Museum's textile holdings are now gathered in the Antonio Ratti Textile Center—one of the largest, most technically advanced facilities for the study, storage, and conservation of textiles in any art museum. While each curatorial department retains intellectual responsibility for its own textiles, the custom-designed center provides the controlled environmental conditions necessary for the long-term preservation of these fragile works of art, as well as study and research facilities for Museum staff and the general public, and a state-of-the-art conservation laboratory.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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American Decorative Arts

The collection of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum extends from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century and includes approximately twelve thousand examples of furniture, silver, glass, pewter, ceramics, and textiles. Present in the collection are objects made on Americ... [ + ]an soil from the early colonial period, reflecting the settlers' keen desire to reproduce as faithfully as possible the material world they had left behind in England, Holland, and other homelands. Styles adhered closely to overseas developments, though regional schools of cabinetmaking did emerge rather swiftly in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston. Over the next two centuries, assimilating trends and techniques from across the Atlantic was the major preoccupation of American designers and craftsmen. The department's holdings reflect this ongoing dialogue, as well as the many truly original voices in American decorative arts.

The Metropolitan's collection of American stained glass is perhaps the most comprehensive anywhere and features the innovative work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Also noteworthy is the rest of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century glass collection, including objects designed and produced by Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company; early furniture up to about 1820; Baroque-style silver of about 1700; presentation and exposition silver objects of the later nineteenth century; and nineteenth-century ceramics.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
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Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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American Paintings and Sculpture

The collection of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum is one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world. More than one thousand paintings, six hundred sculptures, and 2,600 drawings - exceeding four thousand works in total by approximately nine hundred different artist... [ + ]s- constitute an encyclopedic survey of fine art in America, from the late colonial period in the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. The collection has been assembled over more than a century, beginning almost immediately after the Museum's founding. (American paintings, sculpture, and drawings by artists born after 1878 are in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, and all photographs in the Department of Photographs.)

Extraordinary in quality and exhaustive in scope, the department's collection of paintings has impressive concentrations of portraits, landscapes, and narrative scenes, as well as notable works by America's foremost painters, including John Singleton Copley, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and John Sloan. The sculpture collection is equally distinguished and is especially strong in Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts works.

Please note that the galleries for American Paintings and Sculpture will reopen in late 2011, following a major renovation. Many of the colonial American paintings are now installed in the period rooms and adjacent decorative arts galleries. Other masterworks remain on view in The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. Learn more about the American Wing renovation project.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
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Ancient Near Eastern Art

The Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art covers both a lengthy chronological span and a vast geographical area. The collection of more than seven thousand works of art ranges in date from 8000 B.C. (the Neolithic period) to the Arab conquest and rise of Islam beginning in A.D. 651. The works come ... [ + ]from ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria, Anatolia, and other lands in the region that extends from the Black and Caspian Seas in the north to the southwestern Arabian peninsula, and from western Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River Valley in modern-day Pakistan and India. Societies throughout the ancient Near East maintained commercial and cultural contacts across great distances, although the routes, trade goods, and artistic styles and motifs that were exchanged varied in different periods.

Strengths of the department's collection, in formation for more than a century, include Sumerian sculptures; Anatolian ivories; Iranian bronzes; metalwork from Bronze Age Bactria in modern-day Afghanistan and Turkmenistan; and magnificent silver and gold vessels from the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian eras in Iran. These objects are joined by an extraordinary group of Assyrian stone reliefs depicting scenes of warfare and ritual and by enormous guardian figures, all from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) at Nimrud, as well as by fine ivory carvings, many of which originally served as furniture ornaments at that site. There is also a large collection of stamp and cylinder seals representative of the various cultures of the ancient Near East.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
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Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Arms and Armor

The collection of armor, edged weapons, and firearms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art ranks with those of the other great armories of the world, in Vienna, Madrid, Dresden, and Paris. It consists of approximately 15,000 objects that range in date from about 400 B.C. to the nineteenth century. Thoug... [ + ]h Western Europe and Japan are the regions most strongly represented—the collection of more than five thousand pieces of Japanese armor and weapons is the finest outside Japan—the geographical range of the collection is extraordinary, with examples from the Near East, the Middle East, India, Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and North America. The focus is on outstanding craftsmanship and decoration—that is, items often intended solely for display rather than for actual use, from minute ornamental sword fittings to full suits of armor.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
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Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

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Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.

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Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

The art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central, and South America are overseen by a single curatorial department at the Metropolitan. More than 11,000 works of art of varied materials and types represent at least four millennia of greatly diverse cultural tradi... [ + ]tions. The department's holdings range from ritual sculpture and monuments of wood and stone to gold and silver ornaments, masks, costumes, and other textiles. At one end of the department's vast chronological range are archaeological American objects from 2000 B.C.E.; at the other are African and Pacific works from our own time. Strengths of the collection include decorative and ceremonial objects from the Court of Benin in Nigeria; sculpture from West and Central Africa; sculpture in wood from New Guinea and the island groups of Melanesia and Polynesia; and objects of gold, ceramic, and stone from the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central and South America.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
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Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Asian Art

The collection of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum is the largest and most comprehensive in the West. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works that provide—in both quality and breadth—an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world. T... [ + ]he collection of more than 35,000 objects, which range in date from the second millennium B.C. to the early twentieth century, includes paintings, prints, calligraphy, sculptures, metalwork, ceramics, lacquers, works of decorative art, and textiles from East Asia, South Asia, the Himalayan kingdoms, and Southeast Asia. The department is renowned for its Chinese calligraphy and paintings—both monumental landscapes and more intimate glimpses of nature—as well as for its Japanese folding screens and woodblock prints and its assemblage of functional, ritual, and luxury objects in many media. Stone and metal sculptures from South and Southeast Asia and early paintings from Nepal and Tibet are other areas of strength within the collection.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Costume Institute Collection

The Costume Institute houses a collection of more than thirty thousand costumes and accessories spanning five continents and as many centuries. Arguably the preeminent institution of its kind in the world, the matrix of The Costume Institute collection was the Museum of Costume Art, an independent e... [ + ]ntity formed in 1937. Led by Neighborhood Playhouse founder Irene Lewisohn, the Museum of Costume Art benefited from gifts from Irene Lewisohn and her sister Alice Lewisohn Crowley, as well as from theatrical designers Aline Bernstein and Lee Simonson, among many others. In 1946, with the financial support of the fashion industry, the Museum of Costume Art merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Costume Institute became a department in its own right in 1959. The legendary fashion arbiter Diana Vreeland, who served as special consultant from 1972 until her death in 1989, created a spectacular suite of costume exhibitions, including “The World of Balenciaga” (1973), “Hollywood Design” (1974), “The Glory of Russian Costume” (1976), and “Vanity Fair” (1977), galvanizing audiences and setting the international standard for the opulent exhibition of costume, chiefly based on loan items.

Today, The Costume Institute's five thousand square feet of gallery space, refurbished in 1992, house two special exhibitions a year based on The Costume Institute's peerless collection. These exhibitions have achieved the defining stature of the earlier Vreeland exhibitions by developing a critical discourse of fashion.

No other institution in the world has as ambitious a suite of exhibitions on fashion as The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Between exhibitions, The Costume Institute offers a docent-led tour, as well as “The Art of Dress,” a Family Guide that discusses fashion history within the context of the Museum’s vast permanent collection of paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, armor, and textiles.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
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Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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Drawings and Prints

The Metropolitan Museum owns approximately fifteen thousand drawings and 1.5 million prints. The Department of Drawings and Prints focuses almost exclusively on works of graphic art produced after the Middle Ages in Western Europe and in North America. The collection of drawings is known particularl... [ + ]y for its works by Italian and French artists of the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. One corollary of its impressive scope is that artists whose paintings are extremely rare—such as Michelangelo, Pontormo, and Altdorfer—are represented at the Metropolitan by splendid sheets that demonstrate their fluency with chalk, ink, and wash. The collection of northern Gothic and Renaissance prints is one of the finest in the world, and eighteenth-century Italian and nineteenth-century French prints are richly represented. Also in the department's care are more than twelve thousand illustrated books and a comprehensive collection of designs for Renaissance and Baroque architecture and the decorative arts.

12/15/2019 09:30 AM
Sun, December 15
9:30AM
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For New York State residents as well as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut students, admission is pay as you wish. Please be as generous as you can.

Visitors from outside of NY State:
$25 for adults,
$17 for seniors
$12 for students.
Admission for all children under 12 and Members and Patrons will continue to be free.

Any full-priced admissions ticket is valid for three consecutive days at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.
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An accomplished dancer, Maximilian I would conclude his jousting tournaments with a masquerade ball. 🎭 Distinguis…
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#FunFactFriday: On December 13, 1946, The #CostumeInstitute opened its first exhibition to the public. 👗✨ The exhi…
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Take note! It's #ViolinDay 🎻 #DYK "The Gould" is the only violin by famed master Antonio Stradivari that has been…
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This weekend at #TheMet, tap into your powers of observation by hopping on a free gallery tour, or by immersing you…
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