List of artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide

The guide, with a foreword by the museum director Philippe de Montebello, was first produced in 1983 and the edition from 1994 has been digitized.

[2] This guide, with color illustrations followed by concise descriptions, was updated in 1983 and 1994 as The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (edited by Kathleen Howard during Philippe de Montebello tenure), and under the same name in 2012 (edited by Harriet Whelchel, Margaret Aspinwall and Elisa Urbanelli during Thomas P. Campbell tenure).

Montebello claimed that the idea for the guide "to present a profile of the Met in terms of its strengths and weaknesses", came from the museum's senior editor Kathleen Howard in 1978 and took 5 years to make, based on a pocket-sized format inspired by the guidebook from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum of Nuremberg.

The entire collection houses over two million objects, tens of thousands of which are on view at any given time.

The museum guide has been designed to highlight the various major sections based on the importance of their holdings in the "over-all hierarchy of the arts and public response".