The highlights of the collection include the Sumerian Stele of Ushumgal, the Elamite silver Kneeling Bull with Vessel, the Pratt Ivories, and a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II.

Situated in a large room and partially surrounded by a reflecting pool and illuminated by a wall of windows opening onto Central Park, the Temple of Dendur has been one of the Met's most enduring attractions.

[44] Although the collection is particularly concentrated in Renaissance sculpture—much of which can be seen in situ surrounded by contemporary furnishings and decoration—it also contains comprehensive holdings of furniture, jewelry, glass and ceramic pieces, tapestries, textiles, and timepieces and mathematical instruments.

In addition to its outstanding collections of English and French furniture, visitors can enter dozens of completely furnished period rooms, transplanted in their entirety into the Met's galleries.

The Greek and Roman galleries also contain several large classical wall paintings and reliefs from different periods, including an entire reconstructed bedroom from a noble villa in Boscoreale, excavated after its entombment by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

As with many other departments at the Met, the Islamic Art galleries contain many interior pieces, including the entire reconstructed Nur Al-Din Room from an early 18th-century house in Damascus.

[42][71][72] Stephen V. Grancsay, the second arms curator at the museum, ably added to the collection, and he even purchased important works from Clarence H. Mackay (the greatest contemporary private collector of this material, who was wiped out by the Great Depression).

[79][80][81] In past years, Costume Institute shows organized around designers such as Cristóbal Balenciaga, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Gianni Versace; and style doyenne like Diana Vreeland, Mona von Bismarck, Babe Paley, Jayne Wrightsman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Nan Kempner, and Iris Apfel have drawn significant crowds to the Met.

The Costume Institute's annual Benefit Gala, co-chaired by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, is an extremely popular, if exclusive, event in the fashion world; in 2007, the 700 available tickets started at $6,500 (~$9,204 in 2023) per person.

Harris Brisbane Dick's donation of thirty-five hundred works on paper (mostly nineteenth-century etchings) and a fund for acquisitions led to the hiring of William M. Ivins Jr. in 1916.

[91][71] As the museum's first curator of prints, Ivans established the mission of collecting images that would reveal "the whole gamut of human life and endeavor, from the most ephemeral of courtesies to the loftiest pictorial presentation of man's spiritual aspirations."

[72] Ivans and his successor A. Hyatt Mayor (hired 1932, 1946-66 Curator of Prints) collected hundreds of thousands of works, including photographs, books, architectural drawings, modern artworks on paper, posters, trade cards, and other ephemera.

[91] Important early donors to the department include: Junius Spencer Morgan II, who presented a broad range of material, mainly 16th century, including woodblocks and many prints by Albrecht Dürer in 1919; Gothic woodcuts and Rembrandt etchings from the Felix M. Warburg family; James Clark McGuire's transformative bequest brought over seven hundred fifteenth-century woodcuts; prints by Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt with the H.O.

[91] The broadened collecting horizons of the museum in the post-Black Lives Matter era have been displayed in the exhibition of contemporary political works on paper called "Revolution, Resistance, and Activism", held at the Met in 2021-22.

Museum?, 1987, Julie Torres' Super Diva!, 2020 (a posthumous image of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), and Ben Blount's Black Women's Wisdom, 2019.

Other choice Italian paintings in the collection include masterpieces like Botticelli's Annunciation, a pair of stunning portraits by Jacometto Veneziano, and a stellar Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini.

Cornerstones of the collection include Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein, Jasper Johns's White Flag, Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), and Max Beckmann's triptych Beginning.

However, the Photographs department has produced some of the best-received temporary exhibits in the Met's recent past, including a Diane Arbus retrospective and an extensive show devoted to spirit photography.

[135] Norman Lewis, Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Clifford Joseph, Roy DeCarava, Reginald Gammon, Henri Ghent, Raymond Saunders, and Alice Neel were among the artists who picketed the show.

[144] 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.

For six decades Lehman built upon an art collection begun by his father in 1911 and devoted a great deal of time the Met, before finally becoming the first chairman of the board at the Metropolitan in the 1960s.

[154] The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial was celebrated with exhibitions, symposia, concerts, lectures, the reopening of refurbished galleries, special tours, social events, and other programming for eighteen months from October 1969 through the spring of 1971.

[162][163][164] In January 2018, museum president Daniel Weiss announced that the century-old policy of free admission would be replaced by a $25 charge to out-of-state and foreign visitors, effective March 2018.

This resulted in the indefinite postponement of a planned $600 million architectural expansion of the exhibition space for the museum's modern art collection as well as started a general discussion over the Met's human resources management.

[142] Roberta Smith writing for The New York Times in September 2017 voiced growing public concern that proposed increases in admissions costs would have an adverse effect upon attendance statistics at the museum.

The past week has seen a New York Times piece titled "The New Pay Policy Is a Mistake", while Jezebel's Aimée Lutkin claimed "The Met Should Be Fucking Free".

Hoving's deaccessioning practices, including secretive non-public sales that violated donor wishes, was exposed by John L. Hess in a series of articles in the New York Times.

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.

1989), Michael Gross in Rogues' Gallery (2009), and Martin Gammon, Deaccessioning and its Discontents: A Critical History (2018),[32] though the most comprehensive account remains Hess's 1974 book, The Grand Acquisitors.

"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 director of the museum.