Inside the Met Museum’s intrigue-filled past and glorious future

In 1866, a group of New York’s finest decided that their fair city needed a museum. 

It would be a big museum. An important museum. A “national” museum that would bring great art and art education to the American people.

A museum like the National Gallery in London, or the Louvre in Paris. (Never mind that Washington had already opened a national museum, the Smithsonian, in 1846 — everyone knew New York City was the true cultural capital of the US.)

It would elevate Manhattan into a world-class city; boost American manufacturing and craft by showing US citizens great design and art; and give visitors reasons to have pride in their country.

That’s — very generally speaking — how the Metropolitan Museum of Art was born, according to Jonathan Conlin’s scholarly new book “The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People” (Columbia University Press, out now).

It was incorporated in 1870, with no works of art in its collection and no home.Two years later, the museum had 174 paintings and a temporary exhibition space on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. 

Today the Metropolitan is home to more than 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years and a majestic 2-million-square-foot palace in Central Park.

And yet, as Conlin makes clear in his book, we’re still asking the very questions the founding trustees tussled with at its start: What is a museum’s purpose? Who is it for? Who gets a say in how it’s run or what kind of art it has? And is the idea of a wide-ranging “universal” survey museum — that purports to showcase the history of civilization through art — even a good one?

Conlin grew up in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has fond memories of spending time at the Met.

And yet, his book delves into some of the museum’s more unsavory elements: looted goods, fakes, robber baron donors, racism, sexism, classism, striking guards and more.

The beautiful American Wing? Largely inspired by exclusionary immigrant policies and the desire to promote an Anglo-Saxon definition of a national art. Those sublime Impressionist oils? Probably donated by a Gilded Age sugar refiner.

The book doesn’t even get into the Met removing the Sackler name from seven exhibition spaces in 2021, after protests led by artist Nan Goldin against the opioid manufacturing family.

“I did all this as a critical friend to the Met,” Conlin — who now teaches history at the University of Southampton in the UK — told The Post. “In the current climate, it can be hard to be a critical friend, because you’re either a friend or you’re an enemy. But I wouldn’t have spent all this time researching the history of the Met if I didn’t think that it had a future that needed to be informed by looking at the past.”

When the Met first emerged, you could not go to a university and study art history or curation. So most of the people in charge were very, very wealthy men who could afford to journey to Europe and buy expensive art. There weren’t really any artists on the board.

Fortunately for the Met — but unfortunately for the 99% —  post-Civil War industrialization ushered in the era of the robber baron and rapacious capitalism.

Oligarchs made millions off the backs of underpaid laborers, while paying little to no taxes. (The income tax was allowed to expire in 1872 and didn’t return for good until 1916.)

These fat cats saw themselves as the new royalty, and wanted art collections and associations with places like the Met or the MFA in Boston that would flaunt their new-found status.

“At first, there was a sense that there were greater restrictions on the export of art, and so the original idea was [the museum] would have casts or copies,” Conlin said. “And then quickly, I think through the influence of these oligarchs, they set their sights higher to wanting the prestige of the original.”

By the early 1900s, the Met had numerous plutocrats loaning and dangling masterworks they bought through their capitalistic gains.

Henry Havemeyer — of the American Sugar Refining Company — was known for his thuggish business dealings, but collected French art. He and his wife, Louisine, donated more than 300 objects to the Met, including a trove of Impressionist paintings from Manet, Degas and Renoir.

Legendary financier J.P. Morgan served as the Met’s president and funded its first Egyptian excavations. Yet the museum was dismayed upon his death that he didn’t leave his vast art collection to the institution. (His son ended up giving a good chunk of it to the Met four years later.)

“I think traditionally historians of collecting tend not to look at where the money came from before it was spent,” Conlin said. “[But] there is a link between how Havemeyer collected art and how he collected his fortune” — that is aggressively, mercilessly.

“It was about the chase, it was about the fight,” particularly during public auctions, as the crowds cheered as the bids escalated. “It was almost like a WWF approach to art acquisition.”

Then there was the Met’s first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola: a former Union cavalry officer who traveled to Cyprus to dig for treasure, much of which he ended up selling to the Met.

A subsequent archeological dig yielded even more treasures, though he was accused of altering statues, fudging and inflating numbers and dates, and admitted to trying to trick and evade Ottoman restrictions on excavations and export. 

Conlin compared him to circus impresario P.T. Barnum. “He brought a kind of theater to the Met,” he said.

The Met — despite its rarefied air — does occasionally love some good old razzle dazzle. There is, of course, each May’s Met Gala, which rose to fame in the 1970s under the tutelage of famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland.

Today, the event is a showcase for avant-garde fashion, such as Katy Perry walking up the museum’s Fifth Avenue stairway dressed as a chandelier in 2019. But back in 1961, museum director James J. Rorimer shuddered at the sight of patrons dancing The Twist. 

Sometimes the Met’s huge, bombastic swings miss. Take the 1969 show “Harlem on My Mind,” the landmark multimedia exhibit about black life in uptown Manhattan that ended up offending most of the African-American community. 

Museum leaders were shocked when ahead of the show’s January opening, black artists and community members picketed the Met. They protested HMM’s “exclusion of black art and appropriation of black history” and called for the show’s cancellation. They also demanded that the museum appoint black curators and “seek a more viable relationship with the Total Black Community.”

The exhibition did include photographs by the Harlem Renaissance portrait artist James Van Der Zee, but all the paintings and other “fine art” depicting Harlem and black life were done by non-blacks. Then, the exhibition’s catalog included an essay by a Harlem teen featuring a quote that some read as anti-Semitic. In response, Mayor John Lindsay threatened to defund the Met.

Yet the Met was slow to learn its lesson.

Its director, Thomas Hoving, responded by hiring Lowery Stokes Sims in 1972, a young black woman, as an assistant curator. But most of Sims’ groundbreaking shows about black art were mounted outside the Met itself. And she was only promoted to full curator in 1995.

One of the striking things about “The Met” is that so many of its historical debates and troubles still ring true today. Just in 2023, the Met Costume Institute feted the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, a controversial figure who spewed anti-fat, anti-Islamic and just generally un-P.C. comments throughout his life. In 2020 and 2021, amid the COVID lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, advocates on social media called for the Met to hire more curators of color and “decolonize” their collections. (The Met promised to come up with a report to address and repair this contested past. “Four years later, the report they promised to produce in two years still hasn’t appeared,” Conlin noted dryly.) There is a more diverse curatorial staff, but the ones in charge are still white men.

And yet, there have been many improvements. The American Wing has a more expansive vision of American art, including art from Native and Latino cultures. There are more thoughtful shows, such as this year’s “Harlem Renaissance” portraits show, a long overdue and joyful corrective to the “Harlem on My Mind” debacle.

Far from canceling the Met, Conlin said, we should “cherish” it and other universal survey museums like it.

“These institutions, like the Met, the British Museum or the Louvre, are celebrating a shared human creativity,” Conlin said. “Much of the art here was, at one point, a trophy of a few people: kings, scholar mandarins or oligarchs. I think my concern is that art is still being viewed as a trophy — so black art belongs to black people; Chinese art belongs to Chinese people; and it doesn’t belong to the rest of us.”

Today, amid the clamor of identity politics, “it seems progressive to make those arguments,” Conlin continues. “But it’s ultimately compartmentalizing us and encouraging us to lose sight of the things we have in common, which is that we are a uniquely creative species.”