The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's strength is that it does not specialise. Roughly 30,000 ancient Egyptian objects, one of the largest such holdings outside Cairo, and the Museum states that almost all of them are on view. About 2,500 European paintings, including five of the fewer than thirty-five works accepted as Vermeer's by 1979. The most comprehensive collection of American painting, sculpture and decorative arts anywhere, by the Museum's own account. Greek and Roman galleries reinstalled over fifteen years and reopened in 2007, rooted in the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot material bought in 1874 to 1876. Arms and armour, Islamic art, Asian art, medieval art, drawings and prints, photographs, musical instruments, costume, and the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania in a wing rebuilt and reopened in 2025. Nineteen collecting areas in all, by the count the Museum used when it created its provenance research team. Tens of thousands of objects are on view at any one time in a two-million-square-foot building, and in a normal year about 1,700 Met objects are out on loan elsewhere. The consequence for a visitor is that the Met cannot be seen; it can only be sampled. The consequence for this archive is that no other single institution accounts for so many of our records.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was not founded in New York. Its earliest roots are in Paris in 1866, where a group of Americans agreed to create a national institution and gallery of art for the American people; the lawyer John Jay proposed it and pursued it on his return. The Museum was incorporated on 13 April 1870 and opened to the public that year in the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue. Its first object, acquired on 20 November 1870, was a Roman sarcophagus. In 1871, 174 European paintings entered the collection, among them works by van Dyck, Poussin and Tiepolo.

It reached its present site by way of a further move, to the Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street, and opened at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street on 30 March 1880 in a Ruskinian Gothic building by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. That building still exists, and this is the single most important thing to understand about the Met: it was not demolished, it was engulfed. Additions began as early as 1888 and now completely surround the original structure. Its west facade survives as a wall inside the Robert Lehman Wing.

The Museum is unusually candid about this and will show you the seams. Two of the four staircases from the 1880 building were uncovered and restored in 1995, and their decorative ironwork is visible near the European Paintings and Medieval Art galleries. A banded-granite pointed arch from Vaux and Mould's 1880 facade survives at the entrance to the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery near the top of the Grand Staircase. The entire south facade of Theodore Weston's classical addition of 1888 now stands inside the glass-roofed Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court, serving as one of its walls. Even the wing now being designed to replace the modern galleries is constrained by the buried original: the Museum states it will rise no higher than the 1880 wing at the centre of the complex.

What the world pictures as the Met is not the 1880 building but the front that was put on it. By the 1890s the red-brick Gothic museum set back from Fifth Avenue was inadequate to the collection, and the trustees turned to Richard Morris Hunt, himself a founding trustee of the Museum. His Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall were designed in 1895 and opened to the public in December 1902, seven years later. The facade carries four caryatids representing the four branches of art, painting, sculpture, architecture and music, and it set the terms for the northern and southern extensions built by McKim, Mead and White in 1904.

The facade also has four niches, and they are the most interesting thing about it, because the Museum treats them as a site for statues that has never settled. Since 2019 it has filled them with commissioned contemporary sculpture in a rolling series: the South Korean artist Lee Bul's Long Tail Halo occupied them from 12 September 2024 to 10 June 2025 as the fifth commission in the sequence, and Liu Wei's Speculation is scheduled from 17 September 2026 to 8 June 2027. A permanent Beaux-Arts front that has spent more than a century borrowing its figures from living artists is a strange and rather good thing, and it is of a piece with a building that has never stopped being provisional. What Hunt himself intended for those niches, and whether the uncarved stone reported to sit above the paired columns is unfinished ornament or was always meant to be plain, we could not establish from any source we actually read, and we do not assert it.

Hunt's Great Hall has one further trick beneath it. The brick, arch-vaulted undercroft of his 1895 entrance pavilion, structure rather than architecture, was opened up and is now the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art. Visitors walk down into the foundations of the front door to look at Byzantium.

The accretion has a plan behind it. A comprehensive architectural scheme by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates was approved in 1971 and completed in 1991, and it produced most of what a visitor now walks through: the Robert Lehman Wing in 1975, the glass hall built for the Temple of Dendur in 1978, the American Wing in 1980, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in 1982, the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern and contemporary art in 1987, and the Henry R. Kravis Wing for European sculpture and decorative arts in 1991.

Refinement continued after the envelope was finished. The Arts of Korea gallery opened in 1998, completing the Asian suite. The Ancient Near Eastern galleries reopened in 1999. In 2007 the south end of the building delivered several projects at once, the largest being the fifteen-year renovation and reinstallation of the entire Greek and Roman sequence, alongside new galleries for Oceanic and Native North American art, for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting and sculpture, and the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education. The galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia opened on 1 November 2011. The American Wing's third and final renovation phase reopened on 16 January 2012. In May 2021 the Museum installed a plaque on the Fifth Avenue facade recognising Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape peoples, on whose land the building stands.

Two branches should not be confused with this one. The Met Cloisters, opened on 10 May 1938 in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, is a separate site devoted to medieval Europe and holds about 2,000 works, including the Unicorn Tapestries that are the subject of their own record in this archive; it is a different building with its own page. The Met Breuer, opened in Marcel Breuer's former Whitney building on 18 March 2016, was closed in the summer of 2020 and its lease transferred to the Frick Collection. Neither is the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 1000 Fifth Avenue.

The Met's admissions history is the best short account of what an encyclopaedic museum owes its city. Its suggested-admission model was created in 1970: a posted price that nobody was obliged to pay. Before that the Museum had run mandatory fees on certain days and charged for selected special exhibitions. The suggested model held for nearly half a century, and it decayed. The Museum's own figures, published when it changed the policy, are stark: in 2004, 63 per cent of visitors paid the full suggested amount; by 2018 only 17 per cent of adults did, a 73 per cent decline, and the average contribution per person had fallen to nine dollars. In 2017 admissions produced roughly 14 per cent of the operating budget, among the lowest of the Museum's New York peers, some of whom reached 31 per cent. New York City provided about 10 per cent of a 305 million dollar budget, most of it earmarked for utilities.

On 4 January 2018 the Museum announced that from 1 March it would charge a mandatory fee to visitors from outside New York State, while pay-as-you-wish continued for New York State residents and for students from New Jersey and Connecticut. The change needed the approval of the City's Department of Cultural Affairs, and the reason it needed it is the crux of the whole argument: the Fifth Avenue building stands on City-owned land. The Museum projected the new fee would affect 31 per cent of visitors, four out of five of whom were tourists spending an average of 1,200 dollars per person on their New York trips. The initial mandatory rates simply matched the old suggested prices, 25 dollars for adults, 17 for seniors and 12 for students. From 1 July 2022 they rose to 30, 22 and 17, and those are the rates charged on 4 August 2026.

Two details deserve to be recorded because they cut against the Museum. First, the 2018 announcement promised that a full-price ticket would be honoured for three consecutive days across the Museum's three locations. Today a ticket covers all exhibitions and both remaining locations for the printed date only. The concession offered when the fee was imposed has been withdrawn without fanfare. Second, the pay-what-you-wish route is gated by proof, not by need: an online purchase requires a New York State billing address, and students from New Jersey and Connecticut can only obtain the rate in person with a student ID. The Museum has improved this at the margin, introducing online reservation of pay-what-you-wish tickets for New York State residents, and 42 per cent of visitors in the 2025 financial year used some expedited entry route. But the structure remains one in which the cheapest admission is the hardest to arrange in advance.

This archive exists to record where objects have been and who held them, and on that subject the Metropolitan Museum of Art is not a neutral venue. It is one of the most heavily investigated collections in the world, and three of the records in this archive describe objects that passed through it and out again.

The Euphronios krater is the emblem. Bought by the Museum in 1972, it went back to Italy under an agreement negotiated by the then director Philippe de Montebello with the Italian culture ministry, and remained on view here only until 13 January 2008. What is worth reading closely is how the Museum announced it. The press release of 22 January 2008 is headlined on three vases lent by Italy for four years, and the krater's return appears inside it as the consideration for which those loans come to the Met. The framing is exchange, not restitution. The Lydian Hoard went to Turkey under a settlement of September 1993. The gilded coffin of Nedjemankh, bought in 2017, was seized under a New York search warrant in February 2019 and handed to Egypt that September. All three are records here.

The pressure did not stop. The New York District Attorney's office seized five Egyptian antiquities from the Museum under a warrant signed on 19 May 2022, together worth more than three million euros, including a Fayum portrait of Nero's reign; the Museum said its employees had been deceived by a criminal conspiracy and that it had cooperated fully. In March 2023 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported at least 1,109 works in the Museum's own catalogue previously owned by people indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes, 309 of them then on display.

The Museum's answer has been institutional rather than defensive, and it should be credited as such. In spring 2023 it announced a suite of cultural property initiatives including a focused review of works in the collection. On 22 March 2024 it appointed Lucian Simmons, previously worldwide head of Sotheby's restitution department, as its first Head of Provenance Research, a post in the Director's Office coordinating work across nineteen collecting areas. New provenance posts were created in Asian Art, in the American Wing with a focus on Native American art, and in Egyptian Art, filled by Qamar Adamjee, Jennifer Day and Maxence Garde, and Maya Muratov's role in Greek and Roman Art was expanded; eleven staff are now engaged on provenance alongside the curators. The results are on the record: fourteen sculptures returned to Cambodia and two to Thailand in December 2023, including every Angkorian sculpture the Museum knew to be associated with the dealer Douglas Latchford; two stone sculptures transferred to Yemen; a thirteenth-century temple strut and a Vishnu stele to Nepal; a memorandum of understanding with India's Ministry of Culture in February 2024. The Museum has published object pages for restituted works stating that they were returned and to where, and it has installed more than fifty revised labels under the New York State law of August 2022 requiring museums to identify works that changed hands in Europe under duress between 1933 and 1945.

The honest summary is that the Met built this apparatus after criminal investigations and investigative journalism made the status quo untenable, and that having built it, it is now doing more disclosed provenance work than almost any peer. Both halves of that sentence are true and neither cancels the other.

A reader planning a visit needs the unflattering current facts, and the Museum publishes them. Its own gallery closures page, last updated at 08:46 on 4 August 2026, the morning this entry was written, listed partial or complete closures across thirteen collection areas: nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting and sculpture, the American Wing, the whole of Ancient West Asia and Ancient Cyprus, the Arab Lands galleries, Asian Art, the Costume Institute, Egyptian Art, European Paintings 1250 to 1800, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Greek and Roman Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, and the Robert Lehman Collection. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden was closed, and so were the Petrie Court Cafe, The Eatery, the Cantor Roof Garden Bar and the Patrons Lounge.

Much of that is the price of the largest project the Museum has undertaken in a generation. The Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, designed by the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, will replace the modern and contemporary galleries with five storeys inside the existing 123,000-square-foot footprint, increasing gallery space for twentieth- and twenty-first-century art by nearly half, to more than 70,000 square feet. Escobedo is the first woman to design a wing in the Museum's history. The design was approved unanimously by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in April 2025; construction is expected to begin in the summer of 2026 and the wing to open in 2030, funded by 550 million dollars in private donations announced in May 2024. The Cantor Roof Garden will move from the fifth floor to a larger fourth-floor terrace, growing from 7,500 to nearly 10,000 square feet, with a fifth-floor landscape by Thomas Woltz.

The recent precedent is encouraging. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing closed in 2021 and reopened to the public on 31 May 2025 after a rebuild by Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture with Beyer, Blinder, Belle, reported at 70 million dollars, holding more than 1,800 works across over 40,000 square feet, with the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania presented as three autonomous collections rather than one residual category. Its opening day drew 33,700 people, the Museum's busiest day since 2017. Whether the same reception greets the Tang Wing in 2030 is not yet a question anyone can answer.

More of our records name the Metropolitan Museum of Art as their current location than name any other institution, and they are spread across almost every department in the building. In European painting: Bruegel's Harvesters of 1565 and van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgment, both marked by the Museum as works that may not be lent and therefore only ever visible here; Caravaggio's Musicians of 1597; Georges de La Tour's Fortune-Teller; and Velazquez's portrait of Juan de Pareja, bought at Christie's in November 1970. In arms and armour, in Gallery 371: the Greenwich garniture dated 1527 and probably made for Henry VIII, and Filippo Negroli's embossed helmet all'antica. In European sculpture and decorative arts: the Farnese Table in Gallery 503 and the Rospigliosi Cup in Gallery 556, the latter one of the most instructive objects in the building, since it has been attributed in turn to Benvenuto Cellini, to Jacopo Bilivert and to the forger Reinhold Vasters, and is now catalogued as nineteenth-century. In medieval art, Gallery 300: the Antioch Chalice, sixth-century Syrian silver once published as a first-century relic of the Last Supper. In Asian art, Gallery 206: the Longmen relief of Emperor Xiaowen and his entourage, cut from the Binyang Central Cave and bought in 1935. In musical instruments, Gallery 684: Bartolomeo Cristofori's grand piano of 1720. In Greek and Roman art: a bronze statuette of a horse catalogued as early Classical from 1923 until the 1970s and now dated late Hellenistic. Two of the twelve Aldobrandini Tazze are here as well.

That list is a working argument for why a venue page belongs in a provenance archive. Six of those objects have had their attribution or their date substantially revised by the Museum itself; three more objects that once stood in these galleries are now in Cerveteri, Usak and Cairo. The Met is where a great deal of our evidence is kept, and it is also where a good deal of it was contested. A reader who comes to this page for opening hours should leave it understanding that the institution holding these objects is part of their history and not merely their address.

This archive publishes no visitor prose and cites no platform star average, so what follows is drawn from the Museum's own published figures and from named journalism. The Met is the most visited museum in the United States and reported over 5.7 million visits across its two locations in the year to 30 June 2025, up 5 per cent, with local visitors from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey making up 62 per cent of the total and international visitors down to 15 per cent. Its own research finds 40 per cent of visitors come for one named exhibition, which is the honest shape of the place: nobody sees the Met, people see a part of it. What visitors get is the largest encyclopaedic collection in the country at a price the institution itself concedes is a barrier for anyone who cannot prove a New York address, in a building where a substantial number of galleries is shut at any given time. On 4 August 2026 the Museum's own closures page listed partial or total closures in thirteen collection areas plus the roof garden and four food outlets. The Met is also, unavoidably, one of the most scrutinised collections in the world on questions of provenance, and it has been building an apparatus to answer that scrutiny since 2023.