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The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Museum · Founded 1870

Open, admission and hours confirmed 6 September 2026 · 24 sources

On this page 18 sections
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The Fifth Avenue facade
Richard Morris Hunt's Beaux-Arts front, designed 1895 and opened December 1902, seen straight on from Fifth Avenue: three great arched bays, paired columns carrying the attic, the four caryatid figures, and the broad stair. The exhibition banners date the photograph to 2012. Behind this front stands the 1880 Vaux and Mould building, entirely enclosed.Photograph by Yair-haklai · CC BY-SA 4.0

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 at a glance
KindMuseum
FoundedIncorporated 13 April 1870; opened on the Fifth Avenue site 30 March 1880
City and countryNew York, United States
Address1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028, United States
Websitemetmuseum.org
StatusOpen, confirmed 6 September 2026
Record last verified6 September 2026

Visiting

What it costs and when it is openConfirmed 6 September 2026
Hours
  • Sunday10:00 to 17:00
  • Monday10:00 to 17:00
  • Tuesday10:00 to 17:00
  • Thursday10:00 to 17:00
  • Friday10:00 to 21:00Late opening
  • Saturday10:00 to 21:00Late opening
Closed
Closed every Wednesday. Closed Thanksgiving Day, 25 December and 1 January. Closed the first Monday in May, the night of the Costume Institute Benefit.
Admission
  • New York State residentsUSD 0.01Pay what you wish, with a minimum of one cent per ticket. To buy online you must have a New York State billing address. Accepted proof includes a New York State driver's licence or identification card, IDNYC, a current bill or statement showing a New York State address, a student ID, or a New York library card.
  • New York, New Jersey and Connecticut studentsUSD 0.01Pay what you wish. New Jersey and Connecticut students can only buy at this rate in person, on production of a valid student ID.
  • AdultsUSD 30The mandatory rate for visitors from outside New York State
  • Seniors, 65 and overUSD 22
  • Visitors with a disabilityUSD 22In person only
  • StudentsUSD 17Students from outside the tri-state area
  • Children, 12 and underFreeFree
  • Members and PatronsFreeFree and unlimited entry. Membership starts at 90 US dollars a year.
  • Care partner of a visitor with a disabilityFreeFree, in person only
Free entry: Children of 12 and under, free at all times. Members and Patrons, free and unlimited. The care partner of a visitor with a disability, free. New York State residents and students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut pay what they wish, subject to a one-cent minimum, which is not the same thing as free and is the whole substance of the argument recorded below. Every ticket covers all exhibitions and same-day entry to both Met locations, The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters, for the date printed on it. It no longer runs for three consecutive days, as it did when the mandatory fee was introduced in 2018.
Tickets
metmuseum.org/visit/plan-your-visit The museum's own ticket page.
Do I need to book?
No. Tickets can be bought online but advance tickets are not required; buying online lets you go straight to any gallery entrance rather than queue at the desk, and 42 per cent of visitors used one of these expedited routes in the 2025 financial year. Groups of ten or more, and third-party guided tours of any size, must register in advance. New York State residents can now reserve pay-what-you-wish tickets online, which was not previously possible.
Address
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028, United States Map
On foot On the Upper East Side of Manhattan along Fifth Avenue, bordering Central Park, between 80th and 84th Streets. The main entrance is the great stair off Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street.
Step-free entrances Accessible entrances at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue, and through the parking garage at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue. Manual wheelchairs, standard and wide, are available at the 81st Street entrance on a first-come, first-served basis.
Car and parking On-site parking is available only on weekday evenings and weekends, capacity is reduced, and a space is not guaranteed even during public parking hours; the Museum asks visitors to pre-book.
Subway, bus and rail The Museum publishes its own directions by subway and bus, by sightseeing tour bus, by Metro-North Railroad and by car in expandable panels on its Plan Your Visit page. Those panels did not render to text when we read the page on 4 August 2026, so no line numbers are recorded here rather than guessed.
Website
metmuseum.org
Telephone
+1 212-535-7710
Email
[email protected]
Before you go how long, access, photography, bags, eating, shop
How long to allow
The Museum publishes no recommended duration, and on a two-million-square-foot building holding more than 5,000 years of art that is an honest omission rather than a gap. A useful planning figure from the Museum's own research: 40 per cent of visitors in the 2025 financial year said they had come for one specific exhibition. Treat the encyclopaedic collection as a series of separate visits, not one.
Access
Step-free entrances at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue and through the 80th Street parking garage. Manual wheelchairs, standard and wide, at the 81st Street entrance, first come first served. Step-free routes are marked on the Museum's interactive map. Visitors with a disability pay the reduced 22 dollar rate in person, and a care partner enters free. The Museum asks anyone needing assistance to visit with a companion.
Photography
The Museum publishes visitor guidelines governing conduct in the galleries. We did not read a specific photography rule on the pages consulted on 4 August 2026, so none is stated here; check the guidelines on the day.
Bags
Covered by the Museum's published visitor guidelines. No specific bag or cloakroom rule was read on the pages consulted on 4 August 2026, so none is stated here.
Eating
The Museum publishes a food and drink guide. Its own gallery closures page, read 6 September 2026, lists the Petrie Court Cafe and the Cantor Roof Garden Bar as closed; The Eatery and the Patrons Lounge, both closed on 4 August 2026, had reopened by 5 September 2026. Anyone planning to eat inside should re-check before travelling.
Shop
The Museum runs retail on site, including a store off the Great Hall. Opening hours for it were not published on the visit pages read on 4 August 2026 and are not asserted here.

Prices and hours change. We take them from the institution's own pages and print the day we read them, and you can check the current position at the source we used. Confirm before you travel.

What is inside

14 spaces, 9 photographed
  • The Great Hall
    CC0

    The Great Hall

    Richard Morris Hunt's domed Beaux-Arts entrance hall of 1902, and the decision point for the whole building: the admissions desks, the membership desk, the great flower urns and the four passages that lead to Egypt, to Greece and Rome, to medieval Europe and up the Grand Staircase to the European paintings. It is a room designed to make a municipal museum feel like a palace, and it works.

  • The Temple of Dendur in its glass hall
    Photograph by 颐园居 · CC BY 4.0

    Egyptian Art and the Temple of Dendur

    Roughly 30,000 ancient Egyptian objects, one of the largest holdings of Egyptian art outside Cairo, and the Museum states that almost all of them are on display rather than in store. The sequence ends in the glass-walled hall built in 1978 for the Temple of Dendur, a complete Nubian sandstone temple with its gate, set beside a reflecting pool with Central Park behind the glass. Galleries 115 and 120 were closed on 5 September 2026, narrower than the 115-to-119 range closed on 4 August 2026.

  • The Leon Levy and Shelby White Court
    Photograph by 颐园居 · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Greek and Roman Art

    The suite reopened in 2007 after a fifteen-year renovation and reinstallation, the longest single gallery project in the building's history. Its centre is the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, a top-lit two-storey Roman peristyle with a mosaic floor, ranged with marbles, and the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot art bought in 1874 to 1876 sits at the root of the department. This archive's Greek bronze horse and the Antioch Chalice are both held here (the bronze horse itself, accession 23.69, is in Gallery 164). Gallery 176 appeared as a new partial closure on the Museum's gallery closures page read 5 September 2026, not listed on 4 August 2026; it does not affect Gallery 164.

  • A European Paintings gallery hung with Goya
    Photograph by Lageandre · CC BY-SA 3.0

    European Paintings, 1250 to 1800

    About 2,500 European paintings in all, which the Museum reckons one of the greatest such collections anywhere, hung at the top of the Grand Staircase and rehung under the title Look Again. By 1979 the Museum owned five of the fewer than thirty-five paintings then accepted as Vermeer's. Four of this archive's records hang in these rooms: the Bruegel Harvesters, Caravaggio's Musicians, Georges de La Tour's Fortune-Teller and the van Eyck Crucifixion and Last Judgment. Galleries 602 to 603 and 606 to 607, closed on 4 August 2026, had reopened by the Museum's own gallery closures page read 5 September 2026 and no longer appear on it.

  • The equestrian court in the Arms and Armor galleries
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    Arms and Armor

    Gallery 371, the equestrian court, where four armoured men on armoured horses ride down the middle of the room with lances up. It is the single most theatrical display in the building and the reason many children remember the Met at all. Two of this archive's records are here: the Greenwich garniture probably made for Henry VIII in 1527, and Filippo Negroli's embossed helmet all'antica of about 1532 to 1535.

  • The Charles Engelhard Court with the Second Bank facade
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    The American Wing and the Charles Engelhard Court

    The most comprehensive collection of American paintings, sculpture and decorative arts in the world, by the Museum's own account, opened in 1980 and completed in its third and final renovation phase in January 2012, with twenty-five period rooms. The glass-roofed Engelhard Court is built around a real building front: the marble facade of the Second Branch Bank of the United States of 1822 to 1824, dismantled from Wall Street and re-erected indoors. Galleries 773 to 774 and 774A were closed on 4 August 2026.

  • The Astor Chinese Garden Court
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    Asian Art and the Astor Chinese Garden Court

    Galleries covering the arts of Asia, completed as a suite when the Arts of Korea gallery opened in 1998. Their quietest room is the Astor Court, a Ming-style scholar's courtyard with a pavilion, latticed windows, scholar's rocks and a grey brick floor, built as a working piece of Chinese architecture rather than a display case. This archive's Longmen relief of Emperor Xiaowen and his entourage, cut from the Binyang Central Cave and bought in 1935, is in Gallery 206, confirmed still on view there on the Museum's own object page, read 6 September 2026. The Museum's gallery closures page read the same day lists a new partial closure at Galleries 229 to 232, which does not affect Gallery 206.

  • The Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court
    Photograph by Yair-haklai · CC BY-SA 4.0

    European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and the Petrie Court

    The Henry R. Kravis Wing of 1991 covers the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Its Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court is the best place in the building to see what the Met actually is: the entire south facade of Theodore Weston's classical addition of 1888 stands inside the room as one of its walls, red brick and limestone, glazed over and pointed at Central Park. This archive's Farnese Table and Rospigliosi Cup are in this department, in Galleries 503 and 556, neither affected by the new partial closure of Gallery 543 that appeared on the Museum's gallery closures page read 5 September 2026 (not listed there on 4 August 2026).

  • The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Galleries
    CC0

    Modern and Contemporary Art

    The Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of 1987, including the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Galleries. This is the part of the Museum in the worst shape and the part about to change most: galleries 399, 900 to 913, 917 and 919 to 925 were all closed on 4 August 2026, as was the Cantor Roof Garden, ahead of demolition for a wholly new wing. Anyone visiting for twentieth-century art should check what is open before buying a ticket.

  • The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing

    Over 40,000 square feet on the south side holding the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania as three separate collections rather than one lumped category, with more than 1,800 works. Closed from 2021, it 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. Its opening day drew 33,700 people, the Museum's busiest single day since 2017. No plate is offered here because the free-licence photographs we located show the pre-2021 installation, which no longer exists.

  • Medieval Art and the Byzantine crypt

    Medieval Europe at Fifth Avenue, distinct from the separate Met Cloisters uptown. The Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art occupy the brick, arch-vaulted space underneath the Grand Staircase, which is not a designed gallery at all but the structural undercroft of Hunt's 1895 entrance pavilion, opened up and hung with objects. This archive's Antioch Chalice, a sixth-century Syrian silver cup once published as a first-century relic, is in Gallery 300.

  • The Robert Lehman Wing

    The 1975 wing built to hold Robert Lehman's collection of Old Masters together with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, under a pyramidal glass roof over a skylit atrium, and shown as a private collection rather than dispersed into the departments. The Ramadan Prayer Space was closed on 5 September 2026; galleries 956 to 959, closed alongside it on 4 August 2026, no longer appear on the Museum's gallery closures page. Its west wall is the surviving west facade of the original 1880 building.

  • Musical Instruments

    The Crosby Brown Collection, given in 1889, one of the few museum holdings that treats instruments as objects of art rather than equipment. This archive's 1720 Bartolomeo Cristofori grand piano, one of the three surviving instruments by the inventor of the piano, is in Gallery 684.

  • The Costume Institute

    The department behind the Museum's largest-audience exhibitions: Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion drew 401,000 visitors and Superfine: Tailoring Black Style more than 291,000. Its benefit closes the whole Museum on the first Monday in May. Galleries 980 to 981 were closed on 4 August 2026, and Costume Art was on show until 10 January 2027.

What to see first

  • The Temple of Dendur

    Nubian, completed by 10 CE

    A complete Egyptian temple with its gate, given by Egypt to the United States and housed in a purpose-built glass hall in 1978. The Museum lists it first among its own collection highlights, and it is the only object here that is also a building.1

  • Juan de Pareja

    Velazquez, 1650

    Bought at Christie's in London on 27 November 1970 and accessioned in 1971, the acquisition that defined Thomas Hoving's directorship. The Museum lists it among its own highlights; this archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • The Harvesters

    Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

    One of the surviving panels of Bruegel's series of the seasons, bought with the Rogers Fund in 1919 and marked by the Museum as a work that may not be lent, so it can only be seen here. Named on the Museum's own highlights list and recorded in this archive.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Young Woman with a Water Pitcher

    Johannes Vermeer, ca. 1662

    One of the Museum's Vermeers; by 1979 it owned five of the fewer than thirty-five paintings then accepted as his, which is the largest concentration anywhere and the reason this is a Vermeer destination and not merely a museum with a Vermeer.1

  • Self-Portrait

    Rembrandt van Rijn, 1660

    Named on the Museum's own highlights list, and the anchor of a Dutch holding that also carries the two paintings in this archive marked as never to be lent.1

  • Madame X

    John Singer Sargent, 1883-84

    The portrait that ended Sargent's Paris career and made his London one. The Museum lists it among its highlights, and its Sargent and Paris exhibition drew more than 427,000 visitors in the 2025 financial year, the biggest draw of that year.1

  • Washington Crossing the Delaware

    Emanuel Leutze, 1851

    The founding image of American national self-portrayal, painted in Dusseldorf by a German artist, hanging in the American Wing. On the Museum's own highlights list.1

  • Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950

    Jackson Pollock, 1950

    The Museum's central Pollock and one of the reasons the modern galleries matter, which makes their partial closure on 4 August 2026 worth checking before a visit built around it.1

  • The Astor Chinese Garden Court

    China, seventeenth-century style

    A Ming-style scholar's courtyard built inside the Museum by Chinese craftsmen using traditional methods, listed by the Museum among its highlights as an object in its own right rather than as a room containing objects.1

  • Facade of the Second Branch Bank of the United States

    Martin Euclid Thompson, architect, 1822-24

    A real Wall Street building front, dismantled and re-erected indoors as the back wall of the Charles Engelhard Court. It makes explicit what the whole Met does: absorbs architecture into itself.1

  • Mangaaka Power Figure (Nkisi N'Kondi)

    Yombe-Kongo artist and nganga, ca. 1880-1900

    Named on the Museum's highlights list and now shown in the rebuilt Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, where the reinstallation was explicitly designed to foreground the artists responsible rather than the collectors.1

  • The Damascus Room

    Syrian, dated 1119 AH / 1707 CE

    An eighteenth-century Damascene reception room installed in the galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, which opened on 1 November 2011.1

  • Shiva as Lord of Dance (Nataraja)

    Indian, Tamil Nadu, ca. late eleventh century

    On the Museum's own highlights list, and a useful test of the Museum's new provenance apparatus: South Asian bronzes are precisely the category the Met has been returning, and it signed a memorandum with India's Ministry of Culture in February 2024.1

  • William the hippopotamus

    Egyptian faience, entered the collection 1917

    The Museum's unofficial mascot by its own admission, and the clearest demonstration that an encyclopaedic museum's most loved object need not be its most important one.3

  • Perseus with the Head of Medusa

    Antonio Canova, 1804-6

    Commissioned by Count Jan and Countess Valeria Tarnowski and listed by the Museum among its own highlights; the marble that anchors the Petrie Court sequence where the 1888 facade stands indoors.1

  • The Antioch Chalice

    Byzantine or Early Christian silver, 6th century

    Shown in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art, Gallery 300, the brick undercroft of Hunt's 1895 entrance pavilion opened up beneath the Grand Staircase. Once published as a first-century relic of the Last Supper and now dated to the sixth century. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • The Musicians

    Caravaggio, 1597

    Hung in the European Paintings galleries at the top of the Grand Staircase, part of the roughly 2,500-painting collection the Museum reckons among the greatest anywhere. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Grand piano

    Bartolomeo Cristofori, 1720

    In the Crosby Brown Collection of musical instruments, given in 1889, Gallery 684; one of only three surviving instruments by the inventor of the piano. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • The Fortune-Teller

    Georges de La Tour, probably 1630s

    Hung with the Museum's European Paintings, 1250 to 1800, a department rehung under the title Look Again. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Greenwich garniture

    Greenwich armoury workshop, dated 1527

    Displayed in Gallery 371, the equestrian court, where armoured men on armoured horses ride down the room; probably made for Henry VIII. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Relief of Emperor Xiaowen and his entourage

    Chinese, Northern Wei dynasty, cut from the Binyang Central Cave at Longmen

    Bought in 1935 and shown in Gallery 206 in the Asian Art galleries near the Astor Chinese Garden Court. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Bronze statuette of a horse

    Greek, once catalogued as early Classical, now dated late Hellenistic

    Held in the Greek and Roman galleries reinstalled over fifteen years and reopened in 2007; its own attribution was substantially revised by the Museum, from early Classical to late Hellenistic. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Embossed helmet all'antica

    Filippo Negroli, about 1532-1535

    Displayed alongside the Greenwich garniture in Gallery 371, the theatrical equestrian court that many visitors remember as the Met's single most dramatic room. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • The Rospigliosi Cup

    Attributed in turn to Benvenuto Cellini, to Jacopo Bilivert and to the forger Reinhold Vasters; now catalogued as nineteenth-century

    Shown in Gallery 556 in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and one of the most instructive objects in the building for how far an attribution can travel before a museum settles it. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • Crucifixion and Last Judgment diptych

    Jan van Eyck, workshop, about 1440-41

    Hung with the Museum's European Paintings, 1250 to 1800, and marked by the Museum as a work that may not be lent, so it can only be seen at Fifth Avenue. This archive holds a full record of it.1

    Full record in this archive

  • The planned merger with the Neue Galerie

    Announced by The Met and the Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie New York, 14 May 2026

    The Met and the Neue Galerie announced a landmark agreement to merge in 2028, bringing the Neue Galerie's collection of twentieth-century Austrian and German art, including Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, and its William Starr Miller House under Met ownership as the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie. Ronald S. Lauder and Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer are also planning direct gifts of 13 paintings to the combined institution. Still pending as of 10 August 2026, not yet closed, so it does not change this venue's holdings or address today.19

Artworks recorded here

63 artworks

Exhibitions on now

Past exhibitions here

2 recorded

A museum that swallowed its own first building

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.

Hunt's front, and the niches

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.

How the building kept growing, and what it added

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 door, and what it costs to get through it

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.

Provenance: the Met is a party, not a host

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.

What is shut, and what is coming

A reader planning a visit needs the unflattering current facts, and the Museum publishes them. Its own gallery closures page, read again on 5 and 6 September 2026, no longer lists two of the areas closed when this entry was first researched: European Paintings 1250 to 1800, where four of this archive's own records hang, and the separate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting and sculpture galleries. Both had reopened. The Robert Lehman Collection's closure narrowed to the Ramadan Prayer Space alone, down from galleries 956 to 959 as well. Set against that, three partial closures not present on 4 August 2026 had appeared by 5 September: Gallery 543 in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Gallery 176 in Greek and Roman Art, and Galleries 229 to 232 in Asian Art. Ten collection areas remained partially or wholly closed in total: the American Wing, the whole of Ancient West Asia and Ancient Cyprus, the Arab Lands galleries, Asian Art, the Costume Institute, Egyptian Art, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Greek and Roman Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, and the Robert Lehman Collection, plus the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The Eatery and the Patrons Lounge, both shut on 4 August, had reopened; the Cantor Roof Garden Bar and the Petrie Court Cafe remained closed, alongside Gallery 999.

Much of the standing closure 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; the Museum's own project page, read 6 September 2026, still describes construction as expected to begin in the summer of 2026 and gives no confirmation that it has started, and the wing is expected 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.

Why this building matters to this archive

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.

What visitors say

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.

What is praised, what is criticised

  • Praised: the sheer range: more than 5,000 years of art in one building, with the Museum's own claim to the most comprehensive American art holding in the world, one of the largest Egyptian collections outside Cairo, and about 2,500 European paintings
  • Praised: that every ticket covers all special exhibitions and both Met locations for the day, with no supplements, which is unusual among museums of this rank
  • Praised: free entry for children of 12 and under, unconditionally, and a genuine pay-what-you-wish floor of one cent for New York State residents and tri-state students
  • Praised: the architecture as an exhibit in its own right: the Great Hall, the Engelhard Court's transplanted bank facade, the Astor Court, the Petrie Court where an 1888 exterior wall now stands indoors, and the two 1880 staircases uncovered in 1995
  • Praised: exhibition programming that reaches audiences most museums cannot: 464,000 for The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, 427,000 for Sargent and Paris, 401,000 for Sleeping Beauties
  • Praised: step-free entrances, marked step-free routes, free entry for a care partner, and a reduced rate for visitors with a disability
  • Criticised: the 30 dollar adult ticket, mandatory since 1 March 2018 for anyone who cannot show New York State residency, on a building that stands on City-owned land and whose admissions policy therefore needs City approval
  • Criticised: the tri-state test itself: proof of a New York State billing address is required to buy the pay-what-you-wish ticket online, and New Jersey and Connecticut students can only obtain it in person, so the cheap rate is hardest to use for the people least able to plan
  • Criticised: the quiet withdrawal of the three-day ticket. When the mandatory fee was announced in January 2018 the Museum undertook to honour a full-price ticket for three consecutive days across three locations; the current ticket is same-day only, across two
  • Criticised: the volume of closed galleries, even after some reopened. The Museum's own gallery closures page, last updated 5 September 2026 (read the same day), lists ten collection areas partially or wholly shut plus the Cantor Roof Garden, the Cantor Roof Garden Bar, the Petrie Court Cafe and Gallery 999; European Paintings 1250 to 1800 and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting and sculpture, both closed on 4 August 2026, had reopened, while new partial closures appeared in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Greek and Roman Art, and Asian Art that were not on the list a month earlier
  • Criticised: provenance. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists identified at least 1,109 works in the Museum's catalogue previously owned by people indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes, 309 of them on display, and the Manhattan District Attorney has repeatedly executed search warrants on the collection
  • Criticised: the framing of restitution as exchange. The Museum's own 2008 announcement of the Euphronios krater's departure presents three Italian loans as coming to the Met in exchange for the krater's return, with the loans in the headline and the return in a subordinate clause
  • Criticised: the Museum's account of Michael C. Rockefeller, after whom the wing holding the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania is named, says he pursued new avenues of inquiry during his travels in the Pacific and does not mention that he died there in 1961
Reported the reopened Michael C. Rockefeller Wing as a 70 million dollar rebuild by WHY Architecture and Beyer Blinder Belle that markedly improves on Roche and Dinkeloo's low-ceilinged 1982 galleries, while arguing that the ethical questions it raises are unresolved. It set the wing against Nelson Rockefeller's tenure as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and his years running the International Basic Economy Corporation, and carried sustained criticism from Cruz Garcia, who teaches at Iowa State University and Columbia GSAPP and ran a studio on decolonising the Met for four years, to the effect that the Museum's presentation converts loot into patrimony and renders unequal power as ordinary provenance. The piece also quotes the architect Kulapat Yantrasast on bringing the Museum's arched and vaulted architectural language into a wing that had felt like a basement.The Architect's Newspaper, Daniel Jonas Roche, 29 May 2025 [13]
Reported the Met's appointment of a Sotheby's executive to lead a new provenance research team, in the context of the ICIJ investigation that identified at least 1,109 objects in the Museum's own catalogue previously owned by people indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes, of which 309 were then on display. The figure is the Museum's catalogue matched against court records, not an allegation about any single object.International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Hidden Treasures, Joanna Robin, 20 March 2023 [15]
Reported the seizure of five Egyptian antiquities from the Museum by the New York District Attorney's office under a warrant signed on 19 May 2022, valued together at more than three million euros and including a Fayum portrait of Nero's reign and fragments of a fourth- to fifth-century wall hanging depicting the Book of Exodus. The Museum's response was that its employees had been deceived by a criminal conspiracy and that it had cooperated fully throughout. The report situates the seizure alongside the gilded coffin taken from the Museum in 2019 and returned to Egypt, which is the subject of a record in this archive.The Art Newspaper, Vincent Noce, 1 June 2022 [14]
Reported that the Museum would raise general admission by five dollars from 1 July 2022, taking the adult rate from 25 to 30 dollars, the senior rate from 17 to 22 and the student rate from 12 to 17, while leaving the pay-what-you-wish arrangement for New York State residents and tri-state students in place. Those are the rates still charged on 4 August 2026.Hyperallergic, Jasmine Liu, 29 June 2022 [16]

Questions about The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Where is The Metropolitan Museum of Art?

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028, United States.

How much does it cost to visit?

New York State residents: USD 0.01; New York, New Jersey and Connecticut students: USD 0.01; Adults: USD 30; Seniors, 65 and over: USD 22; Visitors with a disability: USD 22. As confirmed 6 September 2026.

When is it open?

Sunday 10:00-17:00; Monday 10:00-17:00; Tuesday 10:00-17:00; Thursday 10:00-17:00; Friday 10:00-21:00; Saturday 10:00-21:00. Closed: Closed every Wednesday. Closed Thanksgiving Day, 25 December and 1 January. As confirmed 6 September 2026.

How do you get there?

On foot: On the Upper East Side of Manhattan along Fifth Avenue, bordering Central Park, between 80th and 84th Streets. The main entrance is the great stair off Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street; Step-free entrances: Accessible entrances at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue, and through the parking garage at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue. Manual wheelchairs, standard and wide, are available at the 81st Street entrance on a first-come, first-served basis; Car and parking: On-site parking is available only on weekday evenings and weekends, capacity is reduced, and a space is not guaranteed even during public parking hours; the Museum asks visitors to pre-book; Subway, bus and rail: The Museum publishes its own directions by subway and bus, by sightseeing tour bus, by Metro-North Railroad and by car in expandable panels on its Plan Your Visit page. Those panels did not render to text when we read the page on 4 August 2026, so no line numbers are recorded here rather than guessed.

What should you see first?

The Temple of Dendur (Nubian, completed by 10 CE); Juan de Pareja (Velazquez, 1650); The Harvesters (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565); Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (Johannes Vermeer, ca. 1662); Self-Portrait (Rembrandt van Rijn, 1660); Madame X (John Singer Sargent, 1883-84).

What we could not confirm

  • What Richard Morris Hunt intended for the four facade niches, and whether the reported piles of uncarved stone above the paired columns are unfinished ornament abandoned for lack of funds or were always to be left plain. Widely repeated, but we found no source we actually read that establishes it, and Hunt's death in 1895 relative to the facade's completion in 1902 is likewise not confirmed from a page we fetched. The Heckscher architectural history in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 53 no. 1, Summer 1995, is the document to consult.
  • Whether the three-consecutive-day ticket promised in the January 2018 admissions announcement was formally withdrawn, and when. The current ticket is same-day only; we found no announcement of the change.
  • The Museum's current total object count. It states tens of thousands on view, roughly 30,000 Egyptian objects and about 2,500 European paintings, but publishes no single collection total on the pages read.
  • Subway, bus and Metro-North directions. The Museum publishes them in expandable panels on its Plan Your Visit page that did not render to text on 4 August 2026, so no line numbers are recorded here.
  • Whether any of the 1,109 objects identified by the ICIJ in 2023 have since been removed from display or restituted as a result of the Museum's own review. The Museum publishes pages for restituted works but no reconciliation against that figure.
  • The closing date for the existing Modern and Contemporary galleries ahead of Tang Wing construction. The Museum states only that it will be announced and that construction is expected to begin in 2026.

Images

3 plates
The original 1880 building
The original 1880 buildingCalvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould's Ruskinian Gothic museum, opened 30 March 1880, standing alone in Central Park in red brick with a glazed clerestory and a timber entrance porch. Additions from 1888 onwards now completely surround it; its west facade survives as an interior wall of the Robert Lehman Wing. Public domain.Public domain
The Fifth Avenue front in the early twentieth century
The Fifth Avenue front in the early twentieth centuryAn Irving Underhill photograph looking along Fifth Avenue at 81st Street, with Hunt's central pavilion of 1902 and the flanking wings, motor cars and bare trees. It records the building at roughly a third of its present extent. Library of Congress, public domain.Public domain
The Great Hall
The Great HallHunt's domed entrance hall, seen from the balcony: the ticket desks at the right, the flower urns on their plinths, and the arched passages leading to the Egyptian, Greek and Roman and medieval galleries and up the Grand Staircase. Beneath this floor, the brick undercroft of the 1895 entrance pavilion now houses the Byzantine galleries.CC0

Sources

24
  1. 1The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Plan Your Visit: admission tiers and prices, residency and student conditions, day-by-day opening hours and annual closures, address, gallery closures notice, getting there, accessibility and step-free entrances, parking, group registration, membership, ticket coverage, and the Museum's own Collection Highlights list. Read in the in-app browser on 4 August 2026; metmuseum.org returns HTTP 429 to WebFetch and to command-line clients. Re-read in the in-app browser on 10 August 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: admission tiers and prices, hours and annual closures, and the open-today notice were all unchanged from 4 August 2026. Re-read in the in-app browser on 6 September 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: admission tiers and prices, day-by-day hours and annual closures, and the open-today notice were all unchanged from the 10 August 2026 recheck. The summary line on this page narrowed the closed-for-renovation list to the Cantor Roof Garden, the Modern and Contemporary Galleries, and the Ancient West Asia and Ancient Cyprus galleries; the full gallery closures page (source 9) was re-read the same day for the complete current list. metmuseum.org/visit/plan-your-visit
  2. 2The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Contact Information: the Fifth Avenue address and telephone number, and the separate address and number for The Met Cloisters, used here to keep the two institutions distinct. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. Re-read in the in-app browser on 10 August 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: address and phone number unchanged; the Communications mailto address on the page reads [email protected] (lower-case c). Re-read in the in-app browser on 6 September 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: address, phone number and the [email protected] contact address all unchanged. metmuseum.org/about-the-met/contact-us
  3. 3The Metropolitan Museum of Art, History of The Met: the 1866 Paris origin and John Jay, incorporation on 13 April 1870, the Dodworth Building, the Roman sarcophagus of 20 November 1870, the 174 paintings of 1871, the Douglas Mansion, the opening of 30 March 1880, Vaux and Mould and the surviving west facade in the Robert Lehman Wing, additions from 1888, the Cesnola Collection, Hunt's facade and Great Hall opening December 1902, the 1910 Matisse, William the hippopotamus in 1917, the Egyptian and Vermeer and European painting figures, the two-million-square-foot building, the Roche Dinkeloo master plan of 1971 to 1991 and each wing in it, the 1998 to 2012 reinstallations, the 2021 Lenapehoking plaque, and the separate histories of The Met Cloisters and The Met Breuer. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/about-the-met/history
  4. 4Brian Cha, 'The Museum, Constructed', The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Perspectives, 17 December 2010: the two 1880 staircases uncovered and restored in 1995, the brick undercroft of Hunt's 1895 entrance pavilion now the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art, the banded-granite arch of the 1880 facade at the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery, Theodore Weston's 1888 south facade preserved inside the Petrie European Sculpture Court, the four caryatids, the 1904 McKim Mead and White extensions, and the citation to Morrison H. Heckscher's architectural history in the Museum Bulletin, Summer 1995. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/perspectives/the-museum-constructed
  5. 5The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'The Metropolitan Museum of Art Welcomed Over 5.7 Million Visitors in Fiscal Year 2025', 21 July 2025: attendance across both locations for the year to 30 June 2025, the 5 per cent rise, the 62 per cent local and 23 per cent domestic out-of-state and 15 per cent international split, the 33,700 single-day record of 31 May 2025, the 40 per cent exhibition-driven figure, the 42 per cent expedited-entry figure and online pay-what-you-wish reservation for New York State residents, exhibition attendances for Sargent and Paris, Superfine, Caspar David Friedrich, Siena, The Harlem Renaissance and Sleeping Beauties, the roughly 1,700 objects on loan annually, and Max Hollein's title. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/press-releases/fy25-pressrelease
  6. 6The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces Updated Admissions Policy', 4 January 2018: the mandatory fee from 1 March 2018 for visitors from outside New York State, continued pay-as-you-wish for New York State residents and New Jersey and Connecticut students, Department of Cultural Affairs approval and the City-owned land, the three-consecutive-day ticket across three locations, the initial 25, 17 and 12 dollar rates, the 31 per cent projection, the 1970 origin of suggested admission and the pre-1970 practice, the 63 per cent in 2004 against 17 per cent and a 9 dollar average by 2018, the 14 per cent of operating budget and peer comparison, the 10 per cent of a 305 million dollar budget from the City, and the visitor-origin percentages. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/press-releases/admissionspolicy-2018-news
  7. 7The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'The Met Appoints Head of Provenance Research', 22 March 2024: Lucian Simmons's appointment and Sotheby's background, the post in the Director's Office, nineteen collecting areas, the expanded role for Maya Muratov and new posts filled by Qamar Adamjee, Jennifer Day and Maxence Garde, the count of eleven staff on provenance, the spring 2023 cultural property initiatives, the February 2024 memorandum with India's Ministry of Culture, the Yemen and Nepal transfers, the December 2023 return of fourteen sculptures to Cambodia and two to Thailand and the Latchford association, the object pages for restituted works, the New York State law of August 2022 and more than fifty revised labels, and the Cultural Heritage Now series. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/press-releases/head-of-provenance-research-2024-news
  8. 8The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'The Met Reopens Newly Reimagined Galleries Dedicated to the Arts of Africa, the Ancient Americas, and Oceania', updated 28 May 2025: the public reopening of 31 May 2025, over 40,000 square feet, more than 1,800 works, closure since 2021, WHY Architecture with Beyer, Blinder, Belle, the sloped glass south wall, the first United States gallery for light-sensitive ancient Andean textiles, the roughly 500 works in the Arts of Africa galleries and the Great Mosque of Jenne reference, Nelson Rockefeller's collecting and the 1969 announcement, the 1982 opening and the naming for Michael C. Rockefeller and his Asmat collecting. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/press-releases/mcrw-opening-english-2025
  9. 9The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery Closures, page stating it was last updated 4 August at 08:46: the thirteen collection areas partially or wholly closed with their gallery numbers, the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, and the closure of the Cantor Roof Garden Bar, The Eatery, the Patrons Lounge, the Petrie Court Cafe and galleries 513 and 999. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. Re-read in the in-app browser on 10 August 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: the page's own timestamp had advanced to last updated August 10 at 12:01 AM, but the same thirteen collection areas plus the Cantor Roof Garden, and the same six other closures (Cantor Roof Garden Bar, The Eatery, Patrons Lounge, Petrie Court Cafe, Gallery 513, Gallery 999), were listed, unchanged from 4 August 2026. Re-read in the in-app browser on 5 and 6 September 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: the page's own timestamp read last updated September 5 at 9:22 AM. European Paintings 1250 to 1800 and the separate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting and sculpture galleries, both closed on 4 and 10 August 2026, no longer appeared; galleries 956 to 959 in the Robert Lehman Collection had also reopened, leaving only the Ramadan Prayer Space closed there. New partial closures not present on 4 or 10 August 2026 had appeared at Gallery 543 (European Sculpture and Decorative Arts), Gallery 176 (Greek and Roman Art), and Galleries 229 to 232 (Asian Art). The Eatery and the Patrons Lounge, both closed on 4 and 10 August 2026, no longer appeared under Other Closures, leaving only the Cantor Roof Garden Bar, the Petrie Court Cafe and Gallery 999 there. Ten collection areas remained partially or wholly closed in total, down from thirteen on 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/visit/gallery-closures
  10. 10The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art: the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, Frida Escobedo as the first woman to design a wing in the Museum's history, the 2030 opening, five storeys within the existing 123,000-square-foot footprint and no higher than the 1880 wing, the near 50 per cent increase to more than 70,000 square feet, construction from summer 2026 and 4,000 union jobs, unanimous Landmarks Preservation Commission approval in April 2025, the 550 million dollars in private donations announced May 2024, and the Cantor Roof Garden's move from the fifth to the fourth floor and expansion from 7,500 to nearly 10,000 square feet with a fifth-floor landscape by Thomas Woltz. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. Re-read in the in-app browser on 6 September 2026 for the periodic freshness recheck: wording unchanged, including construction still described as expected to begin in the summer of 2026 with no confirmation on the page that it has started. metmuseum.org/hubs/tang-wing
  11. 11The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'Three Spectacular Vases Lent by Italy to Metropolitan Museum for Four Years Replace Euphronios Krater', 22 January 2008: the agreement negotiated by director Philippe de Montebello with the Italian culture ministry, the three loans and the Laconian cup on loan from Cerveteri since November 2006, and the Museum's own statement that the loans come to the Met in exchange for the return of the Euphronios krater to Italy, with the krater on view until 13 January 2008. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/press-releases/three-spectacular-vases-lent-by-italy-to-metropolitan-museum-for-four-years-replace-euphronios-krater-2008-news
  12. 12The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo', 12 September 2024 to 10 June 2025: the four facade niches described by the Museum as a site for statues, the four new works, and this being the fifth commission in the series for the Fifth Avenue facade niches. The Museum's own exhibitions listing, read the same day, gives Liu Wei's Speculation as the next commission, 17 September 2026 to 8 June 2027. Read in the in-app browser, 4 August 2026. metmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-facade-commission-lee-bul
  13. 13Daniel Jonas Roche, 'Reopened Michael C. Rockefeller Wing raises ethical questions about decolonization at The Met', The Architect's Newspaper, 29 May 2025: the 70 million dollar cost, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo as the 1982 architects, the 31 May reopening, other Met projects by Frida Escobedo, Peterson Rich Office and NADAAA, the criticism from Cruz Garcia of Iowa State University and Columbia GSAPP, Nelson Rockefeller's roles as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs from 1940 to 1944 and head of the International Basic Economy Corporation from 1947 to 1958, Michael Rockefeller's death in 1961 and the 1969 announcement, and the collection's first display at the Museum of Primitive Art in 1957. The site returns HTTP 403 to WebFetch; read in the in-app browser on 4 August 2026. archpaper.com/2025/05/reopened-michael-c-rockefeller-wing-why-architecture/
  14. 14Vincent Noce, 'Egyptian antiquities connected to international trafficking ring seized from Metropolitan Museum in New York', The Art Newspaper, 1 June 2022: five Egyptian antiquities seized by the New York District Attorney's office under a warrant signed 19 May 2022, valued together at more than three million euros, including a Fayum portrait of Nero's reign and fragments of a fourth- to fifth-century wall hanging depicting the Book of Exodus; the Museum's position that its employees were deceived by a criminal conspiracy and that it cooperated fully; and the earlier seizure of a gilded coffin in 2019, restituted to Egypt. Fetched 4 August 2026 via a summarising fetch; no wording from the article is reproduced here. theartnewspaper.com/2022/06/01/egyptian-antiquities-connected-to-international-trafficking-ring-seized-at-metropolitan-museum-in-new-york
  15. 15Joanna Robin, 'Met taps Sotheby's executive to lead new provenance research team', International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Hidden Treasures investigation, 20 March 2023: at least 1,109 works in the Museum's catalogue previously owned by people indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes, 309 of them then on display. Fetched 4 August 2026 via a summarising fetch; no wording from the article is reproduced here. icij.org/investigations/hidden-treasures/met-taps-sothebys-executive-to-lead-new-provenance-research-team/
  16. 16Jasmine Liu, 'Met Museum Raises Admission Fee to $30', Hyperallergic, 29 June 2022: the five dollar increase effective 1 July 2022, taking adults from 25 to 30 dollars, seniors from 17 to 22 and students from 12 to 17, with pay-as-you-wish retained for New York State residents and tri-state students. Fetched 4 August 2026 via a summarising fetch; the resulting rates were independently confirmed against the Museum's own Plan Your Visit page the same day. hyperallergic.com/met-museum-raises-admission-fee/
  17. 17Wikidata, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Q160236): coordinates 40.779444 north, 73.963333 west, inception 1870, official website and telephone number, and no dissolved-or-abolished date. Tertiary, used for the machine identity only; the coordinates, website and telephone were cross-checked against the Museum's own contact page. Queried via the Wikidata entity API, 4 August 2026. wikidata.org/wiki/Q160236
  18. 18Wikimedia Commons, Category:Metropolitan Museum of Art - Main Building and its subcategories for the interior courts and galleries. Every plate on this page had its licence and author read per file from extmetadata.LicenseShortName at fetch time and was then vetted by eye against the space it is captioned as. Queried via the Commons API, 4 August 2026. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art_-_Main_Building
  19. 19The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie New York Announce Plans for a Landmark Merger', 14 May 2026: the agreement to merge the Neue Galerie with The Met in 2028, the renaming to the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, the William Starr Miller House coming under Met ownership, the 13 paintings Ronald S. Lauder and Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer are planning to donate including Klimt's Die Tanzerin and works by Kirchner and Beckmann, and the endowment gifts from Met trustees led by Marina Kellen French. Read in the in-app browser, 10 August 2026. metmuseum.org/press-releases/neue-galerie-merger-announcement
  20. 20The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for The Antioch "Chalice" (accession 50.4), https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/468346: confirms the object is on view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 300, matching this archive's record. Queried via the Museum's own Collection API (collectionapi.metmuseum.org) and cross-checked in the in-app browser, 6 September 2026. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/468346
  21. 21The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for Emperor Xiaowen and his entourage worshipping the Buddha (the Longmen Binyang relief), https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42707: gallery number 206, department Asian Art, matching this archive's record. Queried via the Museum's own Collection API, 6 September 2026. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42707
  22. 22The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for the cup catalogued as Cup (the Rospigliosi Cup), https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/192708: gallery number 556, department European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, matching this archive's record. Queried via the Museum's own Collection API, 6 September 2026. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/192708
  23. 23The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for The Farnese Table, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/202115: gallery number 503, department European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, matching this archive's record. Queried via the Museum's own Collection API, 6 September 2026. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/202115
  24. 24The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for Bronze statuette of a horse (accession 23.69), https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/251268: gallery number 164, department Greek and Roman Art, matching this archive's record and the accession number embedded in its slug. Queried via the Museum's own Collection API, 6 September 2026. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/251268
Last verified 6 September 2026Open, confirmed 6 September 2026Wikidata Q160236

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