The Best Museum in the World

Making the Met, 1870–2020 makes the case, and no one can deny it: The Met is an unparalleled marvel.

T he new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Making the Met, 1870–2020, commemorates the 150th anniversary of, in my opinion, the unmatched giant among museums in the world today. Its collection, curators, and educational program go from strength to strength. In 1870, the Met’s founding signaled America’s cultural ascendance from provincial to international, from the sweaty work of building a nation from scratch to a time when enrichment of the mind was seen as not only possible but essential to a good life.

From the Gilded Age to the Information Age, the Met’s mission has always pivoted toward the best, in everything it does. It almost always hits the target. Yes, it’s an art museum with intimate as well as sumptuous, grand galleries, but, well beyond that, I’ve always looked at it as a university. Its pedagogical and research functions are huge. With a million moving parts, as many movers and shakers, superb art, and a history of peaks and valleys, the Met’s story is a challenge to tell.

What is its own take on the past 150 years? Expansive but cautious, even corporate. Hygienic, as all the juicy, rapacious bits go unmentioned. Surprising? Not really. The Met’s an enormous place, or, more precisely, a big family where everyone needs to be fed. There’s a little of everything, but the story is coherent. It’s a Cliff Notes version. It shows many great things but not all the best things. It’s about the Met’s best thinking and its high points.

I enjoyed it. How could I not? It’s the greatest museum in the world. It’s the zenith of heritage preservation. It’s a learned storyteller, too, and the story is human creativity. Americans are privileged that it’s here.

The exhibition has ten parts, each pegged to a year or, more precisely, a pivotal moment. Very early, we learn that the Met, from its founding, always strove to collect the world, more or less. In 1870, this was a radical idea. Its early donors might have been very rich, but the money was mostly new, and the donors themselves were likely themselves not far removed from the farm, the tenement, or, in the case of the many Jews supporting the Met, the shtetl. Most weren’t naturally cosmopolitan, but they thought big.

Chinese ceramics and arms, armor, and especially textiles from throughout the world entered the collection along with the usual suspects such as American paintings by John Kensett and Frederic Church and Old Master prints and paintings. So did French contemporary art. Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 was still avant-garde in 1889, when the Met got it as a gift.

I love the attention given to textiles. They’re usually the ugly ducklings in the hierarchy of museum art, but the Met allows them to sing. A gorgeous Noh costume from the early years of Japan’s Edo period joins a Peruvian tunic and an English chasuble to show the range of the museum’s collection, and here we find another recurring theme.

If the Met resembles a university, its curators are among the leading scholars in their specialty. Big money makes things happen at the Met, but the curators, what we call the program people, have often been visionaries. They’re fantastic.

The textile gallery salutes Frances Morris, who came to the Met as a lace expert. She was a broad thinker and a savvy shopper. Like many Met curators, she was there for years, and long after she left, the textile collection expressed her taste, which, fortunately, was both expansive and unfailingly good. Also profiled are William Ivins, who established the print room, James Rorimer, who established the Cloisters, and Henry Geldzahler, the museum’s swashbuckler contemporary art curator in the 1960s and ’70s.

Making the Met is a big show — 250 objects, covering 5,000 years, organized around what the Met calls “transformational moments” in its collecting history. The section Princely Aspirations examines the New York collector class, who saw themselves as reincarnations of Old World humanist potentates. There are sections on American art, Met-sponsored excavations, Louisine Havemeyer (the one donor profiled in depth), and sections dealing with the museum’s complex relationship with contemporary art over the past hundred years. Broadening Perspectives, the final section, is about today. It’s got all the diversity and inclusion lingo and doesn’t, like many museum shows these days, end with a thud. A big, bold El Anatsui wall hanging, Dusasa II, from 2007, dominates the room.

I saw lots of my favorites. Antonio Rossolino’s Madonna with Child and Angels, from the late 1450s, is indeed, as the label proclaims, the most beautiful relief sculpture in America. Winslow Homer’s Northeaster, from the late 1890s, is a majestic seascape. Madame X, by Sargent, is there. He sold it to the Met in 1916, calling it the best thing he did. I love Degas, and there’s plenty there. Two Vuillard lithographs were beguiling. A video by Ann Hamilton called “abc,” from 1994, is there. It’s the first video the Met acquired. It shows her wet finger slowly erasing the letters of the alphabet, seen reversed through a sheet of glass. It’s small and comes from one of the best artists living today.

Just walking to the show from the Met’s front door, I saw dozens of objects in the permanent-collection galleries that could have been in the show. The number of voices involved, the disagreements, and the phone-book-size list of points to be covered make it probably the most complicated show the Met has ever done.

The catalogue is really the most important part of the exhibition. It’s the official history of the Met and is the counterpoint to Rogues’ Gallery, by Michael Gross, the unauthorized Met history published in 2010. The Met’s top brass hate the Gross book. Its subtitle is “The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayal That Made the Met.” I read it when it came out. It does have the ring of truth.

I thought many of the labels were leaden and more than a few awkward. A label for an Indian chair cover notes that the trailblazing curator of the textile department, Frances Morris, bought many works for the museum with her own money, hoping the museum would eventually reimburse her. Did it? We’re never told, and the chair cover was actually purchased by the museum, according to the credit line. This kind of non-sequitur interpretation is just plain sloppy. Why does Copley’s Portrait of Mrs. Jerathmael Bowers reflect “a national debate on immigration, race, and American identity?” Beats me. She looks like a nice, prosperous lady, showy for Copley. Why saddle her with heavy themes the portrait doesn’t support?

A label for a Guardi painting of Venice tells us that “eighteenth-century topographical pictures gained in popularity in the later twentieth century.” So what? Why? What’s the “later twentieth century?” That covers the Space Age, disco, Reagan, and the tech bubble. What’s Guardi got to do with one or any of these? A Watteau etching from 1717 purportedly has a neoclassical design that “would have signaled the user’s anti-royalist sympathies at the time of the French Revolution.” Wait a minute. Watteau’s a rococo artist, and 1717 is 75 years before Louis XVI got the axe.

There are clunker errors. A label describing The Chess Players, by Thomas Eakins, the first painting the Met got from the artist who did it, tells us that “Eakins enjoyed little critical or public favor during his lifetime.” This is wrong, and a debunked old saw. Eakins was nationally known, at least in art circles, served on prestigious juries, won many prizes, and, after all, was famous enough to get a Met retrospective the year after he died. In Eakins’s time, we didn’t have artists like Warhol, Pollock, and Hopper who were nationally known. The art world didn’t have the media apparatus to generate that kind of fame.

I thought the section on the collector and donor Louisine Havemeyer was the best in the exhibition. She comes alive. Her pungent, pithy observations give us a sense of a real person. Manet’s The Dead Christ with Angels, from 1863, “crushed everything beside it,” she said, when she hung it on the walls of her New York home. It was, she decided, “a museum Manet” and didactic and unpretty enough to make it ineligible for home decor. She bought El Grecos when he was still unknown, loving his art for “its intensity, its individuality, its freedom,” which hits the nail on the head.

Louisine partnered with Mary Cassatt, her adviser, to collect work by Degas, which came to the Met. Degas also picked things he did for her. She gave work by Tiffany, Cézanne, Courbet, and a range of Asian artists to the Met as well, so we get a sense of a collector and donor who had wide-ranging taste.

It’s the one moment where the exhibition takes a jab at the robber-baron wealth that built the museum. I wondered how the Met, so smitten now with equity, inclusion, and diversity, would treat its donors, beacon lights of generosity and discernment but also of rapacity. The rough edges, villainy, vulgarity, greed, and double-dealing are airbrushed from the Met’s story. Havemeyer’s money came from sugar refining, which, we’re told, featured “harsh labor conditions.” She wasn’t in the sugar fields beating the cane pickers, though. Conveniently, it was her husband’s money, and, by the way, she was a suffragette, so all’s well.

There are only a few moments devoted to the Met’s superb photography collection. Three big, dark, velvety prints of Edward Steichen’s Flatiron Building, from 1905, each processed differently to achieve gradations of night light, introduced the Met’s engagement with the medium, which was initially rebuffed. Alfred Stieglitz pushed photography, and contemporary avant-garde American art, to Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the Met’s founding director. Cesnola called him a “fanatic,” and that was that for years.

Stieglitz eventually made big gifts of photographs and many other things too, but the issue — the Met’s engagement with contemporary art — is a fraught one. The Met always collected the work of living artists but only around the edges. Its contemporary design collection — furniture, textiles, metalwork, jewelry, clothing, and ceramics — is better, and acquired earlier, than its contemporary paintings and sculpture collection.

Until Gertrude Stein gave her portrait to the Met in 1946, it owned nothing by Picasso. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney wanted to give her collection of cutting-edge American art to the Met in 1928. The trustees turned her down, and she then formed the Whitney. The Met’s photography collection started with the Stieglitz gift but stalled until the 1980s, when a big gift and photography’s ascendence in the art hierarchy made it a priority.

There are other times when it’s clear that the Met still struggles, sometimes awkwardly, with contemporary art. One wall panel is called “Engaging with Artists.” It starts with a reference to the Met’s initial community engagement and school outreach during Thomas Hoving’s years as director in the 1960s and ’70s. It then tells us about art that Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg made honoring the Met’s 100th anniversary.

Following this is a sentence on a Twyla Tharp dance performed at the museum. Then we learn about a Met fiasco occurring when it mounted its Harlem on My Mind show in 1969. The show treated the cultural capital of black America but included no art by black artists. “Duh . . . what dope was Hoving smoking?” I thought. Then we learn that “the exhibition brought attention to the need for greater diversity and inclusion in museums . . . an effort that’s still underway.”

What a mess. We learn nothing about school outreach. The Rauschenberg print on view is just about the most inconsequential thing he did. The Harlem on My Mind show was 50 years ago, and the Met is still thinking about what it learned from it? Then the show immediately changes the subject, pivoting to A Rededication to Asian Art.

The Fragmented Histories section was also puzzling. A curator of medieval art, James Rorimer, later the Met’s director, belonged to the Monuments Men and Women, an international WWII-era group working under the auspices of the Allied forces and dedicated to protecting cultural treasures from Nazi destruction. The group uncovered art looted by both Göring  and Goebbels. We’re told his experience with stolen art “solidified the Met’s commitment to responsible collecting practices and preservation of cultural heritage.” I laughed at that one, given that the Met’s Euphronios Krater debacle is one of the biggest museum scandals of my lifetime — the day the sixth-century-b.c. terra-cotta bowl came to the museum, the Met knew it had been illegally brought to the United States. After 30 years of obfuscation, resistance, and, it seems, a good deal of tale-telling, the Met sent it back to Italy.

Met tapestry curator Edith Standen’s Army uniform is in the show. She worked for the commission restituting art stolen by the Nazis. The problem with this object is that Standen’s service occurred before she came to the Met. It’s misleading since it suggests that her work on Nazi loot occurred under the Met’s aegis, showing the Met’s commitment to restituting ill-gotten gains, when it had nothing to do with the Met.

The Met is at the crossroads of great wealth, New York’s international character, a broadly and deeply superior collection, and an entrepreneurial, expansive spirit among its curators that comes from working in New York. The Met makes things happen. When I reviewed the Michelangelo excellent drawings retrospective a few years ago, I said that only the Met could do so vast, comprehensive, and expensive a show. It has the money and New York chutzpah to make things happen, and that means doing deals.

In 1905, it augmented its outstanding collection of Japanese armor through a swap with Japanese museums, which gave the Met rare armor it wanted in exchange for Egyptian antiquities the Met owned already or had the connections in Egypt to acquire. That takes imagination, and I can assure you that 99 percent of American museum curators today would faint at the thought of doing what in New York comes naturally. I call this cowboy curating, but the Met can do it, and that’s fine. It got a deal that was both fair and good.

The Collecting through Excavation section is insider baseball and a waste of space in what should be a “greatest hits, greatest stories” show. It’s fine to make the point that museums acquire art not only from dealers, artists, and collectors. Sometimes they dig it up through sponsored excavations.

Many museums did this, usually in partnership with universities, other museums, and the host country, divvying up the goods. The Met digs in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and old Palestine were mostly flops, as the exhibition admits, and the Met says it doesn’t do this anymore. Why give it air time? There were lots of shards and smalls in this part of the show. There are no Worcester Hunt mosaic masterpieces like we’d see at the Worcester Art Museum, another museum excavator. It seemed as if it should have been a separate, focused show.

All of this sounds like I didn’t like the show, but I did. I recommend it. I brought deep knowledge of the Met and a long history with it, and while the show touches briefly on a million characters, I knew lots of them and always wanted to see the bare bones invested with flesh, blood, and vinegar. I do think Making the Met tells too many stories. There’s a section on conservation, which seemed to merit a show on its own.

Sad to say, the Met’s 150th anniversary was wrecked by the COVID-19 shutdown. It canceled, for instance, its Costume Institute show, always a high point for me. Losing six months in this pivotal year must have involved a major jiggering of long-planned shows.

When I was a director, my museum had its 75th anniversary. I programmed the entire year in view of this, doing shows that saluted not only the Addison’s history in its many elements but also its core audiences. The Met might have conceived this approach — there’s a big photography show on view, and its British galleries were just spectacularly reinstalled — but I don’t see that all-encompassing planning. The other exhibitions on view cover topics so diffuse and narrow that they seem uncoordinated. Kent Monkman’s massive Wooden Boat People, commissioned for the Met’s Great Hall, is a big, pedantic PC piece of trash. I hadn’t seen it until this week.