Founded in 1870, the Met holds about 1.5 million works spanning 5,000 years, including one of the largest collections of Egyptian art outside Cairo.
The museum is enormous — pick two or three wings rather than trying to see everything in one visit, and reserve timed tickets online in advance during busy seasons.
The Fifth Avenue front reads as one building, but the Met is really a century and a half of additions absorbed into a single envelope of roughly two million square feet. Founded on April 13, 1870, it did not open on this site until 1880, and every director since has added to the plan rather than redrawn it. Nothing about the layout is intuitive. Egyptian art and Greek and Roman art both open directly off the Great Hall on the ground floor, while the European paintings sit a level above — which is why visitors who walk in aiming for the paintings tend to spend their first stretch among sarcophagi and marble.
The Temple of Dendur is the clearest case of a room built around a single object. Commissioned in Nubia under the Roman emperor Augustus and finished by about 10 BC, the sandstone temple faced permanent submersion behind the Aswan High Dam. Egypt gave it to the United States in 1965 in recognition of American funding for the campaign to save the Nubian monuments, and President Johnson awarded it to the Met in 1967. Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo set it behind a reflecting pool with a stippled glass wall to diffuse the northern light, and it opened to the public in 1978. Stand close and the nineteenth-century graffiti is legible, including a British naval officer's carved line, A L Corry RN 1817.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing reopened on May 31, 2025 after a four-year rebuild led by Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture with Beyer Blinder Belle, showing more than 1,800 works from Africa, the ancient Americas and Oceania in three distinct spaces rather than one undifferentiated hall.
The usual misjudgment is treating the museum as a checklist. Two departments walked slowly — arms and armor, say, or the American Wing period rooms — leave more behind than a forced march past the famous canvases.
1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028 · Official site ↗
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5,727,258 visitors in fiscal year 2025, it was the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.
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