Upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 150th anniversary, Allison Hewitt Ward takes a look back at the events 50 years ago that shaped the Met we know today. 

Last week, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated its 150th anniversary. With its doors closed to the public, the occasion was marked by a low-fi video message from President and CEO Daniel H. Weiss and Director Max Hollein. Hollein’s introductory comments focused not on the collection and its history but the museum’s role in the community, highlighting laudable efforts by the institution to support health workers, including pivoting the textile conservation lab’s efforts to the production of hand-sewn masks.

It’s worth dwelling on Hollein’s definition of the Met: “An art museum, a museum of our kind, is a museum about the world, for the world, a museum that’s in the world, that’s really sharing with as many people as possible.” It bares little resemblance to the one set forth in the Met’s founding charter which laid out the museum's mission as:

encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of the arts to manufacture and practical life, of advancing general knowledge of kindred subjects, and, to that end, furnishing popular instruction and recreation. [1]

For the first hundred years of its existence, the Met was a place of relative quiet, immured from daily life and practical politics. The mission of the institution was to collect, display and edify. The public was of periphery concern, if any. The far more pressing question of the aesthetic was one of expansion: new acquisitions elevating new tendencies to the realm of the beautiful. 

Following steady attendance growth in the post-war years, the Museum received its first shock of mass public interest when it displayed Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in 1963. In less than a month, over one million visitors flooded through its doors. (For comparison, the 2017-18 exhibition “Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer,” ran for three months and set the decade’s highest visitorship record at 700,000.) 

In 1967, Thomas P.F. Hoving began a ten year directorship that engineered the Met we know today. Two years in, the Museum launched the controversial exhibition “Harlem on My Mind,” which eschewed artworks altogether in favor of a multimedia production intended to put the “cultural capital” of Harlem on display. The show opened to critical disdain and public protests led by the Harlem artists who had been promised a place in the show only months prior to its opening. [2]

It was around this disastrous exhibition that Hoving began his most ambitious and long-lasting edits to the mission of his employer, shifting its focus from the artworks it housed to the society it existed within. He told the Times that “the social order is in flux and we must be relevant to it.” [3] Seizing upon the founding charter’s link between the Museum and “practical life,” Hoving reoriented the Met’s focus from conservation to influence, urging the Museum to take its place “at the center of things.” [4] No longer content with art having a modest impact on “practical life,” Hoving insisted that the Met should be a primary player in the production of social life. 

By 1971, Hoving had pushed through a massive expansion plan that took form in the 1975 Lehman Wing and the 1978 addition of the Sackler Wing (the site of recent protests against the Sackler family’s contribution to the opioid epidemic), whose massive glass windows gave Central Park passerby a view of the Temple of Dendur. The expansion was the physical manifestation of Hoving’s dream of radical relevance: no longer ensconced behind a stone facade, the Met had literally opened its windows to the world. 

In museological history, Hoving represents the public turn in art museums. For its supporters, this is a necessary transformation that chips away at elitist barriers separating art from life. For its detractors, it has reduced museums to second-rate theme parks. [5] Both give museums altogether too much credit, as if the possibilities of culture were determined in curator’s offices over budget discussions.

The turn from things to people was neither radically progressive nor destructive, but a necessary survival tactic in a culture to whom works of art had lost their ability to speak. Museums had no choice but to rebrand themselves as civic institutions and providers of vital community services; to display art was no longer enough. In a century traumatized by successive political failures, the necessity, or even possibility, of aesthetic experience, was cast into doubt. For its entire modern history art was bound up in the possibility of freedom. So what happens when freedom no longer seems possible?

Until the mid-20th century, the Metropolitan and its fellow global survey museums persevered as mausoleums of bourgeois freedom, even as that freedom became more and more remote. It’s no accident that the new Met coincided with the failure of the New Left, institutionalizing their anti-bourgeois skepticism of the aesthetic itself, throwing into doubt the very grounds of its own existence. 

Museums today exist in that attenuated identity crisis, unsure of their very reason for being. And now, literally, unable to open their doors, what purpose do museums serve? Makeshift PPE factories?

Upon its founding in 1870, the Met had no building and no collection; it was just an idea. In many ways, it’s in the same position now: an idea waiting for a moment in which it can thrive. As we reflect on the Met in exile from its galleries and objects, it’s worth remembering that it, like all museums, is an idea as much as it is physical space. And ideas are subject to change. 

The Met, unlike many other museums, is likely to survive this crisis. It is already set apart in that it promised its staff pay through May 2 as other institutions embarked on mass layoffs. Perhaps the aching desire so many of us feel for the objects that remain locked behind its doors will remind the Museum that its purpose is not as uncertain as the past 50 years have led it to believe. //

[1] Charter of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, State of New York, Laws of 1870, Chapter 197, passed April 13, 1870 and amended L. 1898, ch. 34; L. 1908, ch. 219.

[2] See: Steven C Dubin, “Crossing 125th Street: Harlem on My Mind Revisited,” in Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 18–63 and Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969),” American Studies 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 5–39.

[3] Grace Glueck, “The Total Involvement Of Thomas Hoving; ‘ Hoving’s Tenure May Mark the First Time That a Museum Has Been Used as a Springboard into Politics,’” The New York Times, December 8, 1968.

[4] Thomas P. F. Hoving, “Director’s Note,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 27, no. 5 (January 1, 1969): 243.

[5] Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3–17.