大都会艺术博物馆之使命历史

纽约去哪玩

Honoring Lenapehoking
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is situated in Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape diaspora, and historically a gathering and trading place for many diverse Native peoples, who continue to live and work on this island.

We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, and future—for their ongoing and fundamental relationships to the region. In May 2021, The Met installed a plaque on the Fifth Avenue facade recognizing Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Indigenous Lenape peoples.

纽约去哪玩

The Met Cloisters, view looking north. Photographed in April 1938

The Met Cloisters, which opened to the public in 1938, is the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. Located in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, on a spectacular four-acre lot overlooking the Hudson River, the modern museum building is not a copy of any specific medieval structure but is rather an ensemble informed by a selection of historical precedents, with a deliberate combination of ecclesiastical and secular spaces arranged in chronological order. Elements from medieval cloisters—Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Trie-sur-Baïse, Froville, and elements once thought to have come from Bonnefont-en-Comminges—and from other sites in Europe have been incorporated into the fabric of the building.

纽约去哪玩

This silent film features footage of The Met Cloisters being constructed.

Three of the reconstructed cloisters feature gardens planted according to horticultural information found in medieval treatises and poetry, garden documents and herbals, and medieval works of art such as tapestries, stained-glass windows, and column capitals. Approximately 2,000 works of art from medieval Europe, largely dating from the 12th through the 15th century and including exquisite illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, metalwork, enamels, ivories, and tapestries, are exhibited in this unique context.

纽约去哪玩

Much of the sculpture at The Met Cloisters was acquired by George Grey Barnard (1863–1938), a prominent American sculptor, and an avid collector and dealer of medieval art. Barnard opened his original Cloisters on Fort Washington Avenue to the public in 1914. Through the generosity of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960), the Museum acquired Barnard's Cloisters and most of its contents in 1925. Early on, it was clear that a new, larger building would be needed to display the collection in a more scholarly fashion. Rockefeller donated to New York City, and financed the conversion of, some 56 acres of land just north of Barnard's museum, which became Fort Tryon Park—approximately four acres of which was destined as the site for the new museum. Following J. Pierpont Morgan's purchase of 12 miles of the New Jersey Palisades in 1901 to preserve the cliffs and shoreline from excessive quarrying, Rockefeller in 1933 donated some 700 additional acres of the Palisades' plateau to preserve the view from The Met Cloisters. In addition to providing the grounds and building to house the Barnard collection, Rockefeller contributed works of art from his own collection—including the celebrated Unicorn Tapestries—and established an endowment for operations and future acquisitions.

纽约去哪玩

The new Cloisters museum building was designed by Charles Collens (1873–1956) who, together with Henry C. Pelton, designed the Riverside Church in New York City. Joseph Breck (1885–1933), a curator of decorative arts and assistant director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and James J. Rorimer (1905–1966), who would later be named the Museum's director, were primarily responsible for overseeing the building's design and construction. Balancing Collens's interpretation with strict attention to historical accuracy, Breck and Rorimer created in the galleries a clear and logical flow from the Romanesque (ca. 1000–ca. 1150) through the Gothic period (ca. 1150–1520).

纽约去哪玩

This 28-minute documentary chronicles the dismantling of the 12th-century apse from the church of San Martín in Fuentidueña, Spain, and its reconstruction at The Met Cloisters between 1958 and 1961.

The Cloisters opened to the public on May 10, 1938. In 1958, the 12th-century limestone apse from the church in Fuentidueña, Spain, arrived to become part of the structure. The Treasury, which contains objects created for liturgical celebrations, personal devotions, and secular uses, was renovated in 1988. Major improvement to the infrastructure, climatization, and gallery spaces has continued to this day, including a new skylight in the cloister from Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, a new objects conservation lab, the preservation of limestone windows in the Early Gothic and Late Gothic Halls, and many others.

纽约去哪玩

The collection at The Met Cloisters continues to grow, thanks to Rockefeller's endowment and other significant gifts. Among its masterpieces are an early 15th-century French illuminated book of hours, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry; a richly carved, 12th-century ivory cross attributed by some to the English abbey of Bury Saint Edmunds; stained-glass windows from the castle chapel at Ebreichsdorf, Austria; a stone Virgin of the mid-13th century from the choir screen of Strasbourg Cathedral in France; and the Merode Triptych, representing the Annunciation, by the workshop of the 15th-century Netherlandish master Robert Campin.

纽约去哪玩

On March 18, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Met Breuer, a space dedicated to modern and contemporary art. The landmark building was originally designed by the great Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer for The Whitney Museum of American Art.

For four years, The Met Breuer exhibited global art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, enhanced by the historical reach of The Met's unparalleled collection, through a range of exhibitions, commissions, performances, and artist residencies.

In Summer 2020, The Met closed The Met Breuer, transferring its lease to The Frick Collection, while they renovate their primary building on East 70th Street.

纽约去哪玩

History of the Building
When the great Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981) received the prestigious commission to build a new museum of American art in New York in 1963, it was the beginning of one of the defining decades of the century. All over Manhattan, dizzying monuments to consumerism, television, and commerce were constructed in glass and steel.

纽约去哪玩

Acclaimed for his mastery of stone and concrete with institutional buildings and private homes across Europe, the Hungarian-born émigré crafted the Whitney Museum of American Art, a living monument in contrast with the transient, disposable trends of its time, at the peak of his career (it was constructed in 1963–66). Convinced that the sandy, genteel apartment buildings of the Upper East Side would soon be replaced with a new skyline of gleaming office towers, and equally convinced of the importance of longevity in architecture, Breuer conceived the museum as a solid, permanent sanctuary for the art within and all that it represented.