Metropolitan Museum of Art

Collections

The Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt; paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters; and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. A great number of period rooms, ranging from first-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. Since the late 1800s, the Museum has been collecting diverse materials from all over the world. Its outreach to "exhibition designers, architects, graphic designers, lighting designers, and production designers" helps the museum to maintain its collection in good condition.

Geographically designated collections

Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East. From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the museum's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Hittite, Sasanian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Elamite cultures (among others), as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects. The highlights of the collection include the Sumerian Stele of Ushumgal, the Elamite silver Kneeling Bull with Vessel, the Pratt Ivories, and a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II.

Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, in addition to Mesoamerican antiquities, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman, philanthropist and then NY Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Before Rockefeller's collection was gifted to the Met, Rockefeller founded The Museum of Primitive Art in New York City with the intention of displaying these works, after the Met had previously shown little interest in his art collection. In 1968, the Met had agreed to a temporary exhibition of Rockefeller's work. However, the Met then requested to include the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in their permanent collection. The arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas opened to the public in 1982, under the title, "The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing". This wing is named after Nelson Rockefeller's son, Michael Rockefeller, who died while collecting works in New Guinea.

Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot (4,000 m2) Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum. The Wing exhibits Non-Western works of art created from 3,000 BCE – present, including a wide range of particular cultural traditions. Significantly, this work was regarded as art, judged on aesthetic terms, in a Western art museum. Before then, objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas were often considered to be the work of "primitives" or ethnographic work, rather than art.

The Wing exhibits the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in an exhibition separated by geographical locations. The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall (4.6 m) memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls.

Old Master paintings

The collection began when 174 paintings were purchased from European dealers in 1871. Almost two-thirds of these paintings have been deaccessioned, but quality paintings by Jordaens, Van Dyck, Poussin, the Tiepolos, Guardi, and some other artists remain in the collection. Major gifts from Henry Gurdon Marquand in 1889, 1890 and 1891 gave the Met a much more solid foundation. Additionally, his example helped to create a taste for collecting Old Master paintings. In 1913, the Benjamin Altman bequest had sufficient range and depth to put the Met's collection of paintings on the map. In 1949, the Jules Bache gift added more great paintings. The Robert Lehman Collection, which came to the museum in 1975, included many significant paintings, and is particularly strong in early Renaissance material. Over a period of decades, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman donated 94 works of unusually high quality to the Department of European Paintings, the last of which came with Mrs. Wrightsman's bequest in 2019. Notwithstanding the contributions made by Marquand, Altman, Bache, and Lehman, it has been written that "the Wrightsman paintings are highest in overall quality and condition." The latter "collected expertise as well as art," and advanced technology made better choices possible. Additionally, the Wrightsmans had the Met's curators at their disposal, for whom they served as a virtual "auxiliary purchase fund for objects the Met curators coveted, but could not afford."

The Met's plein air painting collection, which it calls "unrivaled", was the last large section of the European Paintings collection to have a home at the museum. The sale of a Monet and the construction of small scale galleries ultimately resulted in the acquisition of 220 European paintings (most of them plein-air sketches) from two collections. The Monet was used to purchase a half share of Wheelock "Lock" Whitney III's collection in 2003 (the remainder came as a promised gift), and when Eugene V. Thaw (1927–2018) saw how good they looked in the Met's new, purpose built galleries, he and his wife Clare donated their substantially larger collection to the Met (much of it a joint gift to the Morgan Library). The Met easily has the best collection of this material in the nation, and one of the three or four best in the world. Thus the Met's collection, hitherto top-heavy with famous French artists, "became uniquely diverse," with "many little-known artists from France, as well as numerous artists from other European nations;" many of which are not otherwise represented in U.S. museums. The plein-air collection forms a bridge "to what became the avant-garde," the Impressionists and their successors.

As noted by the museum, "a work by Renoir entered the Museum as early as 1907 (today the Museum has become one of the world's great repositories of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art)." The museum terms its nineteenth-century French paintings "second only to the museums of Paris," with strengths in "Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and others."

Non-geographically designated collections

The Met's Department of Arms and Armor is one of the museum's most popular collections. Several early trustees of the museum were armor enthusiasts. The 1904 purchase of the collection of Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, duc de Dino, served as the foundational collection. It became a great collection with the gift and bequest of the Henry Riggs collection of 2,000 pieces, which was one of the finest assembled by a single person. It came to the museum in 1913 and 1925. Another collection landmark took place in 1936, when George Cameron Stone bequeathed 3,000 pieces of Asian armor. Bashford Dean, the first arms curator, did much to build up the collection, including with gifts he and his friends made directly to the Met, which enabled the purchase of his personal collection.

Stephen V. Grancsay, the second arms curator at the museum, ably added to the collection, and he even purchased important works from Clarence H. Mackay (the greatest contemporary private collector of this material, who was wiped out by the Great Depression). Grancsay later resold some of these important works to the museum at cost.

The department's focus on "outstanding craftsmanship and decoration," including pieces intended solely for display, means that the collection is strongest in late medieval European pieces and Japanese pieces from the 5th through 19th centuries. However, these are not the only cultures represented in Arms and Armor; the collection spans more geographic regions than almost any other department, including weapons and armor from dynastic Egypt, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the ancient Near East, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, as well as American firearms (especially Colt firearms) from the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the collection's 14,000 objects are the oldest items in the museum: flint bifaces which date to 700,000–200,000 BCE. There are also many pieces made for and used by kings and princes, including armor belonging to Henry VIII of England, Henry II of France, and Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. A. Hyatt Mayor called the Met's collection "the only single collection from which one might illustrate the whole history of the subject.

The distinctive "parade" of armored figures on horseback installed in the first-floor Arms and Armor gallery was organized with the help of Leonid Tarassuk (1925–90), a senior research associate specializing in arms and armor.

Digital representation of collections

Beginning in 2013, the Met organized the Digital Media Department for the purpose of increasing access of the museum's collections and resources using digital media and expanded website services. The first Chief Digital Officer Sree Sreenivasan from 2013 departed in 2016 and was replaced by Loic Tallon at the time that the department became known by its simplified designation as the Digital Department. At the start of 2017, the department began its Open Access initiative summarized on the Met's website titled "Digital Underground" stating: "It's been six months since the Met launched its Open Access initiative, which made available all 375,000+ images of public-domain works in the Met collection under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). During what is just the dawn of this new initiative, the responses so far have been incredible." At that time, more than 375,000 photographic images from the museum's archival collection were released for public domain reproduction and use both by the general public and by large public access websites such as those available at Google BigQuery.

In May 2022, the Met and the World Monuments Fund announced a collaboration of digital work for the 2024 reopening of the African, ancient American, and Oceanic art galleries. The digital project "aims to bolster the understanding of several historic sites in sub-Saharan Africa", in particular sites that have been minimally explored by Western museums.

Open access images and data have been viewed over 1.2 billion times with over 7 million downloads.

Libraries

Many curatorial departments maintain a library, most of the material of which can be requested online through the libraries' catalog. The Thomas J. Watson Library is the central library of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and supports the activities of staff and researchers. It can be accessed without an appointment. As of July 2026, Watson Library's collection contains approximately 1,030,000 volumes, including monographs and exhibition catalogs; over 32,000 periodical titles; and more than 144,900 auction and sale catalogs. The library includes a reference collection, auction and sale catalogs, a rare book collection, manuscript items, and vertical file collections. The library is accessible to anyone 18 years of age or older through registering online and providing photo ID.

Special exhibitions

The museum regularly hosts notable special exhibitions, often focusing on the works of one artist that have been loaned out from a variety of other museums and sources for the duration of the exhibition. These exhibitions are part of the attraction that draw people both within and outside Manhattan to explore the Met. Such exhibitions include displays especially designed for the Costume Institute, paintings from artists from across the world, works of art related to specific art movements, and collections of historical artifacts. Exhibitions are commonly located within their specific departments, ranging from American decorative arts, arms and armor, drawings and prints, Egyptian art, Medieval art, musical instruments, and photographs. Typical exhibitions run for months at a time and are open to the general public. Each exhibition provides insight into the world of art as a transformative, cultural experience and often includes a historical analysis to demonstrate the profound impact that art has on society and its dramatic transformation over the years.

In 1969, a special exhibition, titled "Harlem on My Mind" was criticized for failing to exhibit work by Harlem artists. The museum defended its decision to portray Harlem itself as a work of art. Norman Lewis, Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Clifford Joseph, Roy DeCarava, Reginald Gammon, Henri Ghent, Raymond Saunders, and Alice Neel were among the artists who picketed the show.

Performance arts

The museum's Department of Live Arts commissions new works of performance using music, sound, movement, and other artistic practices. Under the banner of MetLiveArts, performances are presented in the Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium and the galleries of the main museum building and The Cloisters, and made available through digital platforms such as YouTube and the museum's own website. Limor Tomer, became general manager of MetLiveArts in 2011, moving the department once known as Concerts and Lectures away from the programs of classical recitals and chamber concerts that were customary at that time.

Sarah Jones replaced Limor Tomer in 2025 as Head of Live Arts.

History

19th century

The New York State Legislature granted the Metropolitan Museum of Art an Act of Incorporation on April 13, 1870, "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining in said City a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations". This legislation was supplemented later by the 1893 Act, Chapter 476, which required that its collections "shall be kept open and accessible to the public free of all charge throughout the year". The founders included businessmen and financiers, among them Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the US, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Also instrumental in the founding of the museum was Henry Gurdon Marquand, who donated an important part of his collection of Old Masters paintings to the fledgling institution. The Marquand family, founders of Marquand and Co., maintained a diverse interest in art based philanthropy, having donated large sums of money to Princeton University, as well as establishing Southport's Pequot Library, a special collections institution.

The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum, served as its first president, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam came on board as its founding superintendent. The artist Eastman Johnson acted as co-founder of the museum, as did landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. Various other industrialists, artists, and scientists of the age served as co-founders, including Howard Potter, Salem Howe Wales, and Henry Gurdon Marquand. Marquand's donated works are known as the Marquand Collection. The former Civil War officer, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, was named as its first director. He served from 1879 to 1904. Under their guidance, the Met's holdings, initially consisting of a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 mostly European paintings, quickly outgrew the available space. In 1873, occasioned by the Met's purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum decamped from Fifth Avenue and took up residence at the Mrs. Nicholas Cruger Mansion also known as the Douglas Mansion (James Renwick, 1853–54, demolished 1928) at 128 West 14th Street. However, these new accommodations proved temporary, as the growing collection required more space than the mansion could provide. It moved into the current building in 1880. Between 1879 and 1895, the museum created and operated a series of educational programs, known as the Metropolitan Museum of Art Schools, intended to provide vocational training and classes on fine arts.

20th century

The museum is said to have established the world's first museum shop in 1908. In 1954, to mark the opening of its Grace Rainey Rogers concert hall, the museum inaugurated a series of concerts, adding art lectures in 1956. This "Concerts & Lectures program" grew over the years into 200 events each season. The program presented such performers as Marian Anderson, Cecilia Bartoli, Judy Collins, Marilyn Horne, Burl Ives, Juilliard String Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Artur Rubinstein, András Schiff, Nina Simone, Joan Sutherland and André Watts, as well as lectures on art history, music, dance, theater and social history. The program was directed, from its inception to 1968, by William Kolodney, and from 1969 to 2010, by Hilde Limondjian.

In the 1960s, the governance of the Met was expanded to include, for the first time, a chairman of the board of trustees in contemplation of a large bequest from the estate of Robert Lehman. For six decades Lehman built upon an art collection begun by his father in 1911 and devoted a great deal of time to the Met, before finally becoming the first chairman of the board at the Metropolitan in the 1960s. After his death in 1969, the Robert Lehman Foundation donated close to 3,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Housed in the Robert Lehman Wing, which opened to the public in 1975 and largely financed by the Lehman Foundation, the museum has called it "one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States".

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial was celebrated with exhibitions, symposia, concerts, lectures, the reopening of refurbished galleries, special tours, social events, and other programming for eighteen months from October 1969 through the spring of 1971. The centennial's events (including an open house, Centennial Ball, year-long art history course for the public, and various educational programming and traveling exhibitions) and publications drew on support from prominent New Yorkers, artists, writers, composers, interior designers, and art historians.

21st century

In 2009 Michael Gross published The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, an unauthorized social history, and the museum bookstore declined to sell it.

In 2012, following the earlier appointment of Daniel Brodsky as chairman of the board at the Met, the by-laws of the museum were formally amended to recognize the office of the chairman as having authority over the assignment and review of both the offices of president and director of the museum. The office of chairman was first introduced relatively late in the museum's history in the 1960s in contemplation of the anticipated donation of the Lehman collection to the museum and has since that time, under Brodsky, become the most senior administrative position at the museum.

From 2016 to 2020, the museum operated a modern and contemporary art gallery at 945 Madison Avenue, a Marcel Breuer-designed building at Madison Avenue and 75th Street in Manhattan's Upper East Side, the former Whitney Museum of American Art. It extends the museum's modern and contemporary art program. In September 2018, it was announced that the Met intended to vacate the Met Breuer three years early, in 2020; the Frick Collection began occupying the space while the main building underwent renovations.

In January 2018, museum president Daniel Weiss announced that the century-old policy of free admission would be replaced by a $25 charge to out-of-state and foreign visitors, effective March 2018. The museum temporarily closed in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, and reopened in late August; this was the first time in over a century that the Met was closed for more than three consecutive days.

In September 2020, following debates surrounding provenance holes and mismanagement of Indigenous art, the museum appointed Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha/Nde descent) as the museum's inaugural Associate Curator of Native American Art. In May 2021, the museum installed a plaque on its Fifth Avenue facade in recognition of indigenous communities and of the fact that the museum is situated in what was historically Lenapehoking. That November, the Met received a $125 million donation from Oscar L. Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang, the largest gift in the museum's history. In exchange, the Met named its modern and contemporary art galleries after the Tangs. The following February, the Met hired Moody Nolan to renovate the Ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot galleries. Mexican architect Frida Escobedo was hired in March 2022 to renovate the Tang Wing, and the Met had raised $550 million for the Tang Wing by 2024. Designs for the Tang Wing were announced that December.

Architecture

After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street transverse roads in Central Park. The first part of the Met to be built was a red-brick and stone "mausoleum" designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. The steel structure of the building was designed by London-born architects Edward C. and George K. Radford. Mould described Edward Radford as “an engineer of high scientific attainments to whom we entrusted the constructive portions of the iron work [i. e. the steel structure] of the building”. The Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway were designed in the Beaux-Arts style by Richard Morris Hunt and his son, Richard Howland Hunt, in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The firm of McKim, Mead & White completed the wings on the Fifth Avenue facade in 1910. The modernistic glass sides and rear of the museum are the work of Roche-Dinkeloo.

The Met Fifth Avenue measures almost 1⁄4-mile (400 m) long and with more than 2 million square feet (190,000 m2) of floor space, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building. The museum building is an accretion of over 20 structures, most of which are not visible from the exterior. The City of New York owns the museum building and contributes utilities, heat, and some of the cost of guardianship. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden is located on the roof near the southwestern corner of the museum. The museum's main building was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1967, and its interior was separately recognized by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1977. The Met's main building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986, recognizing both its monumental architecture, and its importance as a cultural institution.

Management

Governance

Daniel Weiss was the president and CEO of the Met, replacing Emily K. Rafferty, who served as president for a decade, and Thomas P. Campbell, CEO and director of the museum until resigning in 2017. In April 2018, Max Hollein was named director. The Met announced in August 2022 that Hollein became CEO in July 2023.

Although the City of New York owns the museum building and contributes utilities, heat, and some of the cost of guardianship, the collections are owned by a private corporation of fellows and benefactors which totals about 950 people. The museum is governed by a board of trustees of 41 elected members, several officials of the City of New York, and persons honored as trustees by the museum. The current co-chairs of the board, Candace Beinecke and Hamilton E. James, were elected in 2021. Other notable trustees include Anna Wintour, Richard Chilton, Candace Beinecke, Alejandro Santo Domingo. The New York City Mayor, City Council speaker, and New York City Comptroller serve as ex officio trustees, who appoint representatives to serve on the board without pay.

The activities of board of trustees are organized and based upon the activities of the individual trustees and their various committees as of 2016. The several committees of the board of trustees include the committees listed as Nominating, Executive, Acquisitions, Finance, Investment, Legal, Education, Audit, Employee Benefits, External Affairs, Merchandising, Membership, Building, Technology, and The Fund for the Met.

Finances

As of 2021, the museum's endowment as administered by the museum's investment officer Lauren Meserve is US$3.3 billion which provides much of the income for operations while admissions account for only 13 percent of revenue as of fiscal 2016. The 2009–10 operating budget was $221 million (~$313 million in 2024). The museum admission price as of March 2018 is $25 (~$32.00 in 2025) for out-of-state and foreign visitors, while New York state residents can pay what they wish to enter. Although subject to re-assessment, a 1970 agreement between the museum and the city of New York requires New York state visitors to pay at least a nominal amount; a penny is acceptable. The Met's finance committee is led by Hamilton E. James of The Blackstone Group, who is also one of the board members at the Met. The Met is reported to have an Aaa credit rating, the highest such rating possible. This was last affirmed by Moody's in 2015.

In 2019, museum president Daniel Weiss announced that the institution would review its policy for receiving financial donations, under pressure from activist group P.A.I.N. for the role that cultural institutions have played in whitewashing the Sackler family by receiving their donations. The museum announced it would remove the Sackler name from locations within the museum in December 2021.

In September 2016, The Wall Street Journal first reported financial set-backs at the museum related to servicing its outstanding debts and associated cut-backs in staffing at the museum, with the goal of trying to balance its budget by fiscal year 2018. According to the Met's annual tax filing for fiscal year 2016, several top executives had received disproportionately high compensation, often exceeding $1 million per annum with over $100,000 bonuses per annum.

In April 2017, The New York Times reported that the Met's annual debt was approaching $40 million, in addition to an outstanding museum bond for $250 million. This resulted in the indefinite postponement of a planned $600 million architectural expansion of the exhibition space for the museum's modern art collection as well as started a general discussion over the Met's human resources management. The chairman of the board at the Met elected in 2011, Daniel Brodsky, stated in response to the Times reports that he "looked forward to working with my administrative and board colleagues to support a climate of candor, transparency, accountability and mutual respect". In January 2018, Daniel Weiss as president of the museum stated that a downsized version of the original $600 million architectural expansion might be reconsidered as early as 2020 at a reduction to the $450 million level.

Attendance

For the fiscal year 2017 which ended on June 30, the museum was reported as having 7 million visitors during the past year, where "37 percent of these were international visitors, while 30 percent came from New York's five boroughs." Previously in 2016, the museum set a record for attendance, attracting 6.7 million visitors—the highest number since the museum began tracking admissions. Forty percent of the Met's visitors in fiscal year 2016 came from New York City and the tristate area; 41 percent from 190 countries besides the United States. In 2017, the attendance figures indicated seven million annual visitors with 63% of the visitors arriving from outside of New York State.

Roberta Smith writing for The New York Times in September 2017 voiced growing public concern that proposed increases in admissions costs would have an adverse effect upon attendance statistics at the museum. Smith referred to the public perception that such costs would appear "greedy and inappropriate" because "The museum already gets around $39 million a year from its gate—equal to the entire annual budget of the Brooklyn Museum." Smith's article continued to report the negative response of local communities in the tristate area surrounding the museum which was previously introduced in a series of articles by Robin Pogrebin written during the 2016–2017 fiscal year at the museum which criticized speculative suggestions among current administrators at the museum that an added revenue stream could be pursued by the museum by rescinding existing museum policy since 1893 allowing for free public access to the museum. In January 2018, museum president Daniel Weiss announced that the century-old policy of free museum admission would be replaced. Effective March 2018, most visitors who do not live in New York state or are not a student from New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut have to pay $25 (~$32.00 in 2025) to enter the museum. The City of New York has reduced funding at the Metropolitan as part of Mayor De Blasio's political effort to increase artistic diversity. They made an agreement to allow the fees in exchange for less funding which the city pledged to use at alternate facilities and promote diversity.

Holland Carter and Roberta Smith of The New York Times argued in response to Weiss's decision to rescind the previous free admission policy as lacking in responsible fiscal planning. They stated that a recent $65 million expenditure for renovating fountains seemed to be a poor allocation of the limited available funding. Smith added, "Those new awful Darth Vaderish fountains take huge hunks out of the plaza and disrupt movement" as an indication of the misuse of funds. Further criticism of Weiss's proposal was voiced internationally when The Guardian summarized the backlash from the Weiss proposal for raising the admissions fees. It stated, "Some critics are outraged. The past week has seen a New York Times piece titled "The New Pay Policy Is a Mistake", while Jezebel's Aimée Lutkin claimed "The Met Should Be Fucking Free". The New York Post writes that the museum has never had the right to charge admission and Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker says the new policy diminishes New York City".

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021)

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly impacted the Met's operations and led to the museum's first long-term shutdown on March 13. The Met gradually partially reopened in stages. By 2021, the public could visit the Met five days a week, with reduced hours of operation, and visitors were required to wear masks and practice social distancing. Several special exhibits were opened to the public during the reduced hours. There were 6,479,548 visitors in 2019, compared to 1,124,759 in 2020. However, in 2021, the museum attracted 1,958,000 visitors, ranking fourth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.

Other services such as the research libraries were almost completely closed except for off-site digital access. As a result, 20 percent of staff positions were eliminated, and Met director Max Hollein indicated that the Met might deaccession and sell off some of its collection to make up financial shortfalls. At least some of the museum's large art holding was placed in storage in order to make-up for losses in revenue causes by responses to the pandemic.

Deaccessioning works of art

The Met has always deaccessioned works to improve the collection by using the proceeds to purchase better or more appropriate works. As noted above, it has deaccessioned nearly two-thirds of the founding purchase of Old Master paintings made in 1871. As early as 1887, it sold 5,000 Cypriot objects in order to purchase Egyptian antiquities, and over the years it sold many thousands more works from Cyprus. 15,000 Egyptian objects were sold in the museum's shop in 1955, and nearly 10,000 works from other departments were earmarked that year for sale at auction.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art spent $39 million to acquire art for the fiscal year ending in June 2012. In 2020, it spent $29,824,000 (with $6,747,000 coming from insurance and the sale of art). In 2021, it spent $36,402,000 (with $4,007,000 coming from insurance and the sale of art). In 2022, it spent $74,432,000 (with $9,488,000 coming from insurance and the sale of art); in 2023 it spent $52,401,000 (with $7,444,000 coming from insurance and the sale of art).

In the early 1970s, under the directorship of Thomas Hoving, the Met revised its deaccessioning policy. It sought to acquire "world-class" pieces, including through the sale of mid- to high-value items from its collection. Though the Met had always sold duplicate or minor items from its collection to fund the acquisition of new pieces, the Met's new policy allowed the sale of important items with high values, objects regarded as part of the museum's core collection. Hoving's deaccessioning practices, including secretive non-public sales that violated donor wishes, was exposed by John L. Hess in a series of articles in the New York Times. These exposés provoked widespread criticism when they came to light, and they were compounded by deceitful and misleading statements made by Hoving, who was censured by the College Art Association and the Art Dealers Association of America. This resulted in an investigation of the museum by the New York State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz, who held public hearings in 1972. As a result of these hearings, the museum agreed to list in its annual report the total cash proceeds from art sales each year, and to itemize any deaccessioned objects valued at more than $50,000 each. It also agreed to sell those pieces at public auction and provide advance public notice of a work being sold if it had been on view in the last ten years. Known as the "Hoving Affair", the deaccessioning scandal has been written about by Calvin Tomkins, in Merchants and Masterpieces (1970; rev. ed. 1989), Michael Gross in Rogues' Gallery (2009), and Martin Gammon, Deaccessioning and its Discontents: A Critical History (2018), though the most comprehensive account remains Hess's 1974 book, The Grand Acquisitors.

Looted art

One of the most serious and daunting challenges to the Metropolitan Museum's respectable reputation has been a series of allegations and lawsuits about its known status as an institutional buyer of looted and stolen antiquities. Since the 1990s the Met has been the subject of countless investigative reports and books critical of the Met's laissez-faire attitude to acquisition. The Met has lost several major lawsuits, notably against the governments of Italy and Turkey, which successfully sought the repatriation of hundreds of ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities, with a total value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In August 2022, it was reported that the Cambodian government was pressuring the museum to return Khmer artifacts that were allegedly looted during the civil war and the tumultuous period following. In September 2022, New York law enforcement, across three separate search warrants, seized 27 artifacts highlighting ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt, with the intention of returning them to Italy and Egypt. These 27 objects were worth an aggregate total of $13 million. The items were seized due to their discovered link to known antiquities traffickers. This comes along with an international recalculation of what belongs in the museums of the world. Similar cases of repatriation conversations include the Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, and El Penacho. Along with the conversation about returning art, the art community is calling upon museological institutions to hold themselves to a higher standard of Social Justice, equity, and ethics. On March 22, 2023, Manhattan prosecutors seized 15 allegedly stolen antiquities tied to Subhash Kapoor. In December 2023, the museum announced it will return 14 Khmer sculptures to Cambodia and 2 to Thailand after determining they were stolen and linked to art dealer Douglas Latchford.

Looted Indigenous American art and NAGPRA violations

Since 1993, Charles and Valerie Diker have donated 139 Indigenous objects to the museum, many of which are funerary. Most of these objects have ownership histories with 200–2,000 year gaps in known owners. The display of Native American funerary objects is problematic, not just because of its unethical spotlighting of private ceremonial objects, but also due to its violation of NAGPRA. NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, established in 1990, states that institutions that receive federal funding must work to repatriate Native American human remains, funerary objects, and other ceremonially important objects. This was done to ensure that the respect and dignity deserved by all humans was given to Native Americans. Part of the goal of enacting NAGPRA was to begin a dialogue between American museum institutions and Indigenous groups. Written into NAGPRA is an acknowledgement of museums as the preservers of history. The Met has been able to avoid the repatriation of valuable objects that fall under the grasp of NAGPRA because they have not formally owned them. Objects that are on permanent or semi-permanent loan to a museum do not legally necessitate the initiation of the repatriation process. As the Diker collection is slowly incorporated into the Met's permanent collection, the objects will become illegal possessions, as the Met is a publicly funded institution.

In April 2023, ProPublica published a report detailing the Indigenous American collections of the Met Museum. The report exposed the loophole of loan vs. own that the Met was using to cling onto objects that they had an ethical and legal responsibility to repatriate. The report came to the conclusion that the Native American art held by the Met could only have come into the possession of the Diker's through violence, looting, and dispossession. Additionally, the report exposed that only 15% of the 193 objects donated to the Met by the Diker collection have known provenance. The Report was the cause of international outcry due to its bold pinpointing of just some of the Met's shoddy acquisitioning history. This callout of the unequivocally respected institution that is the Met Museum caused a reckoning amongst museums displaying Indigenous American art. In response to this scandal, the Met claimed that they were in contact with tribal governments about creating appropriate displays of Native American art and funerary objects, but did not specify which tribes.

Head of a Griffin

In February 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced the return of a 2,700-year-old bronze griffin head to Greece. The artifact, dating to the 7th century B.C., had been in the museum's collection since 1950. An internal investigation, prompted by new information from Greek authorities and independent researchers, confirmed that the piece had been looted from an archaeological site before reaching the museum through a private collector.

In response to many controversies, the museum issued a statement on collecting practices. The statement encompasses all 1.5 million works of art held by the Met. Referencing research, transparency, and collaboration, this statement is a clear redefining of the Met's outlook on looted art and artwork with unknown histories. "As a pre-eminent voice in the global art community, it is incumbent upon the Met to engage more intensively and proactively in examining certain areas of our collection," stated Max Hollein, the director of the museum. The Met hired a manager of provenance research with a team of three staff to assist the already-employed curators and historians.