150 Glorious Years Of The Met

The Met as the Metropolitan Museum of Art is popularly known, just turned 150 and is marking the anniversary&nbspwith an exhibition titled &ldquoMaking the Met 1870&ndash2020&rdquo.  It commemorates the 150th birthday by charting its history&mdashand the broader history of Western art collection&mdashfrom the end of the American Civil War to the present day.

The museum reopened in August this year after months of lockdown. 

It was launched by a group of businessmen and civic leaders in the year 1866 as an idea without a work of art to its name. This institution got its first artifact in 1870 and soon the collection grew to a house for thousands of objects.

The Met became an internationally renowned treasure of cultural heritage that attracts more than seven million visitors each year.

The visitors who are interested in checking out the collection personally can purchase the entry tickets online. And those who want to take a part in it from home can also watch it online as the museum is also offering a virtual tour.

Art lovers, you can listen to the audio tour of some of the highlights from this exhibition which has been narrated by actor Steve Martin.

All those who are interested in the behind the scenes of the museum can browse seven stories about the conservation of the Met&rsquos most iconic works or watch a short documentary on the museum&rsquos iconic Fifth Avenue architecture. The other option is viewing the rarely seen footage which is a silent 1928 documentary. The exhibition&rsquos 250 objects are presented in an order that they were acquired in the museum.

The list of the selected artifacts includes the seated statue of the female Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, Edgar Degas&rsquo bronze Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer, contemporary works such as El Anatsui&rsquos large scale Dusasa ll among many others. The exhibition curates the museum&rsquos collection over the decades.

It also features the Monuments Men &ndash a group of men and women who worked to preserve the art looted by the Nazis at the time of the Second World War and curators who pushed the conservative Met to embrace contemporary art.

One of the highlights of this exhibition is Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague Stricken of Palermo, a painting by Anthony van Dyck that was one of the first artifacts to enter the Met&rsquos collection. It depicts Saint Rosalie who saved the Italian city of Palermo from plague in the 17th century.

The show has ten sections which has moments of great change for the museum, from the early decades of World War II and the embrace of modernism in the 20th century. 

Find out more here.