Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Transition to Modernism
In 1870, the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had brought art and art education to both American people and international visitors. Through centuries, Metropolitan Museum of Art has been through continuous changes since the ground was first broken in Central Park. The original Gothic-Revival style building has been greatly expanded in size with various additions surround the original structure. Among the additions to the original museum are the Robert Lehman Wing, the Sackler Wing, The American Wing, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, and the Henry R. Kravis Wing. In this page, one will observe how the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded and evolved since its first built in the late 18th century. And its final site choice broke the traditional view of art as only toys of wealthy people. Because its educational purpose has spread over a large period of time. Henry James's "palace" in the park has undergone many changes, from Vaux and Mould's original Victorian Gothic building to Richard Morris Hunt's and Mckim, Mead and White's elegant Beaux-Arts classicism to the cool understatement of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates' modernist glass wings. With each architectural program, the Metropolitan has recognized the need to adapt to a changing world- one in which serving the public remains paramount. Due to the architectural changes, the museum is considered a hodgepodge of buildings constructed at different times and as parts of difference schemes. Portions of the existing building that have particularly significant historical features are Hunt's Great Hall, Hunt's and Mckim's Fifth Avenue facades, Weston's south facade, and Pope's
How it started?
The Metropolitan Museum was incorporated on April 13, 1870. In the aftermath of the Civil War, New York and the rest of the nation were expanding rapidly in an economic boom that lasted until the Panic of 1873. It was an era notable for grand and creative projects, such as the Atlantic Cable, the Brooklyn Bridge and the founding of many great cultural institutions of the nation. It was also a time of blatant corruption. The administration of Ulysses S. Grant was marked by scandal; the stock-manipulating schemes by financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk made headlines in 1869, and in 1870 the depredations of the New York City treasury by state senator William Marcy Tweed.For years New York City'es liberal-minded reform leaders had talked about founding an art museum, but there was no call for action until 1969 when publisher Geroge P. Putnam, extolled New York's "noble" Central Park as the city's "worthy and creditable" academy of art and the "treasures" of its historical society. Therefore, the Central Park becomes an ideal place to locate a new national institution attracting gifts of works of art from the world.
Site of the Museum: The Central Park
In the 1870s, the Upper East Side was still only sparsely settled. The streets have been superimposed on abandoned farmland but were not yet fully paved. Among decaying rural structures, clusters of brownstone town houses had begun to sprout like weeds. The popular part of the city was to the south of Fifth Avenue, where an unbroken line of handsome mansions. It is no wonder that most of the museum's trustees thought the Museum should be located in the center of this desirable area. The decision of the final location is more political. There are three choices for the site of a large museum building: The Central Park, Reservoir Square and Manhattan Square.A majority of the Museum's trustees favored the Reservoir Square site, because it was in the heart of the most popular residential district. Such a place near the developed part of the city seemed ideal. Compared to the Reservoir Square, Manhattan Square (from Seventy-seventh to Eighty-first Streets between Eight and Ninth Avenues, in 1864 made part of the Central Park*) was considered too far uptown and too far west.
The ultimate decision about the Museum's location was to be made by the eleven commissioners of "The Central Park", who in 1857 had been given full power over all aspect of its management and design. The treasurer Andrew Green and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted committed to the idea of the of the park as an educational center, and through their influence, park regulations were amended to allow "for the establishment or maintenance, within the limits of said Central Park, of museums... collections of natural history, observatories or works of art."
