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Descriptive Essay: The Metropolitan Museum Of Art

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Esther Jacob
POLSC 110
Ms. Logan
April 2017
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
I grew up in a small town in upstate New York where the closest supermarket was a 15-minute drive. A few times a year my mom would take me and my siblings to the Big Apple and expose us to city life. I always loved the city - the lights, the skyscrapers, the street filled with people - it captivated me. One of the places we would visit was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, otherwise known as the Met. I remember walking through the museum in awe – everything was so big and beautiful. The tall ceilings, gigantic sculptures, meticulous architecture - I had never seen anything like it, and it is safe to say that visiting the Met was the highlight of my trip. And of course …show more content…

Ranking the third largest art collection in the world, “the collection of Met museum NYC includes classical art, Ancient Egyptian art, European masters, American art, modern art, Asian, African, Byzantine, Islamic and Oceanic art” (“Three Interesting Facts about the Met”). The Met has many different types of art – there are paintings, sculptures, weapons, instruments, and even clothing. The Met’s longest object is a 16th century Egyptian carpet, its smallest object is a 1.1-inch cylinder from ancient Mesopotamia and its oldest object is an Iranian storage jar circa 3750 BCE. As a child learning piano, I was fascinated by the world’s oldest surviving piano created in 1720 by Bartolomeo Cristofori and housed in the Met. The Met is also home to many prominent works of art. Some of the Met’s most famous paintings include Raphael's Colonna Altarpiece (1504), Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565), Diego Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja (1650), Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates (1787), Vincent van Gogh’s Cyprus tree Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905) and Morris Louis’s Alpha-Pi (1960). At any time, there are tens of thousands of pieces of art and objects on display in the museum, and the Met attracts over 6 million visitors each …show more content…

Its name originated from the well-known architect who built the building – Marcel Breuer, known for his sharp-edged and box shaped designs. In 1963, Breuer was given the job of building a new museum in New York City. He built the Whitney Museum which was originally located at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side before it moved to downtown Manhattan. The Met then took an “eight-year lease on the building from the Whitney Museum, with the option to renew another five and a half years, until approximately 2029” (www.wikepedia.org). The Met Breuer was created to further expand the Met’s modern and contemporary art collection. As New York Times art critic Roberta Smith said on the Met Breuer’s opening, “The Met [Fifth Avenue] is huge and old, with a history of treating contemporary art as an afterthought.” The Met Breuer focuses on the beauty of modern and contemporary art. The Met Breuer’s main exhibit is called “Unfinished –Thoughts Left Visible.” This exhibit displays over 200 works of art that were left incomplete either intentionally or unintentionally. While the Met Breuer main focus is modern and contemporary art, this exhibits art dates from the Renaissance until today and includes artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andy Warhol. Home to many other interesting exhibitions, the Met Breuer is “one of the most recognizable modern icons in New York and one of the world's landmark arts

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