Today we will be giving you an insider look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which is also known as ‘The Met’ one of the most popular attractions in New York City. We will be showing the most important  works that will surprise you and definitely don’t want to miss it. This is the most visited Museum in New York City. More than six million people come every year.

Ticket Info

What about admissions? The good news is, if you are a New York state resident or a student in New York or New Jersey or Connecticut you can pay what you wish, otherwise it’s $30 for adults, $22 for seniors and $17 for students. We recommend you buy the ticket in advance. When you go to Paris you go to the Louvre Museum, when you come to New York you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is one of the world’s classiest museums and deserves to be visited by everyone. In case, it’s your first time at The Met you need to grab a map, the second you walk in this will be very handy. 

1. Temple of Dendur

This is probably one of the most iconic rooms in the entire museum one of the most recognisable ones. The Temple of Dendor was a gift from the Egyptian Government to the United States and President Johnson decided between Boston Washington and New York that it would come here to New York City and the humidity in here is the same as in the Nile and it is the only Egyptian Temple in the United States. So, if you have no near plans to visit Egypt you can visit The Met at cheaper prices. Here we also have Nile crocodile, not less then an ancient Egyptian Nile Crocodile.

2. Emanuel Leutze – Washington Crossing the Delaware

George Washington crossing to Delaware, we’ve must have seen in almost every history book that we have is reproductive and why you come to The Met is not just that they have it but how big it looks at the scale of this thing. If we walk up here we are much smaller than most of these people but it is totally a political propaganda. The event happened Washington did cross the Delaware on the 26th December 1776 but do you think an older man can stand up in a rocky boat like that no, unlikely artist was a German Emanuel who was destroyed in World WarII during the American bombing and this is a copy that he made but it was ironically hired by America and so the reason he made this is because they were having a revolution at the time and this was the spur on their revolution. We mean eight feet tall exactly this is remarkable.

3. Louis Comfort Tiffany – Autumn Landscape

This is the finest collection of american art decorative, art sculpture rooms anywhere and it should be a must for any overseas visitor because you’re not going to see this quality and quantity of American Art anywhere but here so imagine in a very wealthy house going up a flight of steps and at the end of the steps this is the window that was there. First of all we have breakfast at Tiffany’s Tiffany of the jewellery store with the Blue Box. There is his son one of his specialties was glass and he actually created a glass factory where he produced coloured glasses and he had a team of women artists who designed this for him. So we know this was designed by Agnes Northrup and she created this autumn scene. So when we look at this and we instantly say something like god doesn’t it look like fall, fall colours doesn’t look like the sun is about to set and though this looks like it might be painted but it’s not, it’s 100 percent glass and he invented glass to create this illusion you see it looks like confetti, yeah it’s called confetti glass. He made it and it almost looks like leaves are falling. Using that kind of confetti glass you can really see the quality of the glass and the colour as the light comes through it and that you can only experience in a museum in the northeastern United States. 

4. Vincent Van Gogh – WheatField with Cypresses

We think the Chinese Garden is one of the coolest spots in The Met it’s always calm in here they’ve been here before we’ve never met like a dozen times there are very few people usually when it’s  really busy in the man you want to just break away this is the spot you can come to open to the sky and the thing that we find remarkable is this is the only place in The Met they actually have live animals they actually have Koi and Goldfish. Garden was created by artists who came from China. The Van Gogh Room is one of the most popular we’ve seen in the entire museum. The reason you come to the Museum to see Van Gogh in person is to see the quality of paint. How did Van Gogh paint and you see there are clouds in the painting. The clouds have movement, we mean they really look like they’re moving and the wheat field down below looks like it’s moving. It looks like it’s shimmering and then halfway between the wheat field and the clouds there’s rolling hills.

We always thought the man was crazy, this was just a figment of his imagination but when you’re standing in front of it you can see the paint literally rising off the surface enlightened in the room rebounds off of it and gives it this remarkable quality so this is really similar to one that most knows art museum starry night. This one’s bigger starry night is smaller but it’s the same town, same view, same wheat field and the same hills.

5. Thomas Cole – The OxBow

All these pictures everything we see in every room everything here is a political statement it’s not just a pretty picture of a landscape it has a meaning behind it not meaning to generate a political meaning the river comes and it loops around like that to create an oxbow it’s called an oxbow if you notice on the one Picture or the east it’s all cultivated on the another picture and if you get very close that they’re going to yell at us but you can see at first glance of picture, it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there but in fact the reason you come to The Met or to a Museum is there are hundreds of people and animals working the fields very hard to see in an art work and you see smoke we mean just right in the fields right over there in another picture. Just amazing to see the activity that going on on the east cultivated on the west or the left it’s wild and what Thomas Cole is doing here is a political statement he is saying that the america is eating up its land and it’s creek it’s cultivating it and this though it looks positive to us for his statement it was negative that that land is being wasted used and the wild land that you see over there in one picture is the garden of eden is wild that’s what america really is or was.

6. Marble Statue of a Kouros

This is The Met Kouros and Kouros is a standing young male nude. The guy is not naked, he is nude, he is in a natural posture and that’s what the Greeks believed in this kind of heroic nudity. Anyway, why is this so important? Why is it in every survey of art history textbooks in the world and it’s because it’s the very first Greek Monument about 600 BC that breaks out of the Egyptian Model. Egyptian Models where left foot forward and right foot back like in a block of stone. This one it’s like they’ve opened it up, it’s a real person about to walk out.

7. Boscoreale Frescoes

In the Naples Area as a Volcano Mount Etna erupted covering everything and this room was in a villa at the foot of Mount Etna and it was covered up for almost thousand years until it came out and ultimately brought here too and it’s roman wall paintings also known as Frescoes and so you have to imagine someone in the high country living in here that would be probably down there somewhere and they’re looking through illusionistic architecture see the corinthian column looking through to a cityscape. Because it is a bedroom, grandmother probably has guests come over so she might put out a bowl of fruit for people just to the right of the window.

8. Bronzino – Portrait of a Young Man

This is the single most important painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art it is what we would consider the Mona Lisa of the Metropolitan Museum of Art it is in every single art history textbook and it is the reason you should come to a Museum and that is because there are things in this painting that you will see in person that you cannot see or reproduced this kind of portrait of a Young Man. We don’t know who he is but we probably could guess he’s wealthy, he’s well dressed, he’s learned his hands in a book but what is never reproduced unless you’re here in person is you see there’s a mask over to the left right on the furniture area there are two eyes and a nose, there’s actually face like mask in there. Also, yes it’s never reproduced and so you have these three masks. He is part of the theater, we were just something erudite and fancy that’s why we come to this museum to be able to see the nuances of the black and the blue and then that mask and we almost defy anybody to see to show that reproduction.

9. Studiolo from the Ducal Palace 

We well be surprised if what we’re going to look at now there’s anybody looking at it and that’s because this is the single, in my opinion most important work of Italian renaissance in the USA and it’s a room called the Studiolo. A ducal palace in somebody’s home you have a series of rooms and the innermost room “The Inner Sanctum” where the duke alone is allowed. In which all the important papers are available for his study basically and it’s done with the most intricate wood inlay Illusion. He has things from his army days but he also has the parts of music now. This is all illusionism. There’s nothing real in here when you look like a door that’s opened or a window that’s open that’s an illusion. It’s what we call Trompe l’oeil. Fool the eye and this is the best example in the United States of this kind of Trompe l’oeil and it’s all done in different kinds of wood. 

10. Picasso – Gertrude Stein

The reason we like this so much is it is probably if we had to put my finger on it where Modern Art starts Pablo Picasso. We mean he’s one of the great thinkers in art and this is his Patron Gertrude Stein an american who lived in paris and why is it the origin of modern art well look at the sofa behind her it starts over here but it disappears on the left hand side, if you see her eye- one eye looks one way and the other eye looks the other way. It almost looks like a mask her ear disappears her nose almost looks like a mask that’s been flattened a little bit her hands don’t, they don’t really look right decides to break away from the western tradition and this is the beginning of that this picture alone is going to set the stage for cubism, futurism and all the other isms that come after it.

The MET Tips For First Timers

So, don’t overdo it, coming to The Met or any museum should be fun. You should pick a handful of objects that are of interest. You should accept the fact it is physically impossible see the entire museum in one day unless you want to kill yourself in the process.

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