A Visit to: Pandemic Metropolitan Museum of Art
My companion’s sneaker squeaks against the floor of the Petrie Court. In the European paintings gallery on the second floor, I smell the light, floral perfume of a well-dressed older woman, scrutinizing Degas’ dancers with a friend.
In the American Wing, it was the fountains, did you remember there were fountains there? But here they are, bubbling and gurgling away, easy to hear without the normally constant murmur from the café echoing in the vast space of the atrium. In the sparsely populated Temple of Dendur it was the skylights, we looked up, and realized how very dirty they looked.
The normally boisterous Metropolitan Museum of Art was quieted by the pandemic. Small details of the experience felt heightened by the absence of noise and distraction. Viewing the art, never just a visual experience, was colored by the atmosphere, the quiet, even the smells that wafted around us. Some of the Met’s galleries actually had a musty air, like a forgotten room in an old, small town library.
I’ve always thought the Met was gracious in welcoming its vast numbers of visitors, particularly when admission was still recommended – tourists, suburbanites on day trips, groups of school children, and New Yorkers getting to know the place through repeat, casual visits. A number that had grown to a reported seven million a year, pre-pandemic. It was a noisy, animated space, in a way that could sometimes crowd out jaw-dropping treasures as you hustled by them.
Not that there weren’t opportunities for silence, you just had to tuck into an esoteric gallery, like my personal favorite, the one devoted to eighteenth-century European porcelain figurines on the first floor. You’d rarely find another soul in there. Or slip into the galleries that wrap around the Lehman Wing’s atrium. The scale and layout of those spaces, as well as the art within, are so different from the viewing experience of the rest of the museum, it always seemed to hush viewers.
So, the spaces where you really felt the pandemic’s changes were the big ones, those vast atriums that were meant to open the arms of the museum wide to embrace those large, enthusiastic crowds. Places where voices tended to echo and bounce around. The Great Hall, for instance, which, on a busy day could recall Grand Central Terminal, with the info desk at the center, ticket lines around the edges, people swirling around.
The Great Hall was designed by the architect Richard Morris Hunt (although he did not live to see its completion). Arguably the star architect of the Gilded Age’s 1%, Hunt was responsible for several of the Vanderbilt family’s homes including the Biltmore, two homes for Alva and Willie K. (their Fifth Avenue “petite chalet” and Newport’s Marble House), and Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s Breakers in Newport. An early trustee of the museum himself, Hunt was also responsible for two homes for Henry Marquand, another early Met trustee (one on Fifth Ave. and one in Newport).
Great Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, postcard, c. 1902-1931, New York Public Library.
The Met likes to quote a New York Evening Post report on the opening of the Hall in 1902 which called it, “the only public building in recent years which approaches in dignity and grandeur the museums of the old world.” Indeed, at a time when an estimated one third of America’s millionaires called New York City home, the city’s Gilded Age elite set out to establish civic institutions that would rival, and hopefully surpass, those of the European cities they visited on their “Grand Tours”. From the 1880s through the turn of the century, wealthy New Yorkers built the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Public Library’s main branch, the original Penn Station and Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus.
But there was also a different motivation behind the museum’s founding, a more democratic one - if imperfect and reflective of the times. The museum was meant to bring fine art to the masses. Museum trustee Joseph Choate told assembled “leading families” at the 1880 opening of the museum’s original Central Park building, “Art belongs to the people, and has become their best resource and most efficient educator.” He implored the elite crowd to, “convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce in to priceless pottery…and railroad shares and mining stocks — things which in the next financial panic shall surely shrivel like parched scrolls — into the glorified canvases of the world’s masters that shall adorn these walls for centuries.” The art on display would be, said Choate, “the vital and practical interest of the working millions.”
Museum trustee & president, financier J.P. Morgan seems to have taken Choate literally, filling both the Met and his own library with Europe’s finest treasures, paid for with American capital. Cartoon from Puck, 1911, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.
As I walked through the mostly empty galleries, it felt like that democratizing impulse was also behind many of those other large spaces where I felt the absence of crowds most acutely — many of them the work not of the Beaux Arts-trained architects of the Gilded Age, but of the late architect Kevin Roche. Starting in 1967 and for the next four decades, Roche executed a master plan for the museum that included several large open spaces like the Petrie Court, the Sackler Wing’s Temple of Dendur, and the American Wing’s Engelhard Court.
Roche received the Met commission from the museum’s young new director Thomas Hoving at a moment when museums were on a building spree, hiring well known architects to build new buildings or expand older ones, and attendance was on the rise. Architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted in 1968, “the fact remains that museum visits in this country have increased 500 percent in 30 years to 300 million annually, and anyone witnessing the phenomenon of Sunday afternoon at New York’s Metropolitan would think that Rembrandts were being given away.” Roche’s own Oakland Museum of Art opened in 1969, Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin in 1968, Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum in 1966, and Gordon Bunshaft’s Hirshhorn in 1974.
It is in this context that Roche built some of the Met’s great open spaces. Roche was fresh from his successful Ford Foundation building (itself a sort of great atrium). And it is no surprise that his first two projects were oriented towards embracing those ever-larger crowds. Both opened in 1970 in time for the museum’s centennial: a restoration of Hunt’s Great Hall, and a revamp of the Fifth Avenue plaza.
Thomas Hoving told the New York Times that Hunt’s Great Hall, “got rinky-dinked up over the years.” It had become cluttered and overcrowded with statuary and service counters. Roche cleaned and lighted the space, stripped it of add-ons like those service counters and some gaudy chandeliers, and re-focused it as a space for welcoming visitors. He also did away with a much hated “dog house” entrance which had been designed to keep drafts out of the building (replacing it with an air curtain) and created a dedicated space for that most democratic of museum moments — the shop. Hoving said the Hall would become “a free public vestibule.”
Although when it opened Ada Louise Huxtable called it, “a cross between an information concourse and an expensive bank,” it is still, even 50 years later, a free public space, a grand entryway to enjoy before tickets are bought. It is the kind of space that both the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art felt was important to incorporate into their own new buildings in recent years.
Today Roche’s entryway is crowded by temperature-taking machines.
Outside on the plaza, Roche created the huge, 3-sided, pyramidal steps – in effect creating one of the city’s great public forums – a place where people could sit to see and be seen, eat hotdogs, meet friends, hang out (whether or not they were ultimately going into the museum). His steps are audience seating for the ballet of Fifth Avenue, the antics of street performers, and hot dog stands fighting for space. At the same time, he built drama into the experience of ascending those steps and entering the Great Hall to begin your museum visit.
Looking down at the Hunt and Roche’s Great Hall during my pandemic visit, I truly felt how much the Met must miss its crowds, especially as it celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2020 more quietly that I’m sure it would have liked. And I think the moment when it will no longer be possible to hear the gurgle of the fountains in the American Wing will be a great day. Let’s hope it comes soon.