150 YEARS OF THE MET

On 13 April 1870, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded. Celebrating this anniversary, a new exhibition explores how America’s largest art museum came into being, and looks at the changes it has gone through in its 150-year history. The curator Andrea Bayer tells Lucia Marchini some of its stories.

- Lucia Marchini

Andrea Bayer is the organiser of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s anniversary exhibition, Making the Met, 1870-2020, as well as the museum’s Deputy Director for Collections and Administration. Before being appointed to the latter position in October 2018, Bayer was the Jayne Wrightsman Curator in the Department of European Paintings. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 1990, and has been on the staff of the Met ever since. An expert on Italian Renaissance art, she has worked on a range of exhibitions, including thematic investigations – such as Painters of Reality: the legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (2004) and Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008-2009) – and monographic shows on artists such as Giambattista Tiepolo, Dosso Dossi, and Antonello da Messina.

The museum was founded in 1870, after the end of the American Civil War. How important was this post-war context to establishing the institution?

It was the great moment for conceiving and building museums in the United States. We share this anniversary with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, for example. What we saw happening in New York was that almost immediately after the Civil War people began to talk about great civic endeavours that they wanted to undertake. Of course, the building of Central Park was one of them, and the New-York Historical Society really got a strong impulse then too.