All posts tagged: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Skip Met Gala, Sources Say

Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Skip Met Gala, Sources Say

Published by Jenni Sidey

The long list of stars attending the Met Gala in May will not include New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji, if unnamed sources cited by the New York Post’s “Page Six” prove to be correct. As reported by the paper, “New York City’s mayor is traditionally invited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the lavish event every year, but we’re told that Mamdani, 34, won’t be joining Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour and her coterie of celeb guests on Monday, May 4.” Related Articles A source who was not identified said, “He’s not coming. And it would be foolish if he did … can you imagine? It goes against everything he believes in.” Mamdani and Duwaji do believe in fashion, as evidenced their sharp and pointed sartorial choices—see his custom Carhartt jacket and her vintage Balenciaga coat. But as the Post notes, this year’s Met Gala is being funded in part by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez-Bezos, two figures who run counter to Mamdani’s declaration “I don’t think that we …

Met Museum to Stage Giacometti Show in Temple of Dendur This Summer

Met Museum to Stage Giacometti Show in Temple of Dendur This Summer

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Temple of Dendur, an ancient Egyptian structure that counts among the most beloved attractions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will this summer host an exhibition of sculptures by the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti—a rarity, since the Temple of Dendur does not often act as a space for shows of any kind. The exhibition, simply titled “Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur,” is a small one, with just 17 of the artist’s sculptures. Fourteen of them belong to the Fondation Giacometti, while the rest come from the Met’s collection. Related Articles But it is being touted as a major occasion by the Met, whose wing for modern art is currently closed while it undergoes a renovation and expansion. The exhibition also suggests the Met is trying to break down divisions between curatorial departments, linking the distant past with the modern era—something the museum already did with “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” a 2024 show that featured ancient artifacts alongside modern and contemporary artworks inspired by them. Starting on June 12, …

The Met is Treating Lee Krasner as Pollock’s Equal—Will Market Follow?

The Met is Treating Lee Krasner as Pollock’s Equal—Will Market Follow?

Published by José Betancourt

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says its upcoming exhibition, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” is a “story of equals.” Set to open in October, the survey brings together 120 works  by more than 80 lenders, with an explicit focus on considering Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner “on their own terms” while also placing them in relation to one another.  Related Articles That is the museum’s version of the story. But the art market’s version is harsher, simpler, and much more familiar: Pollock remains one of the great trophies of 20th-century art. Krasner, his wife, widow, and interlocutor, and one of the most formidable painters of the New York School, still has to fight for every inch of price recognition. The price gap between these two long dead artists is sizeable: Pollock’s auction record sits at $61.2 million, while Krasner’s is just under 20 percent of that figure, at $11.7 million, set at Sotheby’s in 2019 …

What Were the Most Visited Museums in 2025?

What Were the Most Visited Museums in 2025?

Published by José Betancourt

Some 200 million visitors streamed through the 100 top-attended museums around the world in 2025, according to the latest attendance ranking by the Art Newspaper. That figure is still down a bit from the 230 million who punched their tickets in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic shut museums down for months, indicating that overall museums haven’t quite regained their footing even five years later. Many new museums in the Middle East and Asia, which are relatively new to museum-building, attracted tons of visitors, according to TAN, but so did museums in places like New York and London, already well known for their rich institutional landscape.  Related Articles Paris’s Louvre Museum continues to hold the top spot, with some 9 million visitors. Rounding out the top 10 are the Vatican Museums, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, the British Museum in London, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum, Shanghai Museum East, Tate Modern in London, and the National Gallery in London. …

Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s First Native American Curator, Quietly Left

Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s First Native American Curator, Quietly Left

Published by José Betancourt

Patricia Marroquin Norby, the first curator of Native American art ever hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, quietly left her post in December 2025. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York posted a job listing for a curator of Native American art to replace Norby, who had been the museum’s associate curator of Native American art since 2020.  Norby had been hired to great fanfare, as both the first person to hold the role at the Met and the first Native American to be hired as a curator by the institution. Her appointment was seen as both a watershed and as a response to criticism from various Native American tribes, who pointed to the museum’s poor documentation for many of the thousands of Native artworks and cultural objects it owns, some of which are on display in the recently opened Rockefeller Wing. Related Articles Norby’s departure was much quieter. She left the Met in December; Norby and a Met spokesperson both cited health reasons as the cause of her departure. …

A Must-See Show the ‘Greatest Influencer’

A Must-See Show the ‘Greatest Influencer’

Published by José Betancourt

The closing image of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Raphael blockbuster, opening to the public on Sunday, is of a muscular man bursting out of a craggy hillside. As he does so, one jacked forearm blows right through the frame that surrounds him. Part of a monumentally scaled tapestry called Saint Paul in Prison (ca. 1517–21), it’s a ferocious picture of unbridled masculinity, bulging pecs and all. It might be read as the logical parting shot for a retrospective about a man whose paintings changed art history forever. But there is a wrinkle in that reading: the textile is not attributed to the Renaissance painter himself but to the workshop of Flemish artist Pieter van Aelst, since Raphael’s sole contribution was only its cartoon, which isn’t at the Met. Raphael died the year before the tapestry was completed, but the fact that van Aelst continued on without him suggests this Italian painter wasn’t necessary to finish the job. Tough going for an artist who was named a “master” by one of his patrons when he …

A Raphael Exhibition Reunites Works with Their Historical Companions

A Raphael Exhibition Reunites Works with Their Historical Companions

Published by José Betancourt

The Italian Renaissance artist Raphael may have been called the “prince of painters,” but his masterful drawings were his calling card, even from a young age. We know him best today for paintings such as The Marriage of the Virgin (1504), The School of Athens (1509–11), and The Sistine Madonna (1512–13), but an exhibition opening this month at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reminds us not to overlook his sketches, tapestries, and other artworks. This landmark show, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” the result of nearly a decade of research, will highlight many of the master’s drawings as part of the more than 200 objects on view. To be shown only at the Met (due to the fragility and importance of several of these artworks), the exhibition will be a reunion of sorts for works made together but held apart for centuries. “The exhibition will include many cases of works which are reunited for the first time with their historical companions,” noted exhibition curator Carmen C. Bambach, a curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints …

Met Museum to Acquire Rediscovered Renaissance Painting

Met Museum to Acquire Rediscovered Renaissance Painting

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Thursday that it had acquired a recently rediscovered Renaissance painting of significant art historical importance. Layers of paint were removed during a recent conservation to reveal the figure of Saint John the Evangelist in the canvas’s lower-right portion. With the overpaint now gone, the painting has now been identified as Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist (1512/1513) by 16th-century painter Rosso Fiorentino. The painting’s attribution had previously been questioned, with some scholars assigning it to Rosso and others to a contemporary; it had also been dated to 1520 and titled Madonna and Child. Related Articles The Met has already put the work, which was believed to have been lost for centuries, on view in its European painting wing. In his foundational text Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari, often credited as the first art historian, describes Rosso as having secured his first major commission, a fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin (1513) at the Chiostrino dei Voti at …

Met Seems to Be Planning Major Cy Twombly Retrospective

Met Seems to Be Planning Major Cy Twombly Retrospective

Published by José Betancourt

While the Metropolitan Museum of Art just announced a sizable Lee Krasner–Jackson Pollock exhibition for the fall, it now appears that that show isn’t the only grand one for a postwar painter on the docket at the New York institution. Last week, the Met posted a job posting for a researcher who would work on a retrospective for Cy Twombly due to open in 2029. “Cy Twombly will be a retrospective exhibition of the artist comprising paintings, sculptures and drawings,” the listing notes. “It will examine the artist’s trajectory between two continents and how ancient myths, literature and travel influenced his work.” Related Articles Spokespersons for the Met and the Cy Twombly Foundation did not respond to ARTnews’s requests for confirmation. The Met’s listing remains active on sites such as Indeed, LinkedIn, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. If the retrospective comes to fruition, it will be a momentous occasion. There have been Twombly retrospectives held abroad, with ones taking place at Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou in 2008 and 2016, respectively. …

Met Gala Reveals 2026 Dress Code: ‘Fashion is Art’

Met Gala Reveals 2026 Dress Code: ‘Fashion is Art’

Published by José Betancourt

Last November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute revealed that theme for this May’s Met Gala, is “Costume Art,” a capacious conceit that positions the museum’s five-millennia spanning collection in dialogue with the dressed body (never mind its nonrepresentational holdings). The Met Gala dress code has now been announced, and it pairs neatly: airy to the point of apolitical, a truth too apparent to debate—”Fashion is Art.” The assertion supports the theme laid out last year by Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute: “Over the last two decades, fashion has increasingly gained acceptance as a subject worthy of the same serious contemplation as that accorded the traditional arts—painting and sculpture,” Bolton said at a press conference. “Fashion’s acceptance as an art form, however, has occurred very much on art’s terms, being premised on its renunciation of all connections with the body.” Related Articles The show will feature roughly 400 objects, juxtaposing couture fashions with artworks and artifacts, all staged to inaugurate the Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to the …