Inside NYCs legendary Met Museums intrigue-filled past and glorious future

In 1866, a group of New York’s finest decided that their fair city needed a museum. It would be a big museum.An important museum.

A “national” museum that would bring great art and art education to the American people.A museum like the National Gallery in London, or the Louvre in Paris.

(Never mind that Washington had already opened a national museum, the Smithsonian, in 1846 — everyone knew New York City was the true cultural capital of the US.)It would elevate Manhattan into a world-class city; boost American manufacturing and craft by showing US citizens great design and art; and give visitors reasons to have pride in their country.That’s — very generally speaking — how the Metropolitan Museum of Art was born, according to Jonathan Conlin’s scholarly new book “The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People” (Columbia University Press, out now).It was incorporated in 1870, with no works of art in its collection and no home.Two years later, the museum had 174 paintings and a temporary exhibition space on Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. Today the Metropolitan is home to more than 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years and a majestic 2-million-square-foot palace in Central Park.And yet, as Conlin makes clear in his book, we’re still asking the very questions the founding trustees tussled with at its start: What is a museum’s purpose? Who is it for? Who gets a say in how it’s run or what kind of art it has? And is the idea of a wide-ranging “universal” survey museum — that purports to showcase the history of civilization through art — even a good one?Conlin grew up in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has fond memories of spending time at the Met.

And yet, his book delves into some of the museum’s more unsavory elements: looted goods, fakes, robber baron donors, racism, sexism, classism, striking guards and more.The beautiful American Wing? Largely inspired by exclusionary immigrant policies and the desire to promote an Anglo-...