The Society for the History of Collecting is pleased to invite you to
Professor Jonathan Conlin author of The Met: A History of a Museum and its People in conversation with Dr Elizabeth Pergam
Online via Zoom, Thursday 21 November 2024, 5pm (GMT); 12pm (EST)
Registration for this event will close on 19 November 2024, after which registrants will be sent Zoom details.
Please join us for a conversation with Professor Conlin on the subject of his 2024 published book The Met: A History of a Museum and its People.
New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum?
This book is a groundbreaking bottom-up history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exploring both its triumphs and its failings. Jonathan Conlin tells the stories of the people who have shaped the museum—from curators and artists to museumgoers and security guards—and the communities that have made it their own. Highlighting inequalities of wealth, race, and gender, he exposes the hidden costs of the museum’s reliance on “robber barons” and oligarchs, the exclusionary immigration policies that influenced the foundation of the American Wing, and the obstacles faced by women curators. Drawing on extensive interviews with past and current staff, Conlin brings the story up to the present, including the museum’s troubled 150th anniversary in 2020. As the Met faces continued controversy, this book offers a timely account of the people behind an iconic institution and a compelling case for the museum’s vision of shared human creativity.
Professor Jonathan Conlin is professor of modern history at the University of Southampton. Alongside the recent history of the Met entitled "The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People", Jonathan is author of the authorized bicentenary history of the National Gallery, to be published in early 2025, as well as "Mr Five Per Cent", a biography of the Anglo-Armenian art collector, oil magnate and philanthropist Calouste Gulbenkian.
Dr Elizabeth Pergam is co-chair of the Society for the History fo Collecting. Her research and writing focuses on the intersection of the history of collecting, museums, exhibitions, and the art market.
