Historian
Columbia University Press, October 2024.
This book is a groundbreaking bottom-up history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exploring both its triumphs and its failings. I tell the stories of the people who have shaped the museum—from curators and security guards to museumgoers and mannequins—and the communities that have made it their own. For information on launch events, click here.
Advance Comment
-
As well researched and illustrated as it is written, Conlin’s 'The Met' offers a rich, incisive, original, and highly entertaining account of the evolution of America’s most famous museum.
Andrew McClellan, author of The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao
-
Conlin has written a remarkably wide - ranging, thought - provoking, and scholarly history of the Metropolitan Museum from a variety of intellectual perspectives, including examination of those who have visited it, paid for it, and run it — directors, staff, educators, trustees, and museum attendants.
Charles Saumarez Smith, former director of the National Gallery, London
-
A tour de force of original research and critical insight, Jonathan Conlin’s The Met is a fascinating study, a must read for anyone interested in the multifaceted history of the United States’ premier art museum.
Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States
