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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world's largest and finest art museums. Its collections include more than two million works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe.

Collections
The Museum's two-million-square-foot building has vast holdings that represent a series of collections, each of which ranks in its category among the finest in the world. The American Wing, for example, houses the world's most comprehensive collection of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, presently including 24 period rooms that offer an unparalleled view of American history and domestic life. The Museum's approximately 2,500 European paintings form one of the greatest such collections in the world – Rembrandts and Vermeers alone are among the choicest, not to mention the collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases. Virtually all of the 36,000 objects constituting the greatest collection of Egyptian art outside Cairo are on display, while the Islamic art collection is one of the world's finest. Other major collections belonging to the Museum include arms and armor, Asian art, costumes, European sculpture and decorative arts, medieval and Renaissance art, musical instruments, drawings, prints, antiquities from around the ancient world, photography, and modern art.

Major gallery areas have opened recently, greatly enhancing the presentation of collections. In June 1998, the Arts of Korea gallery opened to the public, completing a major suite of galleries – a "museum within the Museum" – devoted to the arts of Asia. In October 1999 the renovated Ancient Near Eastern Galleries reopened. And a complete renovation and reinstallation of the Greek and Roman Galleries is underway: the first phase, The Robert and Renée Belfer Court for early Greek art, opened in June 1996; the New Greek Galleries premiered in April 1999; and in April 2000 the Cypriot Galleries will open to the public.

Exhibitions
The Metropolitan Museum presents more than 30 exhibitions each year, representing a wide range of artists, eras, and cultures. Some of the best-known of these have been Treasures of Tutankhamun (1978), The Vatican Collections (1983), Van Gogh in Arles (1984) and Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers (1986-87), Degas (1989-90), Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990-91), Seurat (1991-92), Origins of Impressionism (1994-95), Splendors of Imperial China (1996), The Glory of Byzantium (1997), and The Private Collection of Edgar Degas (1997-98).