Museums: The Muses' Marble Acres

They start arriving on the steep stone steps at an early hour. In wintertime, the motorcycle jackets and minks, chesterfields and children's snowsuits quilt the entrance. In summer, every shirtsleeve seems to end in an ice cream cone. In any season it is Sunday, and the people wadded up against the doubled Corinthian columns are waiting to get into the most culturally concentrated 20 acres in the U.S.—New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Watching the crowds jostling through the Met's entrance last week, Director James J. Rorimer, 59, could not repress a small sigh for the bygone days when museum corridors contained echoes rather than crocodiles of squealing children. "My ivory tower is no more," he said. In the decade of Rorimer's stewardship at the Met, annual attendance has skyrocketed from 2,830,000 to nearly 6,000,000, rising more rapidly than that of any other major U.S. museum. Over the Washington's Birthday weekend, the Met counted a record of 59,099 admissions during Sunday's four-hour visiting period. It was a record for only a fortnight; two weeks later, more than 62,000 came. The Met even plans to widen its front steps.

The pressure has become staggering. But Rorimer, like most U.S. museum directors, welcomes the crowds."Familiarity with beauty can only breed more beauty, he believes, adding, "We have more people interested in art today than when these old masterpieces were produced." To make the turnstiles turn faster, and thus acquaint more people with their artistic heritage, he arranged in 1963 for Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to make a guest appearance at the Met, certain that it would increase museum attendance by more than a million. It did.

Bravura Rembrandt. To cope with the current culture explosion, other museums sprout wings like seraphim. The Met is busily rebuilding itself behind its own monumental neoclassic façade.

Two months ago, Rorimer reopened 43 newly air-conditioned, relit and restored galleries of European paintings. He unveiled the U.S.'s largest art reference shelf, the 150,000-volume Thomas J. Watson Library, and threw open the Vélez Blanco Patio (opposite page), whose elegant lintels had lain in the basement since 1945. This week he will open to the public the Met's new Far Eastern and Islamic galleries (color pages, following), with great halls of giant buddhas that seem to ring with temple gongs, and a collection of Islamic art without parallel in any of the world's museums outside of Istanbul's Topkapi.*

All these splendors just gild what was already there. Even within a single gallery, the Met is worth a thousand and one days of exploration. Only the Louvre and Leningrad's Hermitage, among museums outside of Holland, rival the Met's Rembrandts. Hanging in honeycomb luminosity are 33 of the Dutch master's softest illusions, from his early white-ruffed burghers to intense portraits of his mistress Hendlrickje Stoeffels to his jeweled Old Testament parables and his bravura Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, the costliest work of art ($2,300,000) ever auctioned.