Art: Wings for the Met

Like a housewife with too many heirlooms, Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has always needed a bigger attic. Last week the museum announced details of its $10 million postwar plan to increase its 7.21 acres of floor space by about 30% (TIME, Jan. 29). If the customers can take it, they will be able to see the $1 billion conglomeration of 5,000 years of art—everything from South American bone nose flutes to priceless Raphaels and Rembrandts.

To make the going pleasanter, the Met will throw out what Director Francis Henry Taylor calls the “bronze grapefruit tree” lamps that flank the entrance, and the gingerbread decorations inside, will re-do the 25 formidable front steps so that they do not make people shrink and slink as they climb them. The giant tomb of Perneb, which stands like a road block before the Egyptian wing, will be tucked into place about two blocks away. The Met will also put in escalators for weary museum-feet, a new, airy restaurant for the hungry, a radio-broadcasting and television studio for the stayaways. One of the Met’s three new wings will hold the $500,000 collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, now housed in its own building in Greenwich Village, three and a half miles away.

Says Taylor of the streamlined storehouse: “We want to overcome the feeling of the public that they have to see the whole damn thing on a Sunday afternoon.” Already so big that museum guards can safely hold pistol practice in the basement, the new Met will be enough to occupy an art lover’s entire vacation.