Why Indian art is 'of high importance and great presence' in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection of 1.5 mn objects

(from left) The Metropolitan Museum of Art director and CEO Max Hollein; 'Goddess who bestows riches, probably Sri Lakshmi' moulded terracotta sculpture from the Shunga dynasty, 1st century BCE, Chandraketugarh, West Bengal; and 'Patravahaka yaksha' sandstone statue from the Shunga period, 50 BCE, from Madhya Pradesh. The MET provenance data shows that both pieces were gifted to the museum roughly 35 years ago. (Max Hollein photo credit: Eileen Travell; all images courtesy The MET)

In 2023, around the time that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned 15 artworks that had been smuggled out of India by convicted art thief Subhash Kapoor, The MET launched a cultural property initiative. (According to a museum spokesperson, The MET has since launched a programme to research its entire collection.) A year later, during a visit to India, The MET's director and CEO Max Hollein said in a newspaper interview that the museum has repatriated works not just to India but also Nepal, Yemen, Turkey and Cambodia. Today, The MET has some 4,000 works of Indian art.

In July 2024, the US and India signed a Cultural Property Agreement on the sidelines of the 46th World Heritage Committee in Delhi, to prevent trafficking in cultural properties and for the smooth repatriation of antiquities.

Hollein was in India again in February 2025, partly to acquire new works of art for the New York museum, and partly to tour cultural sites and museums in Hyderabad and Hampi. While in India, he also met some of the people working on the Indian Conservation Fellowship Programme that The MET piloted in collaboration with the Central ministry of culture more than 10 years ago.

Over a video call with Moneycontrol, Hollein spoke about the Chola bronzes in The Met's collection, why the 4,000 pieces of Indian art in The MET's collection of some 1.5 million pieces matter a great deal, The MET's interest in contemporary Indian art, and a new NFT educational game developed by the museum. Edited excerpts:

Tell us about Indian art that is currently housed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The collection of The MET probably starts from the earliest time to now. We collect Indian art in many different areas: musical instruments, textiles, early Buddhist art. We have very important Hindu works. We collect art from the Mughal period. We most recently acquired the entire collection of Howard Hodgkin, very important Mughal and Deccan miniatures. So that's certainly another really important aspect. Our suite of Chola bronzes is, for example, one of the really outstanding manifestations of Indian art as well as our really beautiful gallery at The MET.

A Lady Playing the Tanpura (1735) - an ink, opaque and transparent watercolour, and gold on paper work, 47 x 33.7 cm, from Rajasthan's Kishangarh - was acquired by The MET in 1996. (Image courtesy The MET)

We also collect Indian contemporary art. The MET's involvement, engagement with Indian art and culture is profound, it's deep, it's scholarly and it's driven by the aim to share Indian art with a broad audience here in New York; to be in touch, of course, with our colleagues and scholars in India; to kind of further foster that level of understanding art objects; but also really make sure that Indian art is being seen also in an overall more global context of cultural development, as The MET can provide. And so I would say that it's an important aspect of our work and it's something that we continue to foster.

My recent trip to India is part of that. But you can also see that we've been engaging with Indian colleagues in many ways. We just completed a over-10-year-long fellowship program for India and with Indian conservators, to train the next, almost a generation of Indian conservators. A lot is going on in that context.

And if you would come to The MET one of these days, you would find Indian art, for example, in our contemporary galleries. You would find Indian art in our Islamic galleries, you would find Indian art in our Asian galleries, especially in musical instruments, textile collection, costumes, etc.

Could you give us a sense of the volume, in terms of the number of pieces, and the value of the art from India that is there in The MET's collection?

Roughly it's about 4,000 works. We never give values on either specific pieces or on the bulk of it. But of course, it's a very important collection. It's important to see that the relationship and the collecting of Indian works has been in existence for over 100 years. And it's not just centralized in one gallery. It really informs the broader context, and you can learn and see how important Indian art is in dialogue, in that sense, or direct juxtaposition with Chinese art of the same time, with other developments around the world at that time, or how Indian art has also influenced and sometimes even migrated to another place and time. I think that was extremely powerful in our most recent exhibitions that we've done on India art, like the Tree and Serpent exhibition on early Buddhist art. And we will have a number of major exhibitions coming up on the Mughal period, on Hindu prints also in that context.

You mentioned Chola bronzes, can you tell us how many there are in The MET's collection and when they were acquired?

Well, you can see all the details of the acquisition process as well as when they were acquired and the provenance that we have on our on our website. The most recent Chola bronze that we acquired was I think it was five years ago.

You mentioned training conservators. Are these people also going to be acquiring art for The MET?

No, The MET is a museum that is, so to say, of the world and for the world. We provide help, support, knowledge, service, scholarship to many areas around the world... We developed trainings and programs for Indian conservators so that they kind of gather additional knowledge about conservation practices and we advised and helped (in) how Indian conservation labs can be set up in India. So this is basically all to see how our Indian colleagues and Indian museum infrastructure can develop. It doesn't kind of feed, so to say, any kind of activity at The MET.

You also mentioned a couple of shows that are upcoming, including ones on Mughal art as well as Indian portraiture. Anything that's coming up in the near term?

Our program is always planned out for the next five to six years. So these projects will happen in a sequence over the next few years. Indian art, art coming from India, is part of not only our genuine interest, but it's really also an important part of our overall exhibition program. We'll announce details about these exhibitions soon, but I think it's just important to see that The MET continuously does major shows on Indian art and, and culture. I think that that's something that basically shows the genuine scholarly interest of the institution and also our ability to share that with a broad audience. Sometimes these exhibitions also travel and tour, as we have just done with the Tree and Serpent exhibition, which travelled on to Seoul.

Are you also bringing exhibitions to India?

Well, we are in dialogue and conversation with different institutions as well as leaders, and we have very strong ties to our colleagues in Delhi, of course, and in Mumbai. So yeah, we are definitely interested in doing that but I can't announce anything particular right now.

Indian contemporary art at The MET: Sudhir Patwardhan's Fall (1998); gifted to The MET by Virginia and Ravi Akhoury in 2023.

You mentioned that there are some 4,000 pieces of Indian art in the collection of The MET and that Indian art continues to be of importance, not just in terms of what Indian art represents, but also the cross-connections that you're able to build between Indian art and the rest of the collection of The MET. Could you expand on what this 4,000-pieces really means, in terms of percentage of the entire collection as well as importance? Just to put a context around it...

How many pieces? It depends on how you do the math, right? So, The MET has about 1.5 million objects. Of these 1.5 million objects, I would say, more than half are works on paper - especially all the prints. It's a very substantial collection, a very important one. But if you, if you say, OK, it's 4000 objects compared to 1.5 million, it's of course only a smaller percentage. But the reality is that the objects are of course of high importance and of great presence, and that The MET also prominently displays them. These works that we have in our custody are really important, maybe even as ambassadors of Indian culture. You know this better than I do, but India is a very diverse culture, right? And you have all sorts of different artistic manifestations of that. For us to be able to accentuate that and properly present that and put that also in the context of other broader developments, I think it's very important.

Your thoughts on the role of museums in the AI age? Also, for some time now, initiatives like Google Arts & Culture have been making art accessible remotely. Does The MET have similar ambitions - to mount online exhibitions or use AI in some way to make it possible for anyone with a connection to see and experience the works remotely?

The task of a museum doesn't end with the physical parameter of our institution. We have multiple digital channels and platforms where you can access the information of the museum, engage with art, be part of our educational mission. We want to make sure that The MET is a museum that you can experience and use from all around the world. And we have many different ways of doing that through digital platforms and we will continue to broaden them. Just for example, in January, we published our newest NFT-based educational game on the collection. We have very robust YouTube channels, and everything else that comes with it.

We use AI in many ways already here at the museum; in security, in administration processes, in research and some scholarly endeavours. We also are doing several projects in regard to augmented reality (AR) and how we can through AR sometimes show the appearance of an object in a previous state or reconstruct a more holistic environment for an object that is sometimes only a fragment of a whole, all of these kind of things.

We are very involved in technologies. We have a scientific department that's just focused on some of that work as well as we have a digital department that basically I think there are 30-plus people working there to produce all of these kind of tools as well as offerings.

What we don't do is that as a museum, we are not a production unit for art. So we don't produce art ourselves. Artists do that. But of course the Met has always collected artistic output from the beginning of mankind to now. So the more artists are using and engaging with AI as a tool or as a way of creating context for that, the more it will enter our collection as well at some point. Of course, we already have a lot of digital artworks.

AI is of course a seismic change in our society, and will create all sorts of opportunities, some challenges of course as well. But you will see that also being becoming part of the toolbox or an integral part of artistic output. And we will make sure to reflect that.