In 1866, a group of New York’s best decided that their fair city needed a museum.

It was going to be a big one museum. An important museum. A “national” museum that would bring great art and art education to the American people.

A museum like the National Gallery in London, or the Louvre in Paris. (Keep in mind that Washington had already opened a national museum, the Smithsonian, in 1846 – everyone knew that New York City was America’s real cultural capital.)

It would elevate Manhattan to a world-class city; increase American manufacturing and craftsmanship by showing American citizens great design and art; and give visitors reason to be proud of their country.

That is – very broadly speaking – how the Metropolitan Museum of Art was born, according to Jonathan Conlin’s scholarly new book “The Met: A History of a Museum and its People” (Columbia University Press, out now).

It was incorporated in 1870, with no artwork in its collection and no home. Two years later, the museum had 174 paintings and a temporary exhibition space at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.

Today, the Metropolitan is home to more than 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years and a majestic 2 million square foot palace in Central Park.

And yet, as Conlin makes clear in his book, we are still asking the very questions that the founders struggled with in the beginning: What is the purpose of a museum? Who is it for? Who has a say in how it is run or what kind of art it has? And is the idea of ​​a comprehensive “universal” survey museum – purporting to showcase the history of civilization through art – even a good one?

Conlin grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has fond memories of spending time at the Met.

And yet his book delves into some of the museum’s more unsavory elements: looted goods, forgeries, robber baron donors, racism, sexism, classism, striking guards and more.

The beautiful American Wing? Largely inspired by exclusionary immigration policies and the desire to promote an Anglo-Saxon definition of a national art. Those sublime impressionist oils? Probably donated by a Gilded Age sugar refiner.

The book won’t even make it into the Met, which is removing the Sackler name from seven exhibition spaces in 2021, following protests led by artist Nan Goldin against the opioid-making family.

“I did all this as a critical friend of the Met,” Conlin — who now teaches history at the University of Southampton in the U.K. — told The Post. “In the current climate it can be difficult to be a critical friend, because you’re either a friend or you’re an enemy. But I wouldn’t have spent all this time researching the history of the Met if I didn’t think it had a future that needed to be informed by looking at the past.”

When the Met first appeared, you couldn’t go to a university and study art history or curation. So most of those responsible were very, very rich men who could afford to travel to Europe and buy expensive art. There weren’t really any artists on the board.

Fortunately for the Met—but unfortunately for the 99%—post-Civil War industrialization ushered in the era of robber barons and rapacious capitalism.

The oligarchs made millions off underpaid workers, while paying little or no taxes. (The income tax was allowed to expire in 1872 and did not return for good until 1916.)

These fat cats saw themselves as the new royalty and wanted art collections and associations with places like the Met or the MFA in Boston that would showcase their newfound status.

“At first there was a sense that there were greater restrictions on the export of art, and so the original idea was that (the museum) would have casts or copies,” Conlin said. “And then, I think quickly, through the influence of these oligarchs, they set their sights higher to want the prestige of the original.”

In the early 20th century, the Met had many plutocrats lending and dangling masterpieces they bought through their capitalist profits.

Henry Havemeyer – of the American Sugar Refining Company – was known for his dull business dealings, but collected French art. He and his wife Louisine donated more than 300 objects to the Met, including a host of Impressionist paintings by Manet, Degas and Renoir.

Legendary financier JP Morgan served as the Met’s president and financed its first Egyptian excavations. Still, the museum was dismayed after his death that he did not leave his large art collection to the institution. (His son ended up giving a large portion of it to the Met four years later.)

“I think fundraising historians traditionally don’t look at where the money came from before it was used,” Conlin said. “(But) there’s a connection between how Havemeyer collected art and how he amassed his fortune” — it’s aggressive, ruthless.

“It was about the chase, it was about the fight,” especially during public auctions, when crowds cheered as the bidding escalated. “It was almost like a WWF art acquisition strategy.”

Then there was the Met’s first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola: a former Union cavalry officer who traveled to Cyprus to dig for treasure, much of which he sold to the Met.

A subsequent archaeological dig yielded even more treasure, although he was accused of altering statues, cheating and inflating numbers and dates, and admitted to trying to cheat and avoid Ottoman restrictions on excavations and exports.

Conlin compared him to circus impresario PT Barnum. “He brought a kind of theater to the Met,” he said.

The Met – despite its rarefied air – loves a good old fashioned razzle dazzle every now and then. There is, of course, every May’s Met Gala, which rose to fame in the 1970s under the leadership of famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland.

Today, the event is a showcase for avant-garde fashion, like Katy Perry walking up the museum’s stairs on Fifth Avenue dressed as a chandelier in 2019. But as early as 1961, museum director James J. Rorimer shuddered at the sight of visitors dancing The Vrida.

Sometimes the Mets miss huge, bombastic swings. Take the 1969 performance of “Harlem on My Mind,” the landmark multimedia exhibit about black life in downtown Manhattan that ultimately offended most of the African-American community.

Museum leaders were shocked when, ahead of its January opening, black artists and community members chose the Met. They protested HMM’s “exclusion of black art and appropriation of black history” and demanded the show be cancelled. They also demanded that the museum appoint black curators and “seek a more viable relationship with the Total Black Community.”

The exhibit featured photographs by Harlem Renaissance portrait artist James Van Der Zee, but all paintings and other “art” depicting Harlem and black life were done by non-blacks. Then the exhibit’s catalog included an essay by a Harlem teenager with a quote that some read as anti-Semitic. In response, Mayor John Lindsay threatened to defund the Met.

Still, the Met was slow to learn its lesson.

Its director, Thomas Hoving, responded by hiring Lowery Stokes Sims in 1972, a young black woman, as assistant curator. But most of Sims’ pioneering black arts shows were held outside the Met itself. And she was promoted to full curator only in 1995.

One of the striking things about “The Met” is that so many of its historical debates and issues still ring true today. In 2023 alone, the Met Costume Institute celebrated the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, a controversial figure who spewed anti-fat, anti-Islam and just generally oPC comments throughout his life. In 2020 and 2021, amid the covid lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, advocates on social media called for the Met to hire more curators of color and “decolonize” its collections. (The Met promised to come up with a report to address and repair this contested past. “Four years later, the report they promised to produce in two years still hasn’t appeared,” Conlin dryly noted.) There is a more diverse curator . staff, but those in charge are still white men.

And yet there have been many improvements. The American Wing has a more expansive vision of American art, including art from Native and Latino cultures. There are more thoughtful shows, such as this year’s “Harlem Renaissance” portrait show, a long overdue and joyous corrective to the “Harlem on My Mind” debacle.

Far from canceling the Met, Conlin said, we should “cherish” it and other universal research museums like it.

“These institutions, like the Met, the British Museum or the Louvre, celebrate a shared human creativity,” Conlin said. “Much of the art here was at one time a trophy for a few people: kings, learned mandarins or oligarchs. I think my concern is that art is still seen as a trophy – so black art belongs to black people; Chinese art belongs to Chinese; and it does not belong to the rest of us.”

Today, amid the clamor of identity politics, “it seems progressive to make these arguments,” Conlin continues. “But it is ultimately dividing us and encouraging us to lose sight of the things we have in common, which is that we are a uniquely creative species.”