Each day this week, MAN will feature the ten artworks most-accessed on five art museum collection websites. Today: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1923- George Platt Lynes, [Fashion Photograph for Lord & Taylor], 1940
- Valentina, dress, 1940s
- Pablo Picasso, The Frugal Repast, 1904, printed 1913
- Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950
- Marble statue of a kouros, ca. 590-580 BC
- Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, 1633-34
- The Temple of Dendur, ca. 15 BC
- The Unicorn in Captivity, 1495-1505
- Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565
Bonus feature: The Met also shared Nos. 11-15 with MAN. I’ll be tweeting those five on Monday, so be sure to follow me here!
(Nota bene: The Met’s ranking is based on traffic over the past eight months. Also, via an interesting note from a Met spokesperson: “[V]iews of a particular work of art can be influenced in a given time period by links from other areas of the Met’s website (such as the Timeline of Art History) or from other sites [such as MAN]. For example, Bird in Space, which appears at the very top of the list I sent in this 8-month time period, was featured prominently in a recent “doodle” on Google’s home page in honor of the artist’s birthday. So these lists may shift somewhat depending on the time period captured.”)
Previously: MoMA, SFMOMA, Art Institute of Chicago.


I averaged the dates of the most viewed works in this series, using the starting year for pieces that took longer than a year or were estimated.
In order of most recent:
SFMoMA: 1946.
MoMA: 1939.
Art Institute of Chicago: 1927.
Met: 1375.
I don’t know exactly what this means, if anything, but I thought it was interesting. Also, if you take the top three museums, the average year is 1937… does that mean that the most popular art was being created right before WWII?