The Metropolitan Museum is one of New York’s most visited and well-known cultural institutions, but the museum is coming under fire in a class action lawsuit against the museum’s unfair admissions policies. The museum’s suggested fee is $25, but according to the lawsuits filed against the museum in November and early March, The Met does not make it clear that the $25 is suggested. The plaintiffs also claim that the museum is not even allowed to charge a fee to the public, according to its lease with the city.

The lawsuit demands compensation for “refunds of millions of dollars fraudulently and unlawfully taken by the Museum in an illegal admission fees scheme.” But the Met only responded to the first set of allegations, and denied any claims.

“The concept of this museum was that the city was covering the costs of rent, securities and utilities so that every person can go in free as if they were a king or a baron,” said Arnold Weiss, the lead attorney on the case. “But instead of a museum for everyone, it has become an elite tourist attraction.”

The museum was built and funded by the city in 1872, and the lease agreement states that the city is responsible for the basic upkeep of the museum and that the museum “shall on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday of each week, and on all legal and public holidays except Sundays, be kept open and accessible to the public free of charge.”

The lease further states that “all professors and teachers of the public schools of the City of New York shall be admitted free of any charge.” In addition, according to the New York State Lease and Free Admission Statute of 1893, if the city pays for a public cultural institution, it has to be free to visitors.

However, according to Harold Holzer, the museum’s spokesperson, that lease is out of date, and has been so since the 1970s when the city and the museum amended its policies to make an entrance fee mandatory for visitors. The New

York City Department of Cultural Affairs did not respond in time to confirm which rule the museum has to abide by.

“The city pays for only five percent of operating expenses, but 100 years ago it was more like 40 percent,” said Holzer. “The thing that makes this painful, is in addition to being a pay-what-you-wish museum, which is unique, the Met also offers an amazing number of tours lectures childrens programs, at no extra cost.”

Pat Nicholson, who was one of the lead plaintiffs in the November lawsuit against the museum, believes that the museum is, and should be free.

“As far as I’m concerned we don’t get in free. New Yorkers give up the ability to get the rent income from a Central Park facility,” said Nicholson. “The Met only has to cover their administrative costs and things like that. The museum should just list the two days it can charge customers, or it should list clearly the four days that it is open for free.”

The museum’s signage states that the $25 is a suggested fee, but the words itself are small, according to some visitors,

and it is therefore difficult to discern whether or not the museum is actually free. In addition, on The Met’s website, visitors wishing to pay for tickets online must pay the $25, in order to receive a ticket.

“You have to really know that the fee is suggested because they don’t advertise it,” said Joseph Hufnageo, a teacher who was visiting with his school from Camden, Maine. “I always feel like a chump giving only $5, but we were only going for an hour, so she was nice about it.”

Arnold Weiss said that it is not uncommon, however, for visitors to be mistreated by museum employees for not paying the full $25. But there are still many tourists who want to support the museum, $25 and all.

“I’m definitely OK with still paying the $25, even if it’s not mandatory,” said Scott Herrick, who traveled to the museum with his wife’s school from North Carolina. “I want to give back to the museum.”

Henri Matisse, “Young Sailor II,” 1906
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At age 20, recuperating in a hospital bed, Henri Matisse was given a paintbox by his mother as a diversion. It was Matisse’s first stab at painting, and it changed the course of art. As the 20th century’s greatest colorist, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the energy of colors—for the way shifting hues illuminate a painting from within—but other qualities as well: drive, an anxious but methodical disposition, a willingness to fail and a reverence for great painting.

His early stylistic experiments have inspired the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinary exhibition Matisse: In Search of True Painting. This chronological installation of nearly 50 paintings focuses on series of works—especially pairs of canvases—that show the artist consciously thinking through issues of composition, and ways to give his color full voice. The thrill of the show is that, as Matisse instructs himself, he instructs us too, in the language he knew best.

Matisse’s formidable powers are evident from the start. Hanging alongside a vivid still life from 1899—painted in heightened impressionist hues—a second version somehow preserves much of its weightiness of forms even though reduced to flat, planar colors. Nearby, a Cézannesque still life hangs next to a pointillist version of the same setup. A brushy image of a seated sailor, rendered in a subdued palette, hangs next to one with almost crystalline shapes in blazing Fauve hues. What all these paintings share is an eloquence of colors—or, more exactly, a poignant measuring of the intervals between them.

In 1907-8, Matisse painted two remarkable versions of “Le Luxe,” depicting a standing figure with two attendants. The first has deliberately modeled volumes, but the second’s unmodulated color planes are enough to capture the verticality of the standing figure—the sensation of looking up at her head, and down to her feet, her height measured out by color-charged bands in the background. The artist makes the pose momentous with minimal modeling—much as did Giotto and Duccio, two early Renaissance artists whose works Matisse had admired that summer in Italy.

Henri Matisse, “Le Luxe I,” 1907
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There was no turning back. In one of two stunning paintings from 1914, a window’s cool light gently suffuses a studio view, but the artist’s drawing expands the space almost violently, anchoring a chair and bowl at the bottom, while planting, at our eye level, a distant tower rhyming with the window’s vertical partition. In the second canvas, by contrast, sunlight splashes forcefully across the floor, tracing deep shadows. Elements are rendered more harshly, even irrationally, yet the means are the same: the re-creation of a scene by observing a particular light, and cajoling the forms within into life.

The last galleries include the hieratic, flattened figures, still lifes and interiors from the late ’30s and ’40s, along with four series of photographs of paintings in progress, which afford a gratifying, over-the-shoulder view of the artist at work.

In Search of True Painting is the rare show that reveals and connects art on its own, intimate terms—in its purely visual manifestation. Looking on, we absorb the evidence of one of the greatest minds of modern art, a painter who, to a unique degree, combined intelligence, self-awareness, and knowledge of precedents. Oh yes, he also knew a thing or two about color.

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St., through March 17.