Museum with Five Doors

Earnest tourists who flock by the thousand each year to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art often enter the vast lobby, gaze in awe at the sweep of marble stairway and ask: "Where is the art?" Only those who carry a map and compass can be sure of finding their way through the Metropolitan's 325,811 sq. ft. of sprawling galleries, which house the most diverse collection of art objects in the world today.

Last week the Metropolitan's trustees thought they had a solution. With an eye to the "comfort [and] sanity" of visitors, the Museum announced a $3-million-plus postwar plan. Taking a tip from the Louvre, which has long been divided into ten sections, the Metropolitan will reshuffle and sort itself out into five separate museums, each with an entrance of its own, plainly marked for the visitor who wants to know exactly where he is going. Tentative titles for the five new entrances: the Museum of Ancient Art, the Museum of Oriental Art, the Picture Gallery, the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Early American Wing.

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