Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, as well as electronic media.

The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. Under the leadership of its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. In 1939, the museum moved to its current location on West 53rd Street designed by architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, MoMA became a host to several landmark exhibitions. In recent decades, MoMA has expanded its collection and programming to include works by traditionally underrepresented groups. The MoMA Library includes about 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, more than 1,000 periodical titles and more than 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups.

Attendance

The Museum of Modern Art had 2,190,440 visitors in 2022, making it the 4th most-visited museum in the United States. This number was much higher than in 2021 but still lower than before the COVID period in 2019. In 2023, over 2.8 million people visited MoMA, making it the 15th most-visited art museum in the world and the 6th most-visited museum in the United States.

History

Early years (1929–1939)

The idea for the Museum of Modern Art began in 1929, thanks to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., along with her friends Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They rented space in the Heckscher Building in Manhattan, and the museum opened to the public on November 7, 1929.

Abby Rockefeller invited A. Conger Goodyear to be the museum’s first president. Under the guidance of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s collection grew quickly. The museum moved to several temporary locations over the next ten years. Despite initial opposition from her husband, Abby’s mother eventually donated land for the museum’s current site. The museum became known for showing modern art from Europe and was the first in Manhattan to do so.

1930s to 1950s

The museum gained attention with a very popular Picasso show in 1939-1940, organized by Barr. In 1941, the museum hosted an exhibition about Native American arts that changed how people saw this kind of art.

Nelson Rockefeller, Abby’s son, became president of the museum in 1939 and helped bring attention and support to it. His brother David joined in 1948. In 1937, the museum moved to the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. The museum’s current building, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened in 1939.

1958 fire

In 1958, a fire on the museum’s second floor damaged a large painting. The fire began when workers were installing air conditioning and accidentally started a blaze. Most paintings were safe, but one valuable piece was lost. Firefighters helped save the rest of the museum.

1960s to 1980s

In the 1960s and 1980s, the museum grew with new buildings and more space for art. It added an auditorium, restaurants, and a bookstore. The museum also faced some debates about what art to show and who gets to see it.

1990s and 2000s renovation

By the late 1990s, the museum had over 100,000 pieces of art. It bought a nearby hotel and began a big redesign. Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi helped create a new, larger space that opened in 2004. The redesign gave the museum more room to show its collection.

2010s to present

In 2010, the museum joined with PS1, another art space in Queens. Over the years, MoMA has kept growing, adding new buildings and more space to show its huge collection. In 2019, it closed for more updates and reopened with even more room for visitors to explore.

Exhibition houses

The Museum of Modern Art sometimes sets up special exhibition houses that show important ideas in architecture.

For example, in 1949, there was an exhibition house designed by Marcel Breuer, which was moved in 1950 and is now called the Marcel Breuer House at Pocantico. In 1950, Gregory Ain designed another exhibition house, and in 1955, Junzo Yoshimura created a Japanese Exhibition House that was later placed in Philadelphia and is known as the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden. In 2008, several architects including KieranTimberlake Architects, Larry Sass, System Architects (Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier), Leo Kaufmann Architects, and Richard Horden planned prefabricated houses for an exhibition.

Collections

See also: List of works in the Museum of Modern Art § Department of Painting and Sculpture

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has six main groups of art: Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Film, Media and Performance, Painting and Sculpture, and Photography.

MoMA has more than 150,000 pieces of art, along with about 22,000 films and 4 million still images from films. Some of the famous artworks include:

• Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans
• Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World
• Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk
• Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man, Heroic and Sublime)
• Claude Monet, Water Lilies triptych
• Francis Bacon, Painting 1946
• Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair
• Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love
• Gustav Klimt, Hope II
• Henri Matisse, The Dance
• Henri Matisse, The Red Studio
• Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910
• Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy
• Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950
• Jasper Johns, Flag
• Kazimir Malevich, White on White 1918
• Marc Chagall, I and the Village
• Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
• Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians
• Paul Cézanne, The Bather
• Paul Gauguin, Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi)
• Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie
• René Magritte, The False Mirror
• René Magritte, The Empire of Light II
• Richard Hunt, Arachne
• Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl
• Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory
• Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises
• Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night
• Willem de Kooning, Woman I

Selected collection highlights

The Museum of Modern Art has many famous artworks. Some of the highlights include:

• Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
• Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, 1889
• Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897
• Henri Matisse, The Dance I, 1909
• Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921
• Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910
• Henri Matisse, L'Atelier Rouge, 1911
• Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913
• Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918
• Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–1943
• Paul Cézanne, The Bather, 1885–1887
• Paul Gauguin, Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), 1892
• Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, 1905–06
• Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911
• Henri Matisse, View of Notre-Dame, 1914
• Giorgio de Chirico, Love Song, 1914
• René Magritte, The False Mirror, 1929

The museum also has works by many other important European and American artists like Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Aristide Maillol, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Seraphine Louis, René Magritte, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Georgia O'Keeffe, Morris Hirshfield, Edward Hopper, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Bill Traylor, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat and many others.

Photography

The MoMA photography collection has over 25,000 photos by photographers, journalists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and hobby photographers. It is one of the most important collections in the world.

The Department of Photography started in 1940 by Beaumont Newhall. It grew into a famous collection under Edward Steichen, who was curator from 1947 to 1961. Steichen’s famous exhibit, The Family of Man, was seen by 9 million people. In 2003, this collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register for its historical value.

John Szarkowski (curator 1962–1991) led the department and focused on modern photography.

Film

In 1932, Alfred Barr, the museum's founding director, said that film was the only great art form of the 20th century. In 1935, John Hay Whitney became the first chairman of the museum's Film Library. With help from film curator Iris Barry, they built a very successful collection. In 1937, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences praised the museum for collecting films and making them available to the public.

Iris Barry started the film library. She and others built a collection of about 8,000 films.

The MoMA film collection now has more than 25,000 titles. It includes famous movies like Citizen Kane and Vertigo, as well as unusual pieces like Andy Warhol's eight-hour film Empire, and music videos.

Library

The MoMA library is in Midtown Manhattan, with extra space in Long Island City, Queens. It has books, magazines, and files about artists and art groups from 1880 to today. There are over 300,000 books, 1,000 magazines, and 40,000 files. The library is open to researchers by appointment. Its catalog is called "Dadabase." Dadabase includes records of all the library's materials.

The library also has electronic resources like journal databases, auction result indexes, an image database, and a union catalog.

Architecture and design

MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design started in 1932. It was the first museum department in the world to focus on both architecture and design. The first director was Philip Johnson.

The collection has 28,000 works, including models, drawings, and photos. One highlight is the Mies van der Rohe Archive. The collection also includes works by famous architects and designers like Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul László, the Eameses, Betty Cooke, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection has many everyday objects, from a self-aligning ball bearing to a whole Bell 47D1 helicopter. In 2012, the department added a selection of 14 video games like Pac-Man and plans to collect 40 games ranging up to Minecraft by 2011. In 2026, MoMA and the Ambasz Institute started giving out the Ambasz-MoMA Annual Prize for architecture.

Management

MoMA welcomed 706,060 visitors in 2020, a big drop from 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, the museum usually had between 1.5 million and 2.5 million visitors each year. In 2009, it had 119,000 members and 2.8 million visitors. The most visitors it ever had was 3.09 million in 2010, but numbers went down a little after that.

The museum charges $30 for adults to enter. It used to cost $12, but it went up in 2004. However, people living in New York State can enter for free on Friday evenings as part of a special program. Many college students near New York also get in for free.

MoMA is a private museum and does not get money from the government. It makes its money from many different sources. In 2011, the museum had over $1 billion in assets, not counting the value of the art. MoMA had to close in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of this, the museum had to make some changes, like cutting its budget and reducing staff.

Art repatriation

The Museum of Modern Art has been part of several requests from families asking for artworks back that were lost during a difficult time in history called the Holocaust. These artworks ended up in the museum’s collection.

In 2009, families of artists asked the museum to return some important paintings. The museum and another museum solved these requests without going to court, and they kept the paintings. They said they did this to save money on legal costs and so people could still see the artwork.

Later, in 2015, the museum returned a painting to a family whose member had to leave Germany many years ago. In 2024, the museum also returned another painting after learning more about its history.

Key people

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a group of important people who help guide and lead the museum. These include 56 trustees and 1 life trustee who make big decisions for the museum. The Founders Wall, finished in 2004, shows the names of the people who started the museum and those who gave big gifts to help it grow.

The museum also has directors who lead the whole place and chief curators who take care of special areas like painting, sculpture, and film. Some famous directors include Alfred H. Barr Jr., who led from 1929 to 1943, and Glenn D. Lowry, who has been director since 1995. There are also many chief curators who have helped shape the museum's collections over the years.