Founded in 1929 as the first museum in Manhattan devoted to exhibiting European modernism, MoMA's collection includes Van Gogh's The Starry Night, acquired in 1941, and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Reserve timed tickets online in advance, especially on weekends and in summer, since walk-up lines can be long.
MoMA was conceived by three women — Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan — and opened on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street crash, in rented rooms in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue. The founding argument was that modern art was not only painting and sculpture. It became the first museum to establish departments dedicated to photography and film. The department of architecture and design was founded in 1932, the film library in 1935 under Iris Barry, and photography in 1940 under Beaumont Newhall. That is still the museum's defining trait, and it is the part first-timers overlook while queueing for the canvases.
The building is an accretion in the same way the collection is. Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone's International Style block opened on May 10, 1939; Philip Johnson redesigned the garden in 1953 into what became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden; Yoshio Taniguchi's rebuild reopened in 2004 and nearly doubled the space; the 2019 expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro came at the cost of the demolished American Folk Art Museum next door. With that expansion the museum abandoned separating the collection by discipline and moved to an integrated chronological hang, so a room of paintings may now carry a chair, a poster or a film alongside them. Galleries are also rotated, which means the collection you saw on one visit is not the collection on the next.
Two acquisition stories explain the holdings. Van Gogh's The Starry Night came in 1941 through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest by exchange — MoMA sold works Bliss left in order to buy it. And on April 15, 1958 a fire destroyed an eighteen-foot Monet water lilies painting; the triptych now on the walls was acquired shortly afterwards as its replacement.
11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019 · Official site ↗
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 museum has been instrumental in shaping the history of modern art, particularly modern art from Europe.
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