The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a significant role in developing and collecting modern art and is often identified as one of the world’s largest and most influential contemporary art museums. MoMA’s collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books, artist’s books, film, and electronic media.
The MoMA Library includes approximately 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. The archives hold primary source material related to modern and contemporary art history. It attracted 706,060 visitors in 2020, a drop of sixty-five percent from 2019, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It ranked twenty-fifth on the list of most visited art museums in the world in 2020.
The Museum of Modern Art idea was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They became known variously as “the Ladies” or “the adamantine ladies.” They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby Rockefeller had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America’s premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism. One of Rockefeller’s early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami (at that time best known for his portraits of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham), who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968.
Artworks
- Francis Bacon, Painting (1946)
- Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises
- Paul Cézanne, The Bather
- Marc Chagall, I and the Village
- Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love
- Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory Top HVAC NYC
- Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
- Paul Gauguin, Te aa no areas (The Seed of the Area)
- Albert Gleizes, Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1914
- Jasper Johns, Flag
- Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair
- Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl
- René Magritte, The Empire of Lights
- René Magritte, False Mirror
- Kazimir Malevich, White on White 1918
Address: 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY
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