Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street in Manhattan did more than any other institution to shape the idea of modern art, and many of the pictures that define it hang here. Three collectors started it in 1929: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It opened in a few rented rooms on Fifth Avenue on 7 November, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., treated photography, film, architecture and design as art alongside painting, and MoMA was the first museum to create departments for photography and film. In 1939 it moved into its own International Style building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on land donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had at first opposed the whole idea.

Much of the modern-art canon is on the fifth floor. Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Matisse's Dance and The Red Studio, Dalí's small The Persistence of Memory, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair and Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans are all in the collection, which holds about 200,000 works. Monet's Water Lilies was bought after a fire in 1958 destroyed an earlier one. The 2019 expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro added a great deal of gallery space, and displays are rehung from time to time, so not every famous picture is necessarily on the wall on a given day. The architecture, design and photography collections are good reasons to go beyond the paintings.

Take a break in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, redesigned by Philip Johnson in 1953, a paved courtyard with trees, pools and sculpture set among the Midtown towers. Yoshio Taniguchi's rebuilding in the early 2000s nearly doubled the museum's space. The museum also runs MoMA PS1, a contemporary art centre in a former school in Long Island City, Queens.

Getting there

MoMA is on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Midtown Manhattan, about 1 km from Times Square. The nearest subway station is Fifth Avenue/53rd Street (E train, and F on weekday daytimes). LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 9 km away.