The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is situated within Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It is a major player in the creation and acquisition of contemporary art and is often regarded as one of the most significant contemporary art museums. The MoMA collection provides an overview of contemporary and modern art, including architecture, design, drawing, painting, photographs, sculpture, illustrated books, artist’s books, films, and other electronic media.
The MoMA Library includes approximately 300,000 catalogs and books, More than 1,000 periodical titles, and more than 40,000 records of ephemera on artists and groups. The archives house primary information sources that pertain to contemporary and modern art history. The museum was visited by 706,060 people in 2020, a decline of sixty percent from 2019 due to the COVID-19 epidemic. It was ranked the twenty-fifth place in the list of the most visited art museums worldwide for 2020.
The Museum of Modern Art idea was first developed in 1929 through Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) and two of her acquaintances, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They were later referred to as “the Ladies” or “the adamantine ladies.” They hired modest apartments for the new museum at the Heckscher Building located at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The museum officially opened its doors to the public on the 7th of November in 1929, just 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 City, New York to be the president of the museum. Abby was appointed treasurer. The museum at the time was the only museum in America dedicated exclusively to contemporary art and was the first museum of its kind in Manhattan to display European modernism. One of the first recruits for Rockefeller for staff members of the museum was the renowned photographer from Japan, Soichi Sunami (at the time, most famous as the photographer who captured his images of contemporary ballet innovator Martha Graham), who served as the museum’s the official photographer of documentary photography from the year 1930 until 1968.
Artworks
- Francis Bacon, Painting (1946)
- Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises
- Paul Cezanne, The Bather
- Marc Chagall, I and the Village
- Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love H&A Power Washing NYC
- Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory
- Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
- Paul Gauguin, Te aa no regions (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
- Rene Magritte, The Empire of Lights
- Rene Magritte, False Mirror
- Kazimir Malevich, White on White 1918
Address: 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY
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