Taking a central and high profile position in Manhattan, New York, the Museum of Modern Art is one of the largest and most influential Modern Art galleries in the world. Conceived of in 1929 by Abby Rockefeller and two of her friends, it drew funding from the wealthy family and their friends and opened the same year, with the modest Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue providing the founding home for it. Though modest at first, it would rapidly became the primary art gallery in America for exhibiting European modernism.
MOMA moved through several more properties as it grew in popularity amongst New Yorkers, before finally settling at it’s current location. The museum continues a physical expansion today with major additions and renovations; this is complex in an area like Manhattan, but has been solved with purchases and redevelopment of buildings around the site to incorporate into the museum. Major expansions and refurbishments took place in 1983, 1997, 2005, 2014, and 2019 adding gallery space and facilities.
Starting with just eight art prints and one drawing in the collection, early exhibits were mostly made up of loan pieces, including works by great artists like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat. The collection steadily expanded and rapidly acquired an incredible number of great works by great artists from across the many movements of Contemporary and Modern Art. Quickly coming to international prominence in 1939 with a celebrated Picasso retrospective, MOMA has continued to grow in reputation and size ever since, and ensured itself a place amongst the handful of truly outstanding Modern Art galleries.
MOMA has the world’s finest collection of Western modern art masterpieces
The 2,000,000 piece collection covers a huge swathe of Modern and contemporary Art movements including painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing, art prints, photography, film, electronic media, and over 300,000 books. Over 13,000 artists are represented across the various collections, and the density of masterpieces by some of the greatest names of the Modern and Contemporary eras is probably unrivalled anywhere in the world.
Just a few of the artists with major artworks featured include Bacon, Cezanne, de Chirico, Dali, Ernst, Gauguin, Johns, Kahlo, Lichtenstein, Magritte, Malevich, Matisse, Mondrian, Monet, Picasso, Pollock, van Gogh, and Warhol, with almost any artist you care to mention found deeper in the collection. The photography department is as admired as the paintings with an extensive wealth of documentary photography, and the film collection offers 25,000 titles ranging from cinema classics like Citizen Kane and Vertigo, through to Warhol’s Empire, and Chris Cunningham’s All is Full of Love music video.
The vast library featuring both art, and media about art, includes books, periodicals, and tens of thousands of other files, all extensively catalogued and open to researchers to explore. The final key area is architecture and design, dedicating an entire department to the intersection between the two disciplines was a unique idea when it was first opened, and the collection features models, drawings, and photographs covering legendary names suck as Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Laszlo, and Isamo Noguchi.
An exceptional celebration of the very best of modern and contemporary art
There are few truly great Modern Art galleries, but the Museum of Modern Art is certainly amongst them. It saw annual attendances of around 7 million visitors before the Coronavirus pandemic, and is recovering in line with other major international galleries, but these numbers made it the most popular art gallery in the USA, the second most popular in the world, and it’s scale makes it the fourth largest art museum in the world. Reputationally it scores lower across the international art world rankings than these statistics may suggest it should, but this is largely because of European opinions, which tend to put European art galleries ahead of American ones.