Museum of Modern Art

This article is about the museum in New York City. For other museums, see Museum of Modern Art (disambiguation).

Coordinates: 40°45′41″N 73°58′40″W / 40.761484°N 73.977664°W / 40.761484; -73.977664

The Museum of Modern Art
Location of MoMA in New York City
Established	November 7, 1929; 82 years ago (November 7, 1929)
Location	11 West 53rd Street New York, NY 10019
Visitor figures	2.5 million/year
Director	Glenn D. Lowry
Public transit access	Fifth Avenue / 53rd Street (E M trains)
Website	moma.org

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world.^[1] The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art,^[2] including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.

MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses a restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther.^[3]

History

The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan.^[4] They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in rented spaces in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue (corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street) in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby 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.^[5]

Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr Jr., a promising young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Seurat.^[6]

First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building,^[7] on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum (as well as to modern art itself) and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location. Nevertheless, he eventually donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, and thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors.^[8]

The entrance to The Museum of Modern Art

Yoko Ono, Wish Tree. Contributions from the members of IMMAGINE&POESIA to Yoko Ono's Wish Tree in the Sculpture Garden

During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, and poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".^[9]

The museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, and the exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to follow.^[10]

When Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity, acquisitions and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the museum's board of trustees, in 1948, and took over the presidency when Nelson took up position as Governor of New York in 1958.

David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller (wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller) currently sit on the board of trustees. In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, and with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.^[11]. In 1997 the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi beat out ten other international architects to win the competition to execute the redesign of the museum, which after being closed in Manhattan for a time during the process (a temporary space was opened in Long Island City, Queens) reopened in 2004. Wish Tree, Yoko Ono's installation in the Sculpture Garden (since July 2010), has become very popular with contributions from all over the world.

Artworks

Claude Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, c. 1920, 200 × 1,276 cm (78.74 × 502.36 in), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Claude Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, c. 1920, 200 × 1,276 cm (78.74 × 502.36 in), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

See also: List of works in Museum of Modern Art Department of Painting and Sculpture

Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following:

• The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
• The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
• I and the Village by Marc Chagall
• The Dream by Henri Rousseau
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
• The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
• Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian
• Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
• Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi) by Paul Gauguin
• Water Lilies triptych by Claude Monet
• The Dance by Henri Matisse
• The Bather by Paul Cézanne
• The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni
• Love Song by Giorgio De Chirico
• Number 31, 1950 by Jackson Pollock
• Vir Heroicus Sublimis by Barnett Newman
• Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman
• Flag by Jasper Johns
• Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth
• Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
• Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon
• Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale by Max Ernst

Selected collection highlights

• 

  Paul Cézanne, Bather, 1885–1887

• 

  Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

• 

  Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, 1889

• 

  Paul Gauguin, Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi), 1892

• 

  Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy – Zingara che dorme), 1897

• 

  Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

• 

  Henri Matisse, The Dance I, 1909

• 

  Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910

• 

  Henri Matisse, L'Atelier Rouge, 1911, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm.

• 

  Henri Matisse, View of Notre-Dame, 1914

• 

  Giorgio De Chirico, Love Song, 1914

• 

  Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918

It also holds works by a wide range of influential European and American artists including Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Dorothea Lange, Fernand Léger, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, René Magritte, Aristide Maillol, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Kenneth Noland, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Auguste Rodin, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Frank Stella, and hundreds of others.

MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, which included photos by Todd Webb,^[12] as well as an important film collection under Museum of Modern Art Department of Film. The film collection owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies, including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but the department's holdings also contains many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's All Is Full of Love. MoMA also has an important design collection, which includes works from such legendary designers as Paul László, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection also contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter.

Exhibition houses

At various points in its history, MoMA has sponsored and hosted temporary exhibition houses, which have reflected seminal ideas in architectural history.

• 1949: exhibition house by Marcel Breuer
• 1950: exhibition house by Gregory Ain^[13]
• 1955: Japanese exhibition house
• 2008: Prefabricated houses planned^[14][15] by:
  • Kieran Timberlake Architects
  • Lawrence Sass
  • Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier
  • Leo Kaufmann Architects
  • Richard Horden

Renovation

MoMA's midtown location underwent extensive renovations in the early 2000s, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening to the public in a building redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi along with Kohn Pedersen Fox, on November 20, 2004. From June 29, 2002 until September 27, 2004, a portion of its collection was on display in what was dubbed MoMA QNS, a former Swingline staple factory in Long Island City, Queens.

The renovation project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs and features 630,000 square feet (59,000 m²) of new and redesigned space. The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building on the western portion of the site houses the main exhibition galleries, and The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building on the eastern portion provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the museum's expanded Library and Archives. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

MoMA's reopening brought controversy as its admission cost increased from US$12 to US$20, making it one of the most expensive museums in the city; however it has free entry on Fridays after 4pm, thanks to sponsorship from Target Stores. Also, all CUNY college students receive free admission to the museum by simply going to the information desk. The architecture of the renovation is controversial. At its opening, some critics thought that Taniguchi's design was a fine example of contemporary architecture, while many others were extremely displeased with certain aspects of the design, such as the flow of the space.^[16][17][18]

MoMA has seen its average number of visitors rise to 2.5 million from about 1.5 million a year before its new granite and glass renovation. The museum's director, Glenn D. Lowry, expects average visitor numbers eventually to settle in at around 2.1 million.^[19]

Finances

Before the economic crisis of late 2008, the MoMA’s board of trustees decided to sell its equities in order to move into an all-cash position.^[20] Museum Director Glenn D. Lowry lives in a rent-free $6 million apartment above the museum.^[21]

Officers and the Board of Trustees

Honorary Chairman – David Rockefeller Honorary Chairman – Ronald S. Lauder Chairman Emeritus – Robert B. Menschel President Emerita – Agnes Gund President Emeritus – Donald B. Marron Chairman – Jerry I. Speyer President – Marie-Josée Kravis

Vice Chairmen Sid R. Bass Leon D. Black Mimi Haas Richard E. Salomon Director – Glenn D. Lowry Treasurer – Richard E. Salomon Assistant Treasurer – James Gara Secretary – Patty Lipshultz

Board of Trustees

Board of Trustees Wallis Annenberg Sid R. Bass Lawrence B. Benenson Leon D. Black Clarissa Alcock Bronfman Donald L. Bryant, Jr. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Paula Crown David Dechman Glenn Dubin Joel S. Ehrenkranz John Elkann Laurence D. Fink Kathleen Fuld Howard Gardner Anne Dias Griffin Agnes Gund Mimi Haas Alexandra A. Herzan Marlene Hess Jill Kraus Marie-Josée Kravis Ronald S. Lauder Thomas H. Lee Michael Lynne Donald B. Marron Philip S. Niarchos James G. Niven Peter Norton Maja Oeri Michael S. Ovitz Richard D. Parsons Emily Rauh Pulitzer David Rockefeller, Jr. Sharon Percy Rockefeller Richard E. Salomon Anna Marie Shapiro Anna Deavere Smith Jerry I. Speyer Ricardo Steinbruch Edgar Wachenheim III Gary Winnick

Life Trustees Celeste Bartos Eli Broad Douglas Cramer Gianluigi Gabetti Barbara Jakobson Werner H. Kramarsky June Noble Larkin Robert B. Menschel Peter G. Peterson Gifford Phillips David Rockefeller Joanne M. Stern Jeanne C. Thayer Joan Tisch

Honorary Trustees Lin Arison Mrs. Jan Cowles Lewis B. Cullman H.R.H. Duke Franz of Bavaria Maurice R. Greenberg Wynton Marsalis Richard E. Oldenburg* Mrs. Milton Petrie Lord Rogers of Riverside Ted Sann Gilbert Silverman Yoshio Taniguchi David Teiger Eugene V. Thaw

Chief Curators

• Klaus Biesenbach Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large from 2009
• Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design from 2007
• Sabine Breitwieser, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art from 2010
• Connie Butler, Chief Curator of Drawings from 2005
• Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography from 1991
• Rajendra Roy, Chief Curator of Film from 2007
• Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture from 2008
• Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books from 2010

Controversies

In 1969 the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), a group of New York City artists who opposed the Vietnam War, in collaboration with Museum of Modern Art members Arthur Drexler and Elizabeth Shaw,^[22] created an iconic protest poster called And babies which depicts US soldiers as "baby killers." The poster uses an image by photojournalist Ronald L. Haeberle and references the My Lai Massacre. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had promised to fund and circulate the poster, but after seeing the 2 by 3 foot poster MoMA pulled financing for the project at the last minute.^[23][24] MoMA's Board of Trustees included Nelson Rockefeller and William S. Paley (head of CBS), who reportedly "hit the ceiling" on seeing the proofs of the poster.^[23] Both were "firm supporters" of the war effort and backed the Nixon administration.^[23] It is unclear if they pulled out for political reasons (as pro-war supporters), or simply to avoid a scandal (personally and/or for MoMA), but the official reason, stated in a press release, was that the poster was outside the "function" of the museum.^[23] Nevertheless, under the sole sponsorship of the AWC, 50,000 posters were printed by New York City's lithographers union. On December 26, 1969, a grassroots network of volunteer artists, students and peace activists began circulating it worldwide.^[23][24] Many newspapers and television shows re-printed images of the poster, consumer poster versions soon followed, and it was carried in protest marches around the world, all further increasing its viewership. In a further protest of MoMA's decision to pull out of the project, copies of the poster were carried by members of the AWC into the MoMA and unfurled in front of Picasso's painting Guernica (on loan to MoMA at the time) the painting depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians.^[23] The poster was included shortly thereafter in MoMA's Information exhibition of July 2 to September 20, 1970, curated by Kynaston McShine.^[25]

See also

New York City portal

• List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City
• Lillie P. Bliss
• Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
• Rene d'Harnoncourt
• Dorothy Canning Miller
• Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
• Nelson Rockefeller
• David Rockefeller
• David Rockefeller, Jr.
• John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
• Rockefeller family
• Philip Johnson
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
• Mary Quinn Sullivan
• Talk to Me (exhibition)

See also: Wikipedia:GLAM/MoMA

References

1. ^ Kleiner, Fred S.; Christin J. Mamiya (2005). "The Development of Modernist Art: The Early 20th Century". Gardner's Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective. Thomson Wadsworth. pp. 796. ISBN 0495004782. http://books.google.com/books?id=kuJ6RxgVXa0C&pg=PA796&dq=%22the+institution+most+responsible+for+developing+modernist+art%22+%22the+most+influential+museum+of+modern+art+in+the+world%22. "The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is consistently identified as the institution most responsible for developing modernist art ... the most influential museum of modern art in the world." 
2. ^ Museum of Modern Art – New York Art World
3. ^ "The Modern". Restaurant Review. Gayot. 2008. http://www.gayot.com/restaurantpages/NewYorkInfo.php?tag=NYRES050304&code=NY. Retrieved 2008-10-29. 
4. ^ Jeffers, Wendy (2004-10). "Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: patron of the modern". Magazine Antiques. Archived from the original on 2008-01-29. http://web.archive.org/web/20080129013201/http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_5_166/ai_n9505400. Retrieved 2008-04-24. 
5. ^ First modern art museum featuring European works in Manhattan – Michael FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. (p. 120)
6. ^ Origins of MoMA and first successful loan exhibition – see John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. (pp.217–18)
7. ^ Carter B. Horsley. "The Crown Building (formerly the Heckscher Building)". The City Review. http://www.thecityreview.com/crown.html. 
8. ^ John D. Rockefeller, Jr. one of MoMA's greatest benefactors – see Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New York: Random House, 1993. (pp.376,386)
9. ^ Precursor to the current hold of van Gogh in public imagination – Ibid., (p.376)
10. ^ MoMA's international prominence through the Picasso retrospective of 1939–40 – see FitzGerald, op.cit. (pp.243–62)
11. ^ Time Magazine. 1939: The formal opening of MoMA
12. ^ staff writer (April 22, 2000). "Todd Webb, 94, Peripatetic Photographer". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/22/arts/todd-webb-94-peripatetic-photographer.html. Retrieved 2010-10-10. 
13. ^ Denzer, Anthony (2008). Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary. Rizzoli Publications. ISBN 0-8478-3062-4. http://www.rizzoliusa.com/catalog/results.pperl?title_auth_isbn=denzer&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=submit. 
14. ^ MoMA Announces Selection of Five Architects to Display Prefabricated Homes Outside Museum in Summer 2008
15. ^ Pogrebin, Robin (January 8, 2008). "Is Prefab Fab? MoMA Plans a Show". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/arts/design/08moma.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=prefab+fab&st=nyt&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2008-05-24. 
16. ^ Updike, John (2004-11-15). "Invisible Cathedral". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/15/041115crat_atlarge?currentPage=all. Retrieved 2010-12-12. "Nothing in the new building is obtrusive, nothing is cheap. It feels breathless with unspared expense. It has the enchantment of a bank after hours, of a honeycomb emptied of honey and flooded with a soft glow." 
17. ^ Smith, Roberta (2006-11-01). "Tate Modern's Rightness Versus MoMA's Wrongs". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/arts/design/01tate.html?ei=5088&en=93bb317dd36f453a&ex=1320037200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print. Retrieved 2007-02-27. "The museum’s big, bleak, irrevocably formal lobby atrium ... is space that the Modern could ill afford to waste, and such frivolousness continues in its visitor amenities: the hard-to-find escalators and elevators, the too-narrow glass-sided bridges, the two-star restaurant on prime garden real estate where there should be an affordable cafeteria ...Yoshio Taniguchi’s MoMA is a beautiful building that plainly doesn’t work." 
18. ^ Rybczynski, Witold (2005-03-30). "Street Cred: Another Way of Looking at the New MOMA". Slate.com. http://www.slate.com/id/2115870/. Retrieved 2007-02-27. 
19. ^ "Build Your Dream, Hold Your Breath." 6 August 2006 The New York Times.
20. ^ "Cashing Out." May 2009, Art+Auction.
21. ^ "Plum Benefit to Cultural Post: Tax-Free Housing," Kevin Flynn and Stephanie Strom, August 9, 2010, New York Times.
22. ^ M. Paul Holsinger, "And Babies" in War and American Popular Culture, Greenwood Press, 1999, pg. 363
23. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Francis Frascina. Art, politics, and dissent: aspects of the art left in sixties America, pgs. 175-186+ discuss the creation of the poster.
24. ^ ^{a b} Peter Howard Selz, Susan Landauer. Art of engagement: visual politics in California and beyond, pg. 46.
25. ^ Kenneth R. Allan, "Understanding Information," ed. Michael Corris, Conceptual Art, Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 147-148.

Further reading

• Allan, Kenneth R. "Understanding Information," in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice. Ed. Michael Corris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 144-168.
• Bee, Harriet S. and Michelle Elligott. Art in Our Time. A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art, New York 2004, ISBN 0-87070-001-4.
• Fitzgerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
• Geiger, Stephan. The Art of Assemblage. The Museum of Modern Art, 1961. Die neue Realität der Kunst in den frühen sechziger Jahren, (Diss. University Bonn 2005), München 2008, ISBN 978-3-88960-098-1.
• Harr, John Ensor and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988.
• Kert, Bernice. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New York: Random House, 1993.
• Lynes, Russell, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Athenaeum, 1973.
• Reich, Cary. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908–1958. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
• Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002.
• Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Press 1998, ISBN 0-262-19402-3.
• Wilson, Kristina. The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925-1934. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

External links

• Official website
• The Museum of Modern Art Online Retail Store
• Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: Patron of the modern
• New York Times, 2007: Donors Sweetened Director's Pay At MoMA, Prompting Questions Controversy over the compensation package of MoMA's Director, Glenn D. Lowry.
• Taniguchi and the New MOMA
• Museum Conservation Lab Renovation

Coordinates: 40°45′41″N 73°58′40″W / 40.761484°N 73.977664°W / 40.761484; -73.977664