NYC: MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 and is often recognized as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. Over the course of the next ten years, the Museum moved three times into progressively larger temporary quarters, and in 1939 finally opened the doors of its midtown home, located on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in midtown.

MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. Highlights of the collection inlcude Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Salvador Dali's The Persisence of Memory, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiseels d'Avignon and Three Musicians, Claude Monet's Water Lilies, Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Paul Gauguin's The Seed of the Areoi, Henri Matisse's Dance, Marc Chagall's I and the Village, Paul Cezanne's The Bather, Jackson Pollack's Number 31, 1950, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans. MoMA also owns approximately 22,000 films and four million film stills, and MoMA's Library and Archives, the premier research facilities of their kind in the world, hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, and extensive individual files on more than 70,000 artists.

In 1928, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., Lillie Plummer Bliss and Marry Quinn Sulivan, wife of Cornelius J. Sullivan, perceived a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums. They rented six rooms on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building and opened to the public on November 7, 1929--just nine days after the Wall Street Crash.

Initial public reaction was positive, and the museum museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Behind the guidance of president A. Conger Goodyear and director Alfred H. Barr Jr, the museum's holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. MoMA became America's premier American museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.

In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Abby son, Nelson Rockefeller was selected as President in 1939 and that same year oversaw the museum's move to its present midtown location, on land donated by John D. Rockefeller. The new building, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip C. Johnson 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 Roosevelt.

Subsequent expansions took place during the 1950s and 1960s planned by the architect Philip Johnson, who also designed The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden. In 1984, a major renovation designed by Cesar Pelli doubled the Museum's gallery space and enhanced visitor facilities. At the turn of millennium, the building again underwent extensive renovations, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening on November 20, 2004. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new MoMA features 630,000 square feet 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—the Museum's first building devoted solely to these activities—on the eastern portion of the site 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.

In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art was ranked #146 on the AIA 150 America's Favorite Architecture list.