Museum of Modern Arts (MoMA)

Museum of Modern Art is very often shortened just to MoMA and it is the leading art museum in the world, located in Midtown Manhattan, on 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. To its displays belong works of architecture and design, paintings and sculptures, photography, prints and illustrated books, film and media. MoMA is sometimes considered to be “the sister” of nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Three ladies stood at the birth of the museum in 1928 – Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan. They rented modest quarters and the museum opened on 7 November 1929. A. Conger Goodyear became the first president of the museum. Other foundation trustees became Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield. MoMA has specialized only in modern art and it was the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.

At first, the museum was housed in Heckscher Building and within next ten years it changed its location for three times. Although, John D. Rockefeller Jr. (Abby’s husband) opposed the museum as well as the modern art itself; he eventually donated the land for its current site. The history of the museum has been closely connected with Rockefeller family from the beginning.

The present-day building of the museum was designed in the International Style by the architects Philip C. Johnson and Edward Durell Stone and it was opened on 10 May 1939. It underwent the renovation in 2002 – 2004. Japanese Yoshio Taniguchi became its leading architect.

The collection of the MoMA has more than 150,000 individual pieces, approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. It is the best collection of the Western masterpieces. One can see there works of Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Piet Mondrian, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol and many more.