★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
The Museum of Modern Art
Eight prints and one drawing - that's how this museum started in 1929! Three ladies nicknamed 'the adamantine ladies' opened America's first modern art museum on 53rd Street nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Their tiny collection has grown to over 200,000 works, including Van Gogh's dizzy-making Starry Night. Walk through these bright glass doors and you're seeing art that once made people shout 'that's not real art!' - but three million yearly visitors prove how wonderfully wrong they were!
Did You Know?
- MoMA was founded in 1929 by three visionary women—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lizzie P. Bliss, and Mary Sullivan—specifically to champion modern art at a time when American museums and collectors largely dismissed avant-garde European artists like Picasso and van Gogh as 'frauds' or 'madmen'; their first exhibition featured works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh, drawing 47,000 visitors in just one month and marking a turning point in the acceptance of modern art in the U.S.
- Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s first director, envisioned the museum as a 'laboratory' for modernism, expanding its scope far beyond painting to include architecture, design, film, photography, and even dance—an innovative, multidisciplinary approach that set MoMA apart from traditional art museums and helped shape the global understanding of modern art.
- During the 1930s, as the Nazis labeled modern art 'degenerate' and suppressed it in Europe, MoMA became one of the few places in the world where the public could still see a wide array of European avant-garde masterpieces, cementing its reputation as a sanctuary for modernist art during a dark period in cultural history.