Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, as well as electronic media.
The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site. In 1939, the museum moved to its current location on West 53rd Street designed by architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. A new sculpture garden, designed by Barr and curator John McAndrew, also opened that year.
From the 1930s through the 1950s, MoMA became a host to several landmark exhibitions, including Barr's influential "Cubism and Abstract Art" in 1936. Nelson Rockefeller became the museum's president in 1939, playing a key role in its expansion and publicity. David Rockefeller joined the board in 1948 and continued the family's close association with the museum until his death in 2017. In 1953, Philip Johnson redesigned the garden, which subsequently became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In 1958, a fire at MoMA destroyed a painting by Claude Monet and led to the evacuation of other artworks. In later decades, the museum was among several institutions to aid the CIA in its efforts to engage in cultural propaganda during the Cold War. Major expansions in the 1980s and the early 21st century, including the selection of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi for a significant renovation, nearly doubled MoMA's space for exhibitions and programs. The 2000s saw the formal merger with the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and in 2019, another major renovation added significant gallery space.
The museum has been instrumental in shaping the history of modern art, particularly modern art from Europe. In recent decades, MoMA has expanded its collection and programming to include works by traditionally underrepresented groups. The museum has been involved in controversies regarding its labor practices, and the institution's labor union, founded in 1971, has been described as the first of its kind in the U.S. The MoMA Library includes about 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, more than 1,000 periodical titles and more than 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups. The archives hold primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art.
Attendance
The museum attracted 2,190,440 visitors in 2022, making it the 4th most-visited museum in the United States, and the third most-visited U.S. art museum. This attendance was 89 percent higher than in 2021, but still well below the pre-COVID attendance in 2019.In 2023, MoMA was visited by over 2.8 million people, making it the 15th most-visited art museum in the world and the 6th most-visited museum in the United States.
History
Early years (1929–1939)
The idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies" or "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.Abby Rockefeller 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. One of Rockefeller's early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami, who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968.
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 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 protégé. 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.
First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the 12th floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next 10 years. Abby Rockefeller's husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was adamantly opposed to the museum 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. Under Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s direction, MoMA embraced a multidisciplinary approach to modern art by being the first museum to establish departments dedicated to photography and film.
During that time, the museum initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented 66 oils and 50 drawings from the Netherlands, as well as poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success due to Barr's arrangement of the exhibit, and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".
1930s to 1950s
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. Boy Leading a Horse was briefly contested over ownership by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1941, MoMA hosted the ground-breaking exhibition, "Indian Art of the United States", curated by Frederic Huntington Douglas and Rene d'Harnoncourt, that changed the way Native American arts were viewed by the public and exhibited in art museums.Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its president, in 1939, at the age of 30; he was a flamboyant leader and became the prime instigator and funding source of MoMA's publicity, acquisitions, and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller, joined the museum's board of trustees in 1948, and took over the presidency when Nelson was elected governor of New York in 1958.
David Rockefeller subsequently employed noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden, and named it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The Rockefeller family and he 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 sit on the board of trustees. After the Rockefeller Guest House at 242 East 52nd Street was completed in 1950, some MoMA functions were held in the house until 1964.
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 L. 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.
In 1958, workers re-clad the MoMA building's second floor with a glass facade overlooking the sculpture garden.
1958 fire
On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an Monet Water Lilies painting. The fire was started by workmen installing air conditioning, who were smoking near paint cans, sawdust, and a canvas drop cloth. One worker was killed by the fire, and several firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation.Most of the paintings on the floor had previously been removed from the work area, although large paintings including the Monet had remained in place. Art works on the third and fourth floors were evacuated to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which abutted on the 54th Street side. Among the paintings that were rescued was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which had been on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. Visitors and employees trapped above the fire were evacuated to the roof, and then jumped to the roof of an adjoining townhouse.
1960s to 1980s
In 1969, the MoMA was at the center of a controversy over its decision to withdraw funding from the iconic antiwar poster And Babies. In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition, 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, created an iconic protest poster called And babies. The poster uses an image by photojournalist Ronald L. Haeberle and references the My Lai Massacre. The MoMA had promised to fund and circulate the poster, but after seeing the poster, MoMA pulled financing for the project at the last minute. MoMA's board of trustees included Nelson Rockefeller and William S. Paley, who reportedly "hit the ceiling" on seeing the proofs of the poster. The poster was included shortly thereafter in MoMA's Information exhibition of July 2 to September 20, 1970, curated by Kynaston McShine.In 1971, after protests outside the museum meant to spur inclusion of African Americans Richard Hunt was the first African American sculptor to have a major solo retrospective at the museum.
In 1983, the museum more than doubled its gallery space, increased the curatorial department by 30%, and added an auditorium, two restaurants, and a bookstore in conjunction with the construction of the 56-story Museum Tower adjoining the museum. Architect César Pelli led the design project for the expansion. Despite these expansion projects, MoMA's physical space had never been able to accommodate its growing collection.
On June 14, 1984, the Women Artists Visibility Event, a demonstration of 400 women artists, was held in front of the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art to protest the lack of female representation in its opening exhibition, "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture". The exhibition featured 165 artists. Only 14 of those were women.