Museum of Modern Art

Heckscher and other buildings (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.^[7] They became known variously as "the Ladies" or "the adamantine ladies".^[8][9] They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,^[8] and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.^[10] 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.^[11] One of Rockefeller's early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami (at that time best known for his portraits of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham), who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968.^[12][13]

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.^[14]

First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the 12th floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building,^[15] 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 (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.^[16]

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".^[17]

53rd Street (1939–present)

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.^[18] Boy Leading a Horse was briefly contested over ownership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.^[19] 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.

The entrance to the Museum of Modern Art

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, also 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 (wife of former senator Jay 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.^[20][21]

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.^[22]

1958 fire

On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an 18-foot-long (5.5 m) Monet Water Lilies painting (the current Monet Water Lilies was acquired shortly after the fire as a replacement). The fire started when workmen installing air conditioning were smoking near paint cans, sawdust, and a canvas drop cloth. One worker was killed in the fire and several firefighters were treated for smoke inhalation. Most of the paintings on the floor had been moved for the construction, although large paintings including the Monet were left. Art work on the third and fourth floors were evacuated to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which abutted it on the 54th Street side. Among the paintings that were moved was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which had been on loan by the Art Institute of Chicago. Visitors and employees above the fire were evacuated to the roof and then jumped to the roof of an adjoining townhouse.^[23]

1960–1982

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.^[24] 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 2-by-3-foot poster, MoMA pulled financing for the project at the last minute.^[25][26] 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.^[25] The poster was included shortly thereafter in MoMA's Information exhibition of July 2 to September 20, 1970, curated by Kynaston McShine.^[27] 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.^[28] Another controversy involved Pablo Picasso's painting Boy Leading a Horse (1905–06), donated to MoMA by William S. Paley in 1964. The status of the work as being sold under duress by its German Jewish owners in the 1930s was in dispute. The descendants of the original owners sued MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which has another Picasso painting, Le Moulin de la Galette (1900), once owned by the same family, for return of the works.^[29] Both museums reached a confidential settlement with the descendants before the case went to trial and retained their respective paintings.^[19][30][31] Both museums had claimed from the outset to be the proper owners of these paintings, and that the claims were illegitimate. In a joint statement, the two museums wrote: "we settled simply to avoid the costs of prolonged litigation, and to ensure the public continues to have access to these important paintings."^[32]

1980–1999

Stairs in the Museum of Modern Art

Cross-section of the Museum of Modern Art

In 1983, the museum more than doubled its gallery, 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.^[33]

In 1997, the museum undertook a major renovation and expansion designed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi with Kohn Pedersen Fox. The project, including an increase in MoMA's endowment to cover operating expenses, cost $858 million in total. The project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs, and features 630,000 square feet (59,000 m²) of 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 provides space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher-training workshops, and the museum's expanded library and archives. These two buildings frame the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which was enlarged from its original configuration.

21st century

The museum was closed for two years in connection with the renovation and moved its public-facing operations to a temporary facility called MoMA QNS in Long Island City, Queens. When MoMA reopened in 2004, the renovation was controversial. Some critics thought that Taniguchi's design was a fine example of contemporary architecture, while many others were displeased with aspects of the design, such as the flow of the space.^[34][35][36] In 2005, the museum sold land that it owned west of its existing building to Hines, a Texas real estate developer, under an agreement that reserved space on the lower levels of the building Hines planned to construct there for a MoMA expansion.^[37]

In 2011, MoMA acquired an adjacent building constructed and occupied by the American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street. The building was a well-regarded structure designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and was sold in connection with a financial restructuring of the Folk Art Museum.^[38] When MoMA announced that it would demolish the building in connection with its expansion, outcry and considerable discussion arose about the issue, but the museum ultimately proceeded with its original plans.^[39]

The Hines building, designed by Jean Nouvel and called 53W53, received construction approval in 2014.^[40] Around the time of the Hines' construction approval, MoMA unveiled its expansion plans, which encompass space in 53W53, as well as construction on the former site of the American Folk Art Museum.^[41] The expansion plan was developed by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. The first phase of construction began in 2014. In June 2017, patrons and the public were welcomed into MoMA to see the completion of the first phase of the $450 million expansion to the museum.^[42]

Spread over three floors of the art mecca off Fifth Avenue are 15,000 square-feet (about 1,400 m²) of reconfigured galleries, a new, second gift shop, a redesigned cafe and espresso bar, and facing the sculpture garden, two lounges graced with black marble quarried in France.^[42]

The museum expansion project increased the publicly accessibly space by 25% compared to when the Tanaguchi building was completed in 2004.^[43] The expansion allowed for even more of the museum's collection of nearly 200,000 works to be displayed.^[42] The new spaces also allow visitors to enjoy a relaxing sit-down in one of the two new lounges, or even have a fully catered meal.^[42] The two new lounges include "The Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin Lounge" and "The Daniel and Jane Och Lounge".^[42][44] The goal of this renovation is to help expand the collection and display of work by women, Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and other marginalized communities.^[45] In connection with the renovation, MoMA shifted its approach to presenting its holdings, moving away from separating the collection by disciplines such as painting, design, and works on paper toward an integrated chronological presentation that encompasses all areas of the collection.^[43]

Basement gift shop

The Museum of Modern Art closed for another round of major renovations from June to October 2019.^[45][46] Upon reopening on October 21, 2019, MoMA added 47,000 square feet (4,400 m²) of gallery space,^[47] and its total floor area was 708,000 square feet (65,800 m²).^[48] The expansion and refurbishment was overseen by the architectural firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.^[49]

The institution began offering free online classes in April 2014.^[50]

Discover more about History related topics

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Abigail Greene Aldrich Rockefeller was an American socialite and philanthropist. She was a prominent member of the Rockefeller family through her marriage to financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller Sr.. Her father was Nelson W. Aldrich who served as the Senator of Rhode Island. Rockefeller was known for being the driving force behind the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art.

Lillie P. Bliss

Lillie P. Bliss

Lizzie Plummer Bliss, known as Lillie P. Bliss, was an American art collector and patron. At the beginning of the 20th century, she was one of the leading collectors of modern art in New York. One of the lenders to the landmark Armory Show in 1913, she also contributed to other exhibitions concerned with raising public awareness of modern art. In 1929, she played an essential role in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. After her death, 150 works of art from her collection served as a foundation to the museum and formed the basis of the in-house collection. These included works by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani.

Mary Quinn Sullivan

Mary Quinn Sullivan

Mary Quinn Sullivan, born Mary Josephine Quinn, was a pioneering collector of European and American modern and contemporary art and gallerist, and a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in rented space in New York City in November 1929. She also led a small group of Indianapolis, Indiana, art patrons who called themselves the Gamboliers and between 1928 to 1934 selected artworks of for the group that brought some of the first modern and contemporary works to the collections of the John Herron Art Institute, which later became the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Mary and Cornelius J. Sullivan, her husband, amassed a significant private collection of art during the 1920s and 1930s that included Modigliani's Sculptured Head of a Woman, Paul Cézanne's Madame Cézanne, Georges Rouault's Crucifixion, and a Hepplewhite desk that once belonged to Edgar Degas, as well as works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, and others.

Anson Goodyear

Anson Goodyear

Anson Conger Goodyear was an American manufacturer, businessman, author, and philanthropist and member of the Goodyear family. He is best known as one of the founding members and first president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New York and the seat of Erie County. It lies in Western New York, at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of the Niagara River, on the United States border with Canada. With a population of 278,349 according to the 2020 census, Buffalo is the 78th-largest city in the United States. Buffalo and the city of Niagara Falls together make up the two-county Buffalo–Niagara Falls Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), which had an estimated population of 1.1 million in 2020, making it the 49th largest MSA in the United States.

Soichi Sunami

Soichi Sunami

Soichi Sunami was a modernist photographer, influenced by the pictorialist movement, and best known for his portraits of early modern dancers, including Ruth St Denis, Agnes De Mille, Helen Tamiris and Martha Graham, with whom he maintained an extended artistic collaboration. He produced some of the only known images of the early black modern dancer, Edna Guy, and also photographed the modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg.

Modern dance

Modern dance

Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was considered to have been developed as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and also a way to express social concerns like socioeconomic and cultural factors.

Martha Graham

Martha Graham

Martha Graham was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide.

Paul J. Sachs

Paul J. Sachs

Paul Joseph Sachs was an American investor, businessman and museum director. Sachs served as associate director of the Fogg Art Museum and as a partner in the financial firm Goldman Sachs. He is recognized for having developed one of the earliest museum studies courses in the United States.

Frank Crowninshield

Frank Crowninshield

Francis Welch Crowninshield, better known as Frank or Crownie (informal), was an American journalist and art and theater critic best known for developing and editing the magazine Vanity Fair for 21 years, making it a pre-eminent literary journal.

Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and is widely considered to be one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Not commercially successful in his career, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, which eventually led to his suicide at age thirty-seven.

The MoMA occasionally 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^[51]
• 1955: Japanese Exhibition House by Junzo Yoshimura, reinstalled in Philadelphia, PA in 1957–58 and known now as Shofuso Japanese House and Garden
• 2008: Prefabricated houses planned^[52][53][54] by:
  • Kieran Timberlake Architects
  • Lawrence Sass
  • System Architects: Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier
  • Leo Kaufmann Architects
  • Richard Horden

Discover more about Exhibition houses related topics

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer

Marcel Lajos Breuer, was a Hungarian American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.

Gregory Ain

Gregory Ain

Gregory Samuel Ain was an American architect active in the mid-20th century. Working primarily in the Los Angeles area, Ain is best known for bringing elements of modern architecture to lower- and medium-cost housing. He addressed "the common architectural problems of common people".

Shofuso Japanese House and Garden

Shofuso Japanese House and Garden

Shofuso , also known as Japanese House and Garden, is a traditional 17th century-style Japanese house and garden located in Philadelphia's West Fairmount Park on the site of the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Shofuso is a nonprofit historic site with over 30,000 visitors each year and is open to the public for visitation and group tours.

KieranTimberlake

KieranTimberlake

KieranTimberlake is an American architecture firm founded by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake in Philadelphia. The firm espouses a philosophy of sustainable design, collaborative design, and in-depth research. They have also shown an interest in prefabrication, new technologies and integrating architecture with the actual activities to take place in the buildings they design, especially using "teaching" design elements in schools. Their interest in productions and craft led them to team up with DuPont to develop Smartwrap, a laminated polymer film that can support thin interstitial films, including photovoltaics, OLEDs, polarizing or UV screens, etc.

Larry Sass

Larry Sass

Lawrence (Larry) Sass is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator of architecture. He is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Computation Group in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Sass leads the Design Fabrication Group where his research is focused on digital design and fabrication processes of housing.

Richard Horden

Richard Horden

Richard Manaton Horden, was a British architect based in London. Following an early career with Norman Foster, where he worked for ten years, he established his own practice Richard Horden Associates in 1985, which became Horden Cherry Lee Architects in 1999. Richard Horden is the pioneer of small-scale structures constructed with the most advanced materials and techniques available.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

Claude Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, circa 1920

The MoMA is organized around six Curatorial Departments: Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Film, Media and Performance, Painting and Sculpture, and Photography.^[55]

Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, the MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to roughly 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. (Access to the collection of film stills ended in 2002, and the collection is stored in a vault in Hamlin, Pennsylvania.^[56]). The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following:

• Francis Bacon, Painting (1946)
• Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises
• Paul Cézanne, The Bather
• Marc Chagall, I and the Village
• Giorgio de Chirico, The Song of Love
• Willem de Kooning, Woman I
• Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory
• Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
• Paul Gauguin, Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi)
• Jasper Johns, Flag
• Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair
• Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl
• René Magritte, The Empire of Lights
• René Magritte, False Mirror
• Kazimir Malevich, White on White 1918
• Henri Matisse, The Dance
• Henri Matisse, L’Atelier Rouge
• Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie
• Claude Monet, Water Lilies triptych
• Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk
• Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man, Heroic and Sublime)
• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
• Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950
• Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910
• Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy
• Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night
• Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans
• Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World

Discover more about Artworks related topics

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.

Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.

Hamlin, Wayne County, Pennsylvania

Hamlin, Wayne County, Pennsylvania

Hamlin is a village in Salem Township, Wayne County, Pennsylvania, United States. Hamlin is located at the intersection of Pennsylvania Route 191/Pennsylvania Route 196 and Pennsylvania Route 590.

Francis Bacon (artist)

Francis Bacon (artist)

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant garde artistic movements of the early 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

I and the Village

I and the Village

I and the Village is an oil on canvas painting by the Belarusian-French artist Marc Chagall created in 1911. It is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico

Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His best-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976.

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of colour and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism. Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia. The paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region.

• 

  Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

• 

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

• 

  Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

• 

  Henri Matisse, The Dance I, 1909

• 

  Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910

• 

  Henri Matisse, L'Atelier Rouge, 1911

• 

  Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913

• 

  Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918

• 

  Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–1943

• 

  Paul Cézanne, The Bather, 1885–1887

• 

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

• 

  Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, 1905–06

• 

  Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911

• 

  Henri Matisse, View of Notre-Dame, 1914

• 

  Giorgio de Chirico, Love Song, 1914

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

Photography

Concerning photography, "the MoMA collection is one of the most important in the world, consisting of over 25,000 works, not only by photographers, [but] also by journalists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and amateurs."^[57]

The Department of Photography was founded by Beaumont Newhall in 1940 and developed a world-renowned art photography collection under Edward Steichen (curator 1947–1961). Steichen's most notable and lasting exhibit, named The Family of Man, was seen by 9 million people. In 2003, the Family of Man photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value.^[58]

Steichen's hand-picked successor, John Szarkowski (curator 1962–1991), guided the department with several notable exhibitions, including 1967s New Documents that presented photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand and is said to have "represented a shift in emphasis"^[59] and "identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize".^[60][61] Under Szarkowski, it focused on a more traditionally modernist approach to the medium, one that emphasized documentary images and orthodox darkroom techniques.

Peter Galassi (curator 1991-2011) worked under his predecessor, whereas Quentin Bajac (curator 2013–2018) was hired from the outside. The current David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography is Roxana Marcoci, PhD.

Film

In 1932, museum founder Alfred Barr stressed the importance of introducing "the only great art form peculiar to the 20th century" to "the American public which should appreciate good films and support them". Museum Trustee and film producer John Hay Whitney became the first chairman of the museum's Film Library from 1935 to 1951. The collection Whitney assembled with the help of film curator Iris Barry was so successful that in 1937 the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences commended the museum with an award "for its significant work in collecting films ... and for the first time making available to the public the means of studying the historical and aesthetic development of the motion picture as one of the major arts".^[62]

The first curator and founder of the film library was Iris Barry, a British film critic and author whose three decades of pioneering work in collecting films and presenting them in coherent artistic and historical contexts gained recognition for the cinema as the major new art form of our century. Barry and her successors have built a collection comprising some 8000 titles today, concentrating on assembling an outstanding collection of important works of international film art, emphasizing obtaining the highest-quality materials.^[63]

Exiled film scholar Siegfried Kracauer worked at the MoMA film archive on a psychological history of German film between 1941 and 1943. The result of his study, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), traces the birth of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic and helped lay the foundation of modern film criticism.

Under the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, the film collection includes more than 25,000 titles and ranks as one of the world's finest museum archives of international film art. The department owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies, including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but its holdings also contains many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire, Fred Halsted's gay pornographic L.A. Plays Itself (screened before a capacity audience on April 23, 1974), various TV commercials, and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's All Is Full of Love.

Library

The MoMA library is located in Midtown Manhattan, with offsite storage in Long Island City, Queens. The noncirculating collection documents modern and contemporary art, including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, film, performance, and architecture from 1880–present. The collection includes 300,000 books, 1,000 periodicals, and 40,000 files about artists and artistic groups. Over 11,000 artist books are in the collection.^[64] The libraries are open by appointment to all researchers. The library's catalog is called "Dadabase".^[4] Dadabase includes records for all of the material in the library, including books, artist books, exhibition catalogs, special collections materials, and electronic resources.^[4] The MoMA's collection of artist books includes works by Ed Ruscha, Marcel Broodthaers, Susan Bee, Carl Andre, and David Horvitz.^[65]

Additionally, the library has subscription electronic resources along with Dadabase. These include journal databases (such as JSTOR and Art Full Text), auction results indexes (ArtFact and Artnet), the ARTstor image database, and WorldCat union catalog.^[64]

Architecture and design

MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design was founded in 1932^[66] as the first museum department in the world dedicated to the intersection of architecture and design.^[67] The department's first director was Philip Johnson who served as curator between 1932–34 and 1946–54.^[68] The next departmental head was Arthur Drexler, who was curator from 1951 to 1956 and then served as head until 1986.^[69]

The collection consists of 28,000 works including architectural models, drawings, and photographs.^[66] One of the highlights of the collection is the Mies van der Rohe Archive.^[67] It also includes works from such legendary architects and designers as Frank Lloyd Wright,^{[70][71][72][73]} Paul László, the Eameses, Betty Cooke, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter. In 2012, the department acquired a selection of 14 video games, the basis of an intended collection of 40 that is to range from Pac-Man (1980) to Minecraft (2011).^[74]

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Olive Trees (Van Gogh series)

Olive Trees (Van Gogh series)

Vincent van Gogh painted at least 15 paintings of olive trees, mostly in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889. At his own request, he lived at an asylum there from May 1889 through May 1890 painting the gardens of the asylum and, when he had permission to venture outside its walls, nearby olive trees, cypresses and wheat fields.

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Dance (Matisse)

Dance (Matisse)

Dance (La Danse) is a painting made by Henri Matisse in 1910, at the request of Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, who bequeathed the large decorative panel to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The composition of dancing figures is commonly recognized as "a key point of (Matisse's) career and in the development of modern painting". A preliminary version of the work, sketched by Matisse in 1909 as a study for the work, resides at MoMA in New York City, where it has been labeled Dance (I).

Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier, a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.

L'Atelier Rouge

L'Atelier Rouge

L'Atelier Rouge, also known as The Red Studio, is a painting by Henri Matisse from 1911, in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing had a profound influence on the development of abstract art in the 20th century. Born in Kiev to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is also considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Broadway Boogie Woogie is a painting by Piet Mondrian completed in 1943, after he had moved to New York in 1940. Compared to his earlier work, the canvas is divided into many more squares. Although he spent most of his career creating abstract work, this painting is inspired by clear real-world examples: the city grid of Manhattan, and boogie-woogie, an African-American Blues music Mondrian loved. The painting was bought by the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins for the price of $800 at the Valentine Gallery in New York City, after Martins and Mondrian both exhibited there in 1943. Martins later donated the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant garde artistic movements of the early 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Boy Leading a Horse

Boy Leading a Horse

Jeune garçon au cheval is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. The painting is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was painted in Picasso's Rose Period from 1905 to 1906, when he was still a struggling artist living in Paris. The painting is a study for a much larger composition that Picasso never completed.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

I and the Village

I and the Village

I and the Village is an oil on canvas painting by the Belarusian-French artist Marc Chagall created in 1911. It is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Attendance

MoMA attracted 706,060 visitors in 2020, a drop of sixty-five percent from 2019, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It ranked twenty-fifth on the List of most visited art museums in the world in 2020.^[6]

MoMA has seen its average number of visitors rise from about 1.5 million a year to 2.5 million after its new granite and glass renovation. In 2009, the museum reported 119,000 members and 2.8 million visitors over the previous fiscal year. MoMA attracted its highest-ever number of visitors, 3.09 million, during its 2010 fiscal year;^[75] however, attendance dropped 11 percent to 2.8 million in 2011.^[76] Attendance in 2016 was 2.8 million, down from 3.1 million in 2015.^[77]

The museum was open every day since its founding in 1929, until 1975, when it closed one day a week (originally Wednesdays) to reduce operating expenses. In 2012, it again opened every day, including Tuesday, the one day it has traditionally been closed.^[78]

Admission

The Museum of Modern Art charges an admission fee of $25 per adult.^[79] Upon MoMA's reopening, its admission cost increased from $12 to $20, making it one of the most expensive museums in the city. However, it has free entry on Fridays after 5:30pm, as part of the Uniqlo Free Friday Nights program. Many New York area college students also receive free admission to the museum.^[80]

Finances

A private non-profit organization, MoMA is the seventh-largest U.S. museum by budget;^[81] its annual revenue is about $145 million (none of which is profit). In 2011, the museum reported net assets (basically, a total of all the resources it has on its books, except the value of the art) of just over $1 billion.

Unlike most museums, the museum eschews government funding, instead subsisting on a fragmented budget with a half-dozen different sources of income, none larger than a fifth.^[82] 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. An $858 million capital campaign funded the 2002–04 expansion, with David Rockefeller donating $77 million in cash.^[81] In 2005, Rockefeller pledged an additional $100 million toward the museum's endowment.^[83] In 2012, Standard & Poor's, a nationally recognized statistical rating organization, raised its long-term rating for the museum as it benefited from the fundraising of its trustees.^[84] After construction expenses for the new galleries are covered, the Modern estimates that some $65 million will go to its $650 million endowment.

MoMA spent $32 million to acquire art for the fiscal year ending in June 2012.^[85]

MoMA employed about 815 people in 2007.^[82] The museum's tax filings from the past few years suggest a shift among the highest paid employees from curatorial staff to management.^[86] The museum's director Glenn D. Lowry earned $1.6 million in 2009^[87] and lives in a rent-free $6 million apartment above the museum.^[88]

MoMA was forced to close in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City.^[89] Citing the coronavirus shutdown, MoMA fired its art educators in April 2020.^[90] In May 2020, it was reported that MoMA would reduce its annual budget from $180 to $135 million starting July 1. Exhibition and publication funding was cut by half, and staff reduced from around 960 to 800.^[89]

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COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified in an outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. Attempts to contain it there failed, allowing the virus to spread to other areas of Asia and later worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020, and a pandemic on 11 March 2020. As of 10 March 2023, the pandemic had caused more than 676 million cases and 6.88 million confirmed deaths, making it one of the deadliest in history.

Uniqlo

Uniqlo

Uniqlo Co., Ltd. is a Japanese casual wear designer, manufacturer and retailer. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fast Retailing Co., Ltd.

David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller was an American investment banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation. He was the oldest living member of the third generation of the Rockefeller family, and family patriarch from 2004 until his death in 2017. Rockefeller was the fifth son and youngest child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

Nationally recognized statistical rating organization

Nationally recognized statistical rating organization

A nationally recognized statistical rating organization (NRSRO) is a credit rating agency (CRA) approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to provide information that financial firms must rely on for certain regulatory purposes.

Glenn D. Lowry

Glenn D. Lowry

Glenn David Lowry is an American art historian and director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1995. His initiatives there include strengthening MoMA's contemporary art program, significantly developing the collection holdings in all media, and guiding two major campaigns for the renovation, expansion, and endowment of the museum. He has lectured and written extensively in support of contemporary art and artists and the role of museums in society, among other topics.

COVID-19 pandemic in New York City

COVID-19 pandemic in New York City

The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City was confirmed on March 1, 2020, though later research showed that the novel coronavirus had been circulating in New York City since January, with cases of community transmission confirmed as early as February. By March 29, over 30,000 cases were confirmed, and New York City had become the worst-affected area in the United States. There were over 2,000 deaths by April 6; at that stage, the city had more confirmed coronavirus cases than China, the UK, or Iran. Bodies of the deceased were picked up from their homes by the US Army, National Guard, and Air National Guard.

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Officers and the board of trustees

Currently, the board of trustees includes 46 trustees and 15 life trustees. Even including the board's 14 "honorary" trustees, who do not have voting rights and do not play as direct a role in the museum, this amounts to an average individual contribution of more than $7 million.^[86] The Founders Wall was created in 2004, when MoMA's expansion was completed, and features the names of the actual founders in addition to those who gave significant gifts; about a half-dozen names have been added since 2004. For example, Ileana Sonnabend's name was added in 2012, even though she was only 15 when the museum was established in 1929.^[91]

Board of trustees

Board of trustees:

Directors

• Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1929–1943)
• No director (1943–1949; the job was handled by the chairman of the museum's coordination committee and the director of the Curatorial Department)^[93][94]
• Rene d'Harnoncourt (1949–1968)
• Bates Lowry (1968–1969)
• John Brantley Hightower (1970–1972)
• Richard Oldenburg (1972–1995)
• Glenn D. Lowry (1995–present)

Chief curators

• Philip Johnson, chief curator of architecture and design (1932–1934 and 1946–1954)
• Arthur Drexler, chief curator of architecture and design (1951–1956)
• Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography (1991–2011)^[61][95]
• Cornelia Butler, chief curator of drawings (2006–2013)
• Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design (2007–2013)
• Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film (2007–present)
• Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture (2008–present)^[96]
• Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator at large (2009–2018)
• Sabine Breitwieser, chief curator of media and performance art (2010–2013)
• Christophe Cherix, chief curator of prints and illustrated books (2010–2013), drawings and prints (2013–present)
• Paola Antonelli, director of research and development and senior curator of architecture and design (2012–present)
• Quentin Bajac, chief curator of photography (2012–2018)
• Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance art (2014–present)
• Martino Stierli, chief curator of architecture and design (2015–present)

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Ileana Sonnabend

Ileana Sonnabend

Ileana Sonnabend was a Romanian-American art dealer of 20th-century art. The Sonnabend Gallery opened in Paris in 1962 and was instrumental in making American art of the 1960s known in Europe, with an emphasis on American pop art. In 1970, Sonnabend Gallery opened in New York on Madison Avenue, and in 1971 relocated to 420 West Broadway in SoHo where it was one of the major protagonists that made SoHo the international art center it remained until the early 1990s. The gallery was instrumental in making European art of the 1970s known in America, with an emphasis on European conceptual art and Arte Povera. It also presented American conceptual and minimal art of the 1970s. In 1986, the so-called "Neo-Geo" show introduced, among others, the artist Jeff Koons. In the late 1990s, the gallery moved to Chelsea and continues to be active after Sonnabend's death. The gallery goes on showing the work of artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s including Robert Morris, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Gilbert & George as well as more recent artists including Jeff Koons, Rona Pondick, Candida Höfer, Elger Esser, and Clifford Ross.

David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller

David Rockefeller was an American investment banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation. He was the oldest living member of the third generation of the Rockefeller family, and family patriarch from 2004 until his death in 2017. Rockefeller was the fifth son and youngest child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.

Agnes Gund

Agnes Gund

Agnes Gund is an American philanthropist and arts patron, collector of modern and contemporary art, and arts education and social justice advocate. She is President Emerita and Life Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Chairman of its International Council. She is a board member of MoMA PS1. In 1977, in response to New York City's fiscal crisis that led to budget cuts that virtually eliminated arts education in public schools, Gund founded Studio in a School, a nonprofit organization that engages professional artists as art instructors in public schools and community-based organizations to lead classes in drawing, printmaking, painting, collage, sculpture, and digital media, and to work with classroom teachers, administrators, and families to incorporate visual art into their school communities.

Donald B. Marron Sr.

Donald B. Marron Sr.

Donald Baird Marron was an American financier, private equity investor and entrepreneur, notable as the chairman and chief executive officer of brokerage firm Paine Webber from 1980 through the sale of the company in 2000, as well as the founder of private equity firm Lightyear Capital and of Data Resources Inc. He was the father of the economist Donald B. Marron Jr.

Jerry Speyer

Jerry Speyer

Jerry I. Speyer is an American real estate developer. He is one of two founding partners of the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer, which controls the Rockefeller Center.

Richard E. Salomon

Richard E. Salomon

Richard E. Salomon is an American investment banker and philanthropist. He served as a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2003 to 2013 and again from 2014 to 2017.

Glenn D. Lowry

Glenn D. Lowry

Glenn David Lowry is an American art historian and director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City since 1995. His initiatives there include strengthening MoMA's contemporary art program, significantly developing the collection holdings in all media, and guiding two major campaigns for the renovation, expansion, and endowment of the museum. He has lectured and written extensively in support of contemporary art and artists and the role of museums in society, among other topics.

Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Edgar Bronfman Jr.

Edgar Miles Bronfman Jr. is an American businessman who currently serves as a Managing Partner at Accretive LLC, a private equity firm focused on creating and investing in technology companies. He previously served as CEO of Warner Music Group from 2004 to 2011 and as Chairman of Warner Music Group from 2011 to 2012. In May 2011, the sale of WMG was announced; Bronfman would continue as CEO in the transaction. In August 2011, he became Chairman of the company as Stephen Cooper became CEO. Bronfman previously served as CEO of Seagram and vice-chairman of Vivendi Universal. Bronfman Jr. expanded and later divested ownership of the Seagram Company, and also worked as a Broadway and film producer, and songwriter under the pseudonyms Junior Miles and Sam Roman.

Gustavo Cisneros

Gustavo Cisneros

Gustavo Alfredo Jiménez de Cisneros Rendiles is a Venezuelan businessman and Chairman of Grupo Cisneros.

Anne Dias-Griffin

Anne Dias-Griffin

Anne Dias-Griffin is a French-American investor and philanthropist. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Aragon, an investment firm active in global equities, with a focus on the internet, technology, and consumer sectors, as well as alternative assets.

Glenn Dubin

Glenn Dubin

Glenn Russell Dubin is a billionaire hedge fund manager and the Principal of Dubin & Co. LP, a private investment company. He is the co-founder of Highbridge Capital Management, an alternative asset management company based in New York City, and a founding board member of the Robin Hood Foundation.

John Elkann

John Elkann

John Philip Jacob Elkann is an Italian industrialist. In 1997, he became the chosen heir of his grandfather Gianni Agnelli, following the death of Gianni's nephew Giovanni Alberto Agnelli, and since 2004 has been leading the Agnelli family, an Italian multi-industry business dynasty. The family has been compared to the Kennedys.

Women Artists Visibility Event (W.A.V.E.)

On June 14, 1984 the Women Artists Visibility Event (W.A.V.E.), 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.^[97][98]

Art repatriation issues

The MoMA has been involved in several claims initiated by families for artworks lost in the Holocaust which ended up in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.^[99]

In 2009, the heirs of German artist George Grosz filed a lawsuit seeking restitution of three works by Grosz, and the heirs of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy filed a lawsuit demanding the return of the painting by Pablo Picasso, entitled Boy Leading a Horse (1905–1906).^{[100][101][102]}

In another case, after a decade long court fight, in 2015 the MoMA returned a painting entitled Sand Hills by German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to the Fischer family because it had been stolen by Nazis.^[103]

Strike MoMA

Strike MoMA is a 2021 movement to strike the museum targeting what its supporters have called the "toxic philanthropy" of the museum's leadership.^[104][105]

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Women Artists Visibility Event

Women Artists Visibility Event

The Women's Artists Visibility Event (W.A.V.E.) also known as Let MOMA Know, was a demonstration held on June 14, 1984, to protest the lack of women artists represented in The Museum of Modern Art's re-opening exhibition "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture." The exhibition, which included 165 artists, had 14 women among them.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labor in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland.

George Grosz

George Grosz

George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity groups during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at the Art Students League of New York. In 1959 he returned to Berlin, where he died shortly afterwards.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Boy Leading a Horse

Boy Leading a Horse

Jeune garçon au cheval is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. The painting is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was painted in Picasso's Rose Period from 1905 to 1906, when he was still a struggling artist living in Paris. The painting is a study for a much larger composition that Picasso never completed.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.

Strike MoMA

Strike MoMA

Strike MoMA is a movement to strike the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, targeting what its organizers describe as the "toxic philanthropy" of the museum's leadership. It has consisted of a series of 10 demonstrations organized over ten weeks, from April 9, 2021, through June 11.