Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art, institution founded in 1929 in New York to “help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time” by the American philanthropists Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. It is one of the finest museums of modern art in the world, with widely diverse collections emphasizing developments in art since the Post-Impressionism of the late 19th century. Over the years the museum's collection has grown to include more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and plans, and design objects. It also includes some 10,000 films and a library containing more than 80,000 books and periodicals.

From the opening exhibition, “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh”, held in 1929 in several rented rooms, the museum has attempted to reach a wide audience. In 1932 and 1933 it mounted the first exhibitions of photography, architecture, and furniture and the decorative arts. In 1935 it organized the Film Library (now the Department of Film and Video), the first such programme in any museum. It has periodically mounted retrospective exhibitions of significant artists and art movements, incorporating objects from its own holdings with those borrowed from other museums worldwide, and it has sponsored many travelling exhibitions.

In 1939 the museum moved into permanent headquarters, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on West 53rd Street. After 1939 much additional property and several wings were added, such as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (1953, expanded 1964), designed by Philip C. Johnson. In a 1984 expansion, designed by Cesar Pelli, the museum added a second theatre and doubled its gallery space for the 1.5 million visitors that it attracted each year. In 2002, while undergoing a refurbishment at a cost of US$425 million (£225 million), the museum temporarily relocated to the Museum of Modern Art QNS, a converted factory across the East River in Queens, Long Island, close to its sister gallery the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, with which it entered into a merger in 1999. The museum returned to West 53rd Street in 2004. The renovated building, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, opened with twice its previous capacity.

In the museum's vast collections are paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings that give a complete overview of the major figures and trends in art from the 1880s to the present; photographs from the pioneers of the mid-19th century to the recent masters; and, in the design collection, two motor cars and a helicopter. The sculpture garden at West 53rd Street, with its pleasing combination of fountains, trees, reflecting pools, and sculptures, has been very popular with visitors.

Reviewed by: Museum of Modern Art