MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Description

Essentials about the Museum of Modern Art in brief

Fans of modern art will not be able to avoid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA for short) in New York City, as the museum, located in Midtown Manhattan, is one of the world’s most important and influential collections of modern and contemporary art. The collection includes works of architecture and design, drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, illustrations, films and electronic media. In addition, a 300,000-volume library is part of the Museum of Modern Art. It’s no wonder that MoMa is one of the most visited art museums in the world, with almost three million visitors a year.

The history of the Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art was founded by three art collectors and patrons, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who recognized in the late 1920s that the United States lacked an institution for modern and contemporary art in addition to the art history-oriented museums. At their instigation, the Museum of Modern Art was opened in 1929. The museum was well received by the public and moved three times in the following ten years to provide more exhibition space. In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art moved into the building at its present location on 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. Architects were Edward Durell Stone and Philip Goodwin, who created the first modern museum building with the minimalist building.

From the beginning, the conception and organization of the museum included a division into different departments for the various genres of art. This division was maintained and further strengthened as the collection continued to expand. The number of artworks increased rapidly from eight prints and one drawing at the beginning of the museum to more than 150,000. In addition, films and a considerable number of stills from films were also acquired. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s, the building de MoMa was expanded and renovated several times. Between 2002 and 2004, under the direction of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, the building was remodeled and expanded at a cost of $860 million.

The collections of the Museum of Modern Art

General information on the collections

The Museum of Modern Art’s collection includes over 150,000 works of architecture and design, drawings, paintings, sculptures by Alice Aycock, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, photographs, prints and illustrations, among others. In addition, there are some 22,000 films, four million still images from films, as well as video art such as by Valie Export, Lutz Mommartz, Pipilotti Rist and Julian Rosefeldt, and other electronic media.

Design object and drawings

Among other things, the Museum of Modern Art exhibits design objects of everyday use such as chairs or a VW Beetle developed by Ferdinand Porsche. Furthermore, drawings by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Nataliya Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky and Egon Schiele. Among them are also works by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp and Andy Warhol.

Paintings

The collection of paintings includes works of Impressionism and Late Impressionism by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. With Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oskar Kokoschka, works of German Expressionism are also represented. The collection also includes paintings by Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Pablo Picasso. With Jackson Pollock’s works, works of Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism are also represented in the collection. Likewise, Pop Art with works by Roy Liechtenstein and Andy Warhol is part of the MoMa collection.

Computer games

One of the newest genres of art collected and exhibited by MoMA as part of its design department is computer games. Among them are mainly classics of games history such as Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Myst, SimCity, The Sims and Minecraft.

Special exhibitions

From the beginning, special exhibitions on specific art styles, art genres, and the work of individual artists have also been a focus of MoMa’s museum work. Many of these exhibitions have written art history – in both senses of the word – by discovering art movements in museums and coining new terms.