Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art
Location of MoMA in New York City
Established	November 7, 1929; 83 years ago (November 7, 1929)
Location	11 West 53rd Street New York, NY 10019
Coordinates	40°45′41″N 73°58′40″W / 40.761484°N 73.977664°W / 40.761484; -73.977664
Visitors	2.5 million/year
Director	Glenn D. Lowry
Public transit access	Fifth Avenue / 53rd Street (E M trains)
Website	moma.org

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world.^[1] The museum's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art,^[2] including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.

MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses a restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther.^[3]It is considered one of the "big five" modern art museums in the U.S.

History [edit]

Heckscher and Other Buildings (1929-1939) [edit]

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.^[4] They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue (corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street) in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby 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.^[5]

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 Art 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 protege. 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.^[6]

First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building,^[7] on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband 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.^[8]

The entrance to The Museum of Modern Art

Yoko Ono, Wish Tree. Contributions to Yoko Ono's Wish Tree in the Sculpture Garden

During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, and poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".^[9]

53rd Street (1939-present) [edit]

1930s and 1940s [edit]

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.^[10]

When Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its 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 subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general 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 Senator Jay Rockefeller) currently sit on the board of trustees. 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 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.^[11].

1958 fire [edit]

On April 15, 1958, a fire on the second floor destroyed an 18 foot long 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 dropcloth. 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 painting including the Monet were left. Art work on the 3rd and 4th floors were evacuated to the Whitney Museum 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.^[12]

Expansion from 1983 to present [edit]

In 1983 the Museum more than doubled its gallery and increased curatorial department by 30 percent, and added an auditorium, two restaurants and a bookstore in conjunction with the construction of the 53-story Museum Tower adjoining the museum.^[13]

In 1997 the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi beat out ten other international architects to win the competition to execute the redesign of the museum, which after being closed in Manhattan for a time during the process (MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens acted as the museum's temporary location) reopened in 2004. Wish Tree, Yoko Ono's installation in the Sculpture Garden (since July 2010), has become very popular with contributions from all over the world.^{[citation needed]}

In 2007 the museum sold a lot on its west side to Hines Development for $125 million. Hines in turn announced plans to build Tower Verre, a skyscraper to be as tall as the Empire State Building. In 2009 the New York City Department of City Planning said the building could only be built if it was 200 feet shorter than the original plan. As of April 2013, the lot sits vacant.

In 2011 it acquired the American Folk Art Museum which adjoined its property to the east for $31.2 million.^[14][15] As of April 2013 the Folk Art Museum remains unused.

Artworks [edit]

Claude Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, c. 1920, 200 × 1,276 cm (78.74 × 502.36 in), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following:

• The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
• The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
• I and the Village by Marc Chagall
• The Dream (1910), by Henri Rousseau
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
• The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
• Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian
• Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
• Te aa no areois (The Seed of the Areoi) by Paul Gauguin
• Water Lilies triptych by Claude Monet
• The Dance by Henri Matisse
• The Bather by Paul Cézanne
• The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni
• Love Song by Giorgio De Chirico
• Number 31, 1950 by Jackson Pollock
• Vir Heroicus Sublimis by Barnett Newman
• Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman
• Flag by Jasper Johns
• Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth
• Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
• Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon
• Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale by Max Ernst

Selected collection highlights [edit]

• 

  Paul Cézanne, Bather, 1885–1887

• 

  Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

• 

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

• 

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

• 

  Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy – Zingara che dorme), 1897

• 

  Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

• 

  Henri Matisse, The Dance I, 1909

• 

  Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910

• 

  Henri Matisse, L'Atelier Rouge, 1911, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm.

• 

  Henri Matisse, View of Notre-Dame, 1914

• 

  Giorgio De Chirico, Love Song, 1914

• 

  Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918

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

MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, which included photos by Todd Webb.^[16] The department was founded by Beaumont Newhall in 1940.^[17] Under Szarkowski, it focused on a more traditionally modernist approach to the medium, one that emphasized documentary images and orthodox darkroom techniques.

Film [edit]

In 1932, museum founder Alfred Barr stressed the importance of introducing "the only great art form peculiar to the twentieth 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."^[18]

The 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, various TV commercials, and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's All Is Full of Love.

Architecture and Design [edit]

MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design was founded in 1932^[19] as the first museum department in the world dedicated to the intersection of architecture and design.^[20] The department's first director was Philip Johnson who served as curator between 1932–34 and 1946-54.^[21]

The collection consists of 28,000 works including architectural models, drawings and photographs.^[19] One of the highlights of the collection is the Mies van der Rohe Archive.^[20] It also includes works from such legendary designers as Paul László, the Eameses, 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 which is to range from Spacewar! (1962) to Minecraft (2011).^[22]

Exhibition houses [edit]

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^[23]
• 1955: Japanese exhibition house
• 2008: Prefabricated houses planned^[24][25] by:
  • Kieran Timberlake Architects
  • Lawrence Sass
  • Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier
  • Leo Kaufmann Architects
  • Richard Horden

Renovation [edit]

MoMA's midtown location underwent extensive renovations in the early 2000s, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening to the public in a building redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi along with Kohn Pedersen Fox, on November 20, 2004. From June 29, 2002 until September 27, 2004, a portion of its collection was on display in what was dubbed MoMA QNS, a former Swingline staple factory in Long Island City, Queens.

The expansion, including an increase in MoMA’s endowment to cover operating expenses, cost $858 million in total.^[26] The project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs and features 630,000 square feet (59,000 m²) of new and redesigned 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 on the eastern portion provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the museum's expanded Library and Archives. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

The architecture of the renovation is controversial. At its opening, some critics thought that Taniguchi's design was a fine example of contemporary architecture, while many others were extremely displeased with certain aspects of the design, such as the flow of the space.^[27][28][29]

Museum of Modern Art is selling its last vacant parcel of land in Midtown for $125 million to Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston.

Management [edit]

Attendance [edit]

MoMA has seen its average number of visitors rise to 2.5 million from about 1.5 million a year before its new granite and glass renovation. In 2009, the museum reported 119,000 members and 2.8 million visitors over the previous fiscal year.^[30] MoMA attracted its highest-ever number of visitors, 3.09 million, during its 2010 fiscal year;^[31] however, attendance dropped 11 percent to 2.8 million in 2011.^[32]

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.^[33]

Admission [edit]

MoMA's reopening brought controversy as its admission cost increased from US$12 to US$20, making it one of the most expensive museums in the city; however it has free entry on Fridays after 4pm, thanks to sponsorship from Target Stores. Also, many New York area college students receive free admission to the museum. As of October, 2012, admission fees for MoMA at its Midtown Manhattan location are as follows: Adults $25. Seniors (65 and over with ID) $18. Students (full-time with current ID) $14. Children (16 and under) Free (note that this policy does not apply to children in groups). Members, Free. Guests of Members, $5 (limit of five per visit).

Finances [edit]

A private non-profit organization, MoMA is the seventh-largest U.S. museum by budget;^[34] 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.^[35]

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.^[36] 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.^[37] An $858 million capital campaign funded the 2002-2004 expansion,^[34] with David Rockefeller donating $77 million in cash. In 2005, Rockefeller pledged an additional $100 million toward the museum's endowment.^[38] In 2011, Moody's Investors Service, a bond rating agency, rated $57 million worth of new debt in 2010 with a positive outlook and echoed their Aa2 bond credit rating for the underlying institution. The agency noted that MoMA has "superior financial flexibility with over $332 million of unrestricted financial resources," and has had solid attendance and record sales at its retail outlets around the city and online. Some of the challenges that Moody's noted were the reliance that the museum has on the tourist industry in New York for its operating revenue, and a large amount of debt. The museum at the time had a 2.4 debt-to-operating revenues ratio, but it was also noted that MoMA intended to retire $370 million worth of debt in the next few years.^[39] Standard & Poor’s raised its long-term rating for the museum as it benefited from the fundraising of its trustees.^[40] After construction expenses for the new galleries are covered, the Modern estimates that some $65 million will go to its $650 million endowment.

MoMA employs about 815 people.^[36] The museum's tax filings from the past few years suggest a shift among the highest paid employees from curatorial staff to management.^[41] The museum's director Glenn D. Lowry earned $1.6 million in 2009^[42] and lives in a rent-free $6 million apartment above the museum.^[43]

Officers and the Board of Trustees [edit]

Currently, the Board of Trustees includes 42 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.^[41] The Founders Wall was created in 2004, when MoMA’s expansion was completed, and features the names of 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.^[44]

Board of Trustees [edit]

Life Trustees [edit]

Directors [edit]

• Glenn D. Lowry (1995-)
• Richard Oldenburg (1972-1995)
• John Brantley Hightower (1970-1972)
• Bates Lowry (1968-1969)
• Rene d'Harnoncourt (1949-1968)
• No director (1943-1949) (job was handled by the chairman of the museum's Coordinaton Committee and Director of Curatorial Department)^[45][46]
• Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1929-1943)

Chief Curators [edit]

• Klaus Biesenbach Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large from 2009
• Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design from 2007
• Sabine Breitwieser, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art from 2010
• Connie Butler, Chief Curator of Drawings from 2005
• Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography from 2012
• Rajendra Roy, Chief Curator of Film from 2007
• Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture from 2008
• Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books from 2010

Controversies [edit]

In 1969 the Art Workers Coalition (AWC), 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,^[47] created an iconic protest poster called And babies which depicts US soldiers as "baby killers." The poster uses an image by photojournalist Ronald L. Haeberle and references the My Lai Massacre. The Museum of Modern Art (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.^[48][49] 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.^[48] Both were "firm supporters" of the war effort and backed the Nixon administration.^[48] It is unclear if they pulled out for political reasons (as pro-war supporters), or simply to avoid a scandal (personally and/or for MoMA), but the official reason, stated in a press release, was that the poster was outside the "function" of the museum.^[48] Nevertheless, under the sole sponsorship of the AWC, 50,000 posters were printed by New York City's lithographers union. On December 26, 1969, a grassroots network of volunteer artists, students and peace activists began circulating it worldwide.^[48][49] Many newspapers and television shows re-printed images of the poster, consumer poster versions soon followed, and it was carried in protest marches around the world, all further increasing its viewership. In a further protest of MoMA's decision to pull out of the project, copies of the poster were carried by members of the AWC into the MoMA and unfurled in front of Picasso's painting Guernica (on loan to MoMA at the time) the painting depicts the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon innocent civilians.^[48] The poster was included shortly thereafter in MoMA's Information exhibition of July 2 to September 20, 1970, curated by Kynaston McShine.^[50]

See also [edit]

New York City portal

References [edit]

Further reading [edit]

• Allan, Kenneth R. "Understanding Information," in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice. Ed. Michael Corris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 144-168.
• Bee, Harriet S. and Michelle Elligott. Art in Our Time. A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art, New York 2004, ISBN 0-87070-001-4.
• Fitzgerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
• Geiger, Stephan. The Art of Assemblage. The Museum of Modern Art, 1961. Die neue Realität der Kunst in den frühen sechziger Jahren, (Diss. University Bonn 2005), München 2008, ISBN 978-3-88960-098-1.
• Harr, John Ensor and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988.
• Kert, Bernice. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New York: Random House, 1993.
• Lynes, Russell, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Athenaeum, 1973.
• Reich, Cary. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908–1958. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
• Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002.
• Schulze, Franz. Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Press 1998, ISBN 0-262-19402-3.
• Wilson, Kristina. The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925-1934. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
• Glenn Lowry. The Museum of Modern Art in this Century. 2009 Paperback: 50 pages.

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: The Museum of Modern Art

• Official website
• The Museum of Modern Art Online Retail Store
• Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: Patron of the modern
• New York Times, 2007: Donors Sweetened Director's Pay At MoMA, Prompting Questions Controversy over the compensation package of MoMA's Director, Glenn D. Lowry.
• Taniguchi and the New MOMA
• Museum Conservation Lab Renovation

Coordinates: 40°45′41″N 73°58′40″W / 40.761484°N 73.977664°W / 40.761484; -73.977664