North America · United States
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
MoMA is the world's best-known museum of modern art, home to Van Gogh's Starry Night, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Dalí's melting clocks and Warhol's soup cans. It covers painting, sculpture, photography, design and film from the 1880s to today.
History of the museum
MoMA was founded in 1929 by three women, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who wanted a museum for the new art that other museums ignored. It opened just nine days after the stock market crash of 1929, in a rented space in an office building. Its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., built a collection that included film and design as well as painting, which was new at the time. MoMA moved to its present site on West 53rd Street in 1939 and has been expanded several times since.
Top pieces
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The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh, 1889 -
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Pablo Picasso, 1907
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The Persistence of Memory Salvador Dalí, 1931
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Water Lilies (triptych) Claude Monet, 1920
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Campbell's Soup Cans Andy Warhol, 1962
