Museum of Modern Art in New York
Founded
in 1929 as an educational institution, the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA,
in New York City is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art
in the world.
From an initial endowment of eight prints and a single drawing, the
Museum of Modern Art's collection has grown to include more than 150,000
paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural
models and drawings as well as design objects. In addition, MoMA owns
some 22,000 films, videos and media works, as well as film stills,
scripts, posters and historical documents. The museum's library contains
300,000 books, artists' sketchbooks and periodicals, and the archives
hold approximately 762 m (2,500 ft) of historical documents and a
photographic archive of tens of thousands of photographs, including views
of exhibitions and images of the museum's building and grounds.
Considered by many to have the best collection of modern masterpieces in
the world, MoMAs holdings include such notable works as Vincent van
Gogh's Starry Night, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Salvador
Dan The Persistence of Memory, Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, a
triptych of Water Lilies by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse's Dance, Paul
Cezanne's The Bather and Frida Kahlo's Self Portrait with Cropped Hair.
MoMA also holds works by leading American artists such as Jackson
Pollock, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close and Ralph
Bakshi. The museum's design collection includes works from Paul Laszlo,
the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson as well as many industrial
pieces ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1
helicopter.
The Museum of Modern Art seeks to create a dialogue between the
established and the experimental and the past and the present, in an
environment that is responsive to the issues of modern and contemporary
art, while being accessible to all visitors to this beautiful space.
