The Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA) New York City ~ The Most Influential Museum Of Modern Art In The World

Written by Howard Glanser Saturday, 19 February 2011 00:37

The Museum of Modern Art (stylized MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview in modern and contemporary art, 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. When The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929, its founding Director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended the Museum to be dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time, and that it might provide New York with "the greatest museum of modern art in the world." The public's response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and over the course of the next ten years, the Museum moved three times into progressively larger temporary quarters, and in 1939 finally opened the doors of the building it still occupies in midtown Manhattan. 1951 the Grace Rainey Rogers Annex, designed by Philip Johnson (winner of the inaugural Pritzker Prize for architecture) opened beside the original building and MoMA later expanded into neighbouring buildings that it acquired. In 1984, a major renovation designed by famous Argentinian archiect Cesar Pelli doubled the Museum's gallery space, enhanced visitor facilities and added a residential tower above the museum. On May 21, 2002 the museum closed for extensive rebuilding works, the largest and most ambitious building project in its history. This project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new MoMA features 640,000 square feet of new and redesigned space and opened to the public on November 20, 2004. 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 Building, containing classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the Museum's expanded Library and Archives subsequently in November 2006. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Visit The Museum of Modern Art / MoMA at : www.moma.org/

The rich and varied collection of The Museum of Modern Art constitutes one of the most comprehensive and panoramic views into modern art in the world. From an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing, The Museum of Modern Art's collection has grown to include over 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. MoMA also owns approximately 22,000 films and four million film stills, and MoMA's Library and Archives, the premier research facilities of their kind in the world, hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, and extensive individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The collection houses a number of important and familiar works including; “The Dance I”, “The Plum Blossoms” and “View of Notre-Dame” by Henri Matisse, “The City Rises” by Umberto Boccioni, “The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali, “Broadway Boogie Woogie” by Piet Mondrian, “Paintin” by Francis Bacon, “Starry Night” and “The Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background” by Vincent van Gogh, “The Sleeping Gypsy” and “The Dram” by Henri Rousseau, “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” by Pablo Picasso, “Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, “Te aa no areois” (The Seed of the Areoi) by Paul Gauguin, the “Water Lilies” triptych by Claude Monet, “The Bather” by Paul Cézanne, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” and “Broken Obelisk” by Barnett Newman”Flag” by Jasper Johns, “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale” by Max Ernst and “Suprematist Composition: White on White” by Kazimir Malevich. 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, Stanley Spencer, 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, as well as an important film collection under The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video. The film collection owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies, including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but the department's holdings also contain many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's “eight-hour Empire” and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's “All Is Full of Love”. MoMA also has an important design collection, which includes works from such legendary designers as Paul László, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection also contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter.

Amongst approximately 20 temporary exhibitions currently on view at MoMA, “Abstract Expressionist New York” (until 25^th April 2011) is the largest. More than sixty years after the critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker in 1946, first used the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe the richly colored canvases of Hans Hofmann. Over the years the name has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as diverse as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. Beginning in the 1940s, works by these artists began to enter the Museum’s collection and continued throughout the second half of the last century, producing a collection of Abstract Expressionist art of unrivaled breadth and depth. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s vast holdings, “Abstract Expressionist New York” underscores the achievements of a generation that catapulted New York City to the center of the international art world during the 1950s, and left as its legacy some of the twentieth century’s greatest masterpieces. Galleries on the fourth floor present Abstract Expressionist paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, films, and archival materials in a display subtitled “The Big Picture”, marking the first time in the history of the new Museum building that a full floor has been devoted to a single theme. The exhibition continues on the floors below, where focused shows (“Rock Paper Scissors” in the second-floor Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries, and “Ideas Not Theories” in the third-floor Drawings Galleries) reveal distinct facets of the movement as it developed in diverse mediums, adding to a historical overview of the era and giving a sense of its great depth and complexity. “Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914” is on view until 6^th June 2011. Sometime between October and December 1912, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) made a guitar. Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued, Picasso’s silent instrument resembled no sculpture ever seen before. In 1914 the artist revisited his fragile papery construction in a more fixed and durable sheet metal form. These two Guitar sculptures, both gifts from the artist to MoMA, bracket an incandescent period of material and structural experimentation in Picasso’s work. “Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914” explores this breakthrough moment in 20th-century art, and the Guitars’ place within it. Bringing together some 70 closely connected collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs assembled from over 30 public and private collections worldwide, this exhibition offers fresh insight into Picasso’s cross-disciplinary process in the years immediately preceding World War I. “On to Pop” ( until April 25, 2011) highlights the use of everyday objects in Pop Art. In 1955 the influential critic Clement Greenberg published the essay, “American-Type Painting,” hailing the anti-mimetic and monumental canvases of Abstract Expressionist artists as the most advanced form of painting then practiced. That same year, the twenty-five-year-old artist Jasper Johns painted an American flag, a familiar, iconic emblem. Rendered in wax encaustic and augmented with collage, the work’s tactile, painterly surface and allover compositional structure engaged the visual language of Abstract Expressionism while pointing in a new direction. “On to Pop” features familiar objects and images we encounter in our daily lives. In addition to a flag, there are stockings, comics, and movie stars—in works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and others. Collectively these artists came to define American Pop art, a very different kind of “American-type” painting, which by the late 1960s had eclipsed Abstract Expressionism’s dominance on the New York scene.