Музей современного искусства, МОМА читать ~5 мин.

One of the best galleries of contemporary art in the world, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is located on 53rd Street, Manhattan, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. One of three internationally acclaimed art venues in the city - the others being the Samuel R Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art - MoMA is considered by curators and historians to have one of the finest collections of modern art in the world. Its permanent collection provides students and visitors with a unique overview of modernism and its evolution since the era of Impressionism.

It features many of the greatest examples of fine art painting, by American and European artists, such as:

See also our article: How To Appreciate Paintings.

In addition to its collection of some of the greatest 20th century paintings, MoMA’s collection includes works of drawing, mixed media, printmaking, architecture and design, illustrated books, fine art photography, film and electronic media, as well as works of sculpture by nearly all the great modern European sculptors.

During the late 1920s, three progressive patrons of fine art - Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) along with two of her friends, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Miss Lillie P. Bliss - perceived a need for a new type of museum dedicated to fine art of the late-19th and early-20th century. Accordingly, they invited A. Conger Goodyear, a former president of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new Museum of Modern Art. Other members of the team duly included Paul J. Sachs, curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and Alfred H. Barr Jr., who became Museum Director. Under Barr’s supervision, the museum’s collection rapidly increased from an initial donation of eight prints and one drawing, and opened to the public on November 7, 1929 with a loan exhibition featuring works by Post-Impressionists Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, and Georges Seurat.

The venture met with huge success and over the next decade the Museum was obliged to relocate on three occasions into larger premises, before finally in 1939 settling into the building it now occupies in mid-town Manhattan. (See also: American Architecture 1600-present.) From the outset, the idea was to create a series of separate art departments encompassing architecture, film and photography, as well as the more traditional painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints. Meantime, during the early years of development, MoMA held a number of major art shows, including the Vincent van Gogh exhibition in November 1935, the celebrated Picasso retrospective of 1939-40, which was staged in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago.

The relationship between the museum and the Rockefeller family continued to be close: in 1937, MoMA moved into offices and galleries in the Time & Life Building in the Rockefeller Center. Then, in 1939, the 30-year old Nelson Rockefeller became MoMA’s President, overseeing the museum’s acquisitions policy and expansion into new headquarters. Nelson’s brother, David, took over the presidency when Nelson was elected Governor of New York in 1958. This period witnessed a number of expansions, during the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1984, a major renovation doubled the Museum’s gallery space and greatly improved the available facilities.

In the early 2000s, the museum underwent the most ambitious renovation in its history, doubling its available display space. Designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, the western side of the complex, housing The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building, now contains the main display galleries, while The Lewis B and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building to the east has been greatly expanded to house a series of classrooms, auditoriums, workshops and studios, as well as the museum’s archives and library. Between these two buildings sits the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, with its masterpieces by Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Richard Serra.

Although not devoid of controversy, MoMA’s recent granite and glass renovation has coincided with a significant rise in the number of visitors to the museum - from roughly 1.5 million to 2.5 million per annum.