Museum of Modern Art

MoMA's advantage is depth inside a narrow definition of modern and contemporary, rather than breadth across all of art history: it does not attempt to hold antiquities, Old Masters or most of the world's decorative arts traditions, and instead concentrates roughly 200,000 objects into the period from the 1880s to the present across six media-specific departments. That concentration is why a single museum can hold The Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, The Persistence of Memory, Campbell's Soup Cans and Water Lilies within a few floors of each other -- a density of touchstone 20th-century works that few other single institutions match, even against much larger universal-survey museums with far bigger total collections.

The Museum of Modern Art was created in 1929 by three women -- Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller -- who thought New York's existing museums were too conservative to show the art of their own century. They brought in four more trustees, A. Conger Goodyear, Paul Sachs, Frank Crowninshield and Josephine Boardman Crane, and hired a 27-year-old scholar, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., as founding director. Barr's plan was for a multi-departmental museum organized by medium rather than by period, a structure the museum still uses: architecture and design, drawings and prints, film, media and performance, painting and sculpture, and photography are its six curatorial departments today.

The museum opened to the public on November 7, 1929, eight days after the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. Its first show, an exhibition of Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh built entirely from borrowed loans, drew more than 47,000 visitors in a single month. The collection itself began from almost nothing -- an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing -- and has grown since to roughly 200,000 works, of which more than 106,000 are catalogued online.

MoMA moved three times through temporary quarters in its first decade before opening the doors of its own building, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on West 53rd Street in 1939. That building has been added to repeatedly rather than replaced: Philip Johnson designed expansions in 1951 and 1964 along with the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden; Cesar Pelli's 1984 renovation doubled the museum's gallery space; and a much larger project designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, adding 630,000 square feet across the Peggy and David Rockefeller Building and the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, reopened in November 2004 after the museum spent two years operating out of a converted stapler factory in Long Island City known as MoMA QNS.

The most recent and most disputed expansion, designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro with Gensler, opened October 21, 2019, after a three-year, roughly 450 million dollar project that added about a third more gallery space and folded three new floors into Jean Nouvel's adjacent 53 West 53 tower. To make room for it, the museum demolished the American Folk Art Museum building next door, a 2001 structure by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien that MoMA had bought in 2011. The demolition, carried out in 2014, drew sustained criticism from architecture critics on the grounds that a museum with its own department of architecture and design was destroying a distinguished recent building for the sake of a uniform glass street front; Martin Filler's response in The New York Review of Books called it cultural vandalism, and critics writing in New York Magazine, Architectural Record and Vanity Fair made similar arguments from different angles, even as a smaller number of critics defended the decision on the grounds that the Folk Art Museum's cramped, low-lit interior had never worked well for showing art.

The painting and sculpture collection is the largest department by public profile, though not by object count: about 3,600 works spread across floor 5's Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries, covering the 1880s through the 1940s, and floors 2 and 4 of the David Geffen Wing, covering the 1940s to the present. The photography department, collecting since 1930, holds more than 35,000 works; architecture and design, the first curatorial department of its kind anywhere when it was founded in 1932, holds about 28,000 objects running from Arts and Crafts reform furniture to a helicopter; drawings and prints, in the collection since the museum's founding year, has grown to more than 11,000 drawings and over 60,000 prints and illustrated books; film holds more than 30,000 titles and 1.5 million stills, among them the world's largest collection of D.W. Griffith negatives, preserved off-site in Pennsylvania at the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center; and media and performance, the youngest department, formed in 2006 to collect time-based art made specifically for gallery presentation.

The 2019 reopening was not only a building project. MoMA used it to rehang its entire permanent collection, breaking from the department-by-department, roughly chronological sequence Barr had established in the 1930s in favor of galleries that mix media and juxtapose canonical works with pieces by women artists and artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America who had been left out of the collection's traditional story. Critics writing at the time treated the change itself, not just the results, as a subject: some read it as the museum correcting a genuinely narrow, male and largely European account of the twentieth century it had helped write in the first place; others argued that grouping works across media and geography without a chronological throughline traded one kind of clarity for a looser, harder-to-follow arrangement. Both readings agree the rehang was a deliberate departure from decades of settled practice, not a routine reinstallation.

Adult general admission rose to 30 dollars in October 2023, the first increase since 2011 and the same season the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art all raised their own prices, citing higher operating costs. Coverage of the increase, including a report in Hyperallergic, noted that a family of four now spends well over 100 dollars on tickets alone before food, transportation or the gift shop, and that the increase landed hardest on visitors without memberships or student and senior discounts. The museum's own answer to the affordability question is UNIQLO Friday Nights, free admission for New York State residents every Friday evening on a reserved-ticket basis, expanded to a weekly program in 2024-25; MoMA also honors a MoMA ticket at MoMA PS1 in Queens for free entry within fourteen days. Visitors who do pay full price consistently name crowding, not the art itself, as the main friction in a visit, concentrated around a small number of famous paintings and during the free evening hours.

MoMA's board of trustees has itself been a target of activism separate from anything inside the galleries. In the spring of 2021 a coalition of a dozen groups, organizing under the name Strike MoMA, staged ten weeks of demonstrations outside the museum, describing it as tainted by elitism and calling attention to the outside business interests of several board members, which the coalition said were connected to prison systems, border enforcement and environmental harm. The museum did not respond publicly to the coalition's specific allegations at the time. The episode sits alongside the Folk Art Museum demolition and the 2023 price increase as evidence of a recurring pattern in how MoMA is discussed outside its own press materials: praise for the collection runs alongside sustained scrutiny of the institution's money, its board and its relationship to its own neighborhood.

Visitors and critics converge on the same two points from opposite directions. On the strength of the collection there is little argument: the run from van Gogh and Picasso through Monet's late work to Warhol and beyond is treated as close to definitive for the history of modern art, and the museum's own visit guidance and independent travel platforms both put a serious visit at two to three hours minimum. The friction is over access: the cost of a ticket and the density of crowds around a handful of marquee paintings are the two complaints that recur most often, alongside a running argument, now more than a decade old, over how the museum has treated its own building and its neighbors on 53rd Street.