Quick answer
The Museum of Modern Art, known as MoMA, is the modern-art museum on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, founded in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It holds more than 200,000 works and includes Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night in its permanent collection.
Full transcript
Three women, one small room
The Museum of Modern Art opened on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash, in rented rooms on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue. The idea belonged to three friends often nicknamed the adamantine ladies: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who believed modern art deserved a New York home. Abby, married to John D. Rockefeller Jr., is remembered as the driving force, and she recruited the young Alfred H. Barr Jr. as the first director. From six rooms it grew into the museum that, more than any other, told the story of modern art in the twentieth century.
The rooms that grew up around it
In 1939 MoMA moved to its permanent home on West 53rd Street, a clean International Style building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. The collection today holds more than 200,000 works — paintings, sculpture, design, photography, film — and the single most visited object in the building may be Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, painted in 1889 and in the permanent collection since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Around the same rooms grow Philip Johnson's Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden and, since the architect Yoshio Taniguchi expanded the building, nearly double the space the founding ladies could have imagined.
What to do with a few hours
Resist the urge to see everything; with more than 200,000 works in the building, MoMA works best chosen. Head up to the painting galleries, find the great van Gogh, then pick two or three rooms that surprise you and read the wall texts slowly. Step out into the sculpture garden at the end of the day, when the light drops and the fountain does most of the talking. If you want the crush, come on a free Friday evening, when midtown turns out for the reopened doors. Look longest at the one painting you already know — the difference between a picture and the version you carried in your head is the whole reason the place exists.