Museum of Modern Art
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a preeminent art museum located in in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It is regarded as the leading museum of modern art in the world. Its collection includes works of architecture and design, drawings, painting and sculpture, photography, prints and illustrated books, film, and media.
MoMA's library and archives are a major resource and hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art.
MoMA is complementary to and sometimes considered a sister museum to the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art, although the latter is a general art museum, where modern art is only one area of specialization.
Artworks
Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following:
- The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
- The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
- The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (currently on loan, will return 6/2008)
- Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian
- Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
- The Seed of the Areoi by Paul Gauguin
- Water Lilies triptych by Claude Monet
- The Dance (painting) by Henri Matisse
- The Bather by Paul Cézanne
- "Three Musicians" by Pablo Picasso
- "Love Song (Giorgio de Chirico)" by Giorgio De Chirico
- "One: Number 31, 1950" by Jackson Pollock
- Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth
- Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
- Shimmering Substance by Jackson Pollock
- Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon
It also holds works by a wide range of influential American artists including Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Chuck Close, Georgia O'Keefe, and Ralph Bakshi.
MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, 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 contains 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.