The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. 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 idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 and opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. At the time, it was America’s premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism. The museum’s holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing.
Its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Seurat. The museum gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939-1940, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum’s retrospectives that were to follow. 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 four million film stills.
