MoMA opened nine days after the 1929 crash
Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary Sullivan rented rooms in the Heckscher Building and launched America's first museum devoted solely to modern art while Wall Street was still reeling. Alfred Barr built departments for photography and film that older museums had never dared.
MoMA occupies Midtown Manhattan on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth. Its holdings stretch from the late nineteenth century to now—more than 200,000 works across architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, books, film, and electronic media—and helped define how Europe's modernism entered American memory. Conceived in 1929 by those three patrons ("the Ladies"), it opened 7 November 1929, nine days after the crash, with A. Conger Goodyear as president, Abby as treasurer, and Barr as first director. John D. Rockefeller Jr. initially opposed modern art and withheld money, forcing temporary addresses, yet later gave the permanent land. In 1939 Goodwin and Stone's International Style building opened on West 53rd with a sculpture garden; Franklin Roosevelt addressed the six-thousand-strong opening by radio from the White House.
Barr's 1936 "Cubism and Abstract Art" and the 1935 van Gogh show—sixty-six oils and fifty drawings plus letter excerpts—shaped public taste. The 1939–40 Picasso retrospective with Chicago's Art Institute cast Picasso as the era's master and set MoMA's retrospective template. In 1941 "Indian Art of the United States" reframed Native work for art museums. Nelson Rockefeller became president at thirty in 1939; David joined the board in 1948. Philip Johnson redesigned the garden in 1953 as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. A 15 April 1958 fire, sparked by workmen smoking near paint and sawdust, destroyed an eighteen-foot Monet Water Lilies and killed one worker; pieces including Seurat's Grande Jatte loan fled to the adjacent Whitney.
Growth never stopped. César Pelli's early-1980s project with Museum Tower more than doubled gallery space. Yoshio Taniguchi's later renovation nearly doubled exhibition room again; a 2019 expansion added still more. The library holds about 300,000 books and catalogs, over 1,000 periodicals, and more than 40,000 artist files. Attendance hit 2,190,440 in 2022 and over 2.6 million in 2024. MoMA's 1971 union has been called the first of its kind in the U.S. Controversies—from Cold War cultural politics to labor fights—sit beside the canon Barr assembled from eight prints and one drawing. The museum that started in six rented rooms still argues over what modern means.
Source: Museum of Modern Art
