History of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City

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The Museum of Modern Art, better known as MoMA, stands at 11 West 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Since its founding in 1929, the museum has become one of the world’s most influential institutions devoted to modern and contemporary art, helping shape the way generations of visitors understand painting, sculpture, photography, film, architecture, design, performance, and other forms of visual expression.

MoMA began without a permanent building and with an extraordinarily ambitious idea. Three patrons, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, believed New York needed a museum devoted specifically to modern art. Their experiment opened only days after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. From six rooms in a Midtown office building, the institution grew into a museum whose collection now includes approximately 200,000 works and whose campus has been rebuilt and expanded repeatedly over nearly a century.

Who Founded the Museum of Modern Art?

The Museum of Modern Art was created in 1929 through the efforts of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They were joined by original trustees including A. Conger Goodyear, Paul J. Sachs, Frank Crowninshield, and Josephine Boardman Crane.

The new museum rented space on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 57th Street. It opened to the public on November 7, 1929, just days after the stock-market crash. Its first exhibition, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, consisted entirely of borrowed works and attracted more than 47,000 visitors during its one-month run.

Abby Rockefeller’s husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was initially skeptical of the project, but the Rockefeller family’s support later became central to MoMA’s growth. Abby remained one of the institution’s defining figures, and her sons Nelson and David Rockefeller would both play major roles in its development.

Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Early Vision for MoMA

A. Conger Goodyear became the museum’s first president, and the trustees hired Alfred H. Barr Jr. as founding director. Barr’s vision was broader than simply hanging modern paintings on gallery walls. He wanted MoMA to treat multiple forms of visual culture as serious art and to create departments devoted to different media.

The museum’s first decade reflected that ambition. Its program expanded beyond painting and sculpture to architecture, design, photography, and film. MoMA established a Department of Architecture in 1932, an important early institutional commitment to treating modern architecture and design as museum subjects.

Film became another major part of MoMA’s identity. The Film Library was established in 1935, with Iris Barry serving as its first curator and John Hay Whitney as its first chairman. The program helped preserve, collect, and present motion pictures at a time when many museums still did not consider film part of the fine arts.

MoMA’s Early Exhibitions Build Its Reputation

MoMA’s exhibition program quickly established the young museum as an important force in modern art. A major Vincent van Gogh exhibition opened in November 1935 and drew enormous public interest. The museum also presented influential exhibitions devoted to Cubism, abstract art, Dada, Surrealism, photography, industrial design, architecture, and other subjects that traditional museums often treated cautiously or ignored entirely.

One of the institution’s most important early exhibitions was Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, organized by Alfred Barr and presented from November 15, 1939, through January 7, 1940. The exhibition brought together an extraordinary body of Picasso’s work and helped establish a framework through which American audiences and scholars understood his career.

In 1941, MoMA presented Indian Art of the United States, organized by Frederic H. Douglas and René d’Harnoncourt. The exhibition treated Native American objects as works of art rather than simply ethnographic artifacts, although its methods and language also reflected the assumptions of its era.

The Permanent MoMA Building Opens on 53rd Street

During its first ten years, MoMA moved through several temporary locations as its audience and programs expanded. The institution finally opened its permanent home at 11 West 53rd Street on May 10, 1939.

The building was designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. Its white marble exterior, glass-walled ground level, translucent gallery glazing, and horizontal strip windows created a striking modernist contrast with the traditional Midtown townhouses that surrounded it.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt marked the opening with a radio address from the White House. The museum’s tenth-anniversary exhibition, Art in Our Time, opened the same day.

The Rockefeller Family and MoMA

The Rockefeller family’s relationship with MoMA became increasingly important as the museum grew. John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually supported the institution with land and other assistance, while Abby Aldrich Rockefeller remained deeply involved until her death in 1948.

Nelson Rockefeller became president of MoMA in 1939 at the age of thirty. He used his political, financial, and social connections to build support for the institution and later served in several additional leadership roles. His younger brother David Rockefeller joined the board and eventually also became president of the museum.

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden became one of the museum’s most beloved spaces. An outdoor sculpture area had existed when the 1939 building opened, but Philip Johnson completely redesigned the garden in 1953 as a marble-paved “roofless room” with sculpture, pools, plantings, bridges, and terraces. It was named in honor of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

The 1958 Fire at the Museum of Modern Art

On April 15, 1958, a fire broke out on the second floor while workers were updating the museum’s air-conditioning system. According to MoMA’s own archival history, workers had stopped for a smoke break when a drop cloth caught fire and ignited open paint cans nearby.

The fire quickly filled the building with smoke. One electrician died and at least twenty-five people were injured. Museum employees helped move artwork to safety as visitors and staff evacuated the building.

One panel from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies was destroyed, while Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1948 suffered smoke damage. The disaster also helped lead to the creation of MoMA’s own Conservation Department, strengthening the museum’s ability to protect and restore works in its collection.

Art, Protest, and Controversy at MoMA

MoMA’s prominence has also made it a frequent target of artists and activists challenging the museum’s policies, trustees, collecting practices, and representation of artists.

In 1969, members of the Art Workers’ Coalition worked with MoMA staff on the antiwar poster Q. And babies? A. And babies., which used a photograph connected to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The museum’s board leadership withdrew institutional support before publication, but the Art Workers’ Coalition proceeded independently and distributed 50,000 copies. The poster was later displayed at MoMA as part of the 1970 exhibition Information.

Gender representation became another major issue. When MoMA opened its expanded building in 1984 with An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, only fourteen of the artists selected were women. The Women Artists Visibility Event organized protests outside the museum. The controversy became part of a broader art-world debate over the underrepresentation of women and helped create the climate in which the Guerrilla Girls emerged the following year.

Questions of provenance have also led to legal disputes. In 2007, heirs of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy pursued claims involving Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse at MoMA and Le Moulin de la Galette at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, arguing that the works had been sold under duress in Nazi Germany. The museums disputed those claims. The case was settled in 2009 before trial, the terms remained confidential, and both paintings remained in the museums’ collections.

In 2021, activists associated with Strike MoMA staged demonstrations criticizing the museum’s board, donor relationships, and what they described as toxic philanthropy. These protests continued a long history in which MoMA’s influence made the institution a central arena for arguments over who gets represented, who funds museums, and how cultural power is exercised.

Richard Hunt and the Push for Greater Representation

In 1971, MoMA presented The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, an important midcareer survey of the Chicago-born sculptor. An earlier version of this article described Hunt as the first African American sculptor to receive a major exhibition at MoMA, but that was not correct. Hunt was the second Black sculptor to receive a solo exhibition at the museum. The first was self-taught sculptor William Edmondson in 1937.

Hunt’s 1971 exhibition nevertheless came at an important moment, when artists and activists were pressing major museums to give greater attention to Black artists and other groups that had been underrepresented in institutional collections and exhibitions.

The 1984 César Pelli Expansion

By the early 1980s, MoMA once again needed more room. A major expansion designed by architect César Pelli opened in 1984. The project more than doubled the museum’s gallery space and added a new west wing, a second film auditorium, restaurants, and a bookstore.

The expansion was integrated with Museum Tower, a 52-story residential condominium building designed by Pelli. The arrangement was controversial because MoMA sold development rights as part of the project, but it gave the museum the additional space it needed while reshaping the 53rd Street campus.

The Yoshio Taniguchi Transformation and MoMA QNS

MoMA began another major rebuilding program at the end of the 20th century, selecting Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi to redesign and expand the Manhattan museum.

The 53rd Street building closed on May 21, 2002. During construction, the museum moved its exhibition program to MoMA QNS, a temporary facility in Long Island City that opened on June 29, 2002. That temporary museum remained the center of MoMA’s public operations until September 27, 2004.

The rebuilt Manhattan museum reopened on November 20, 2004. Taniguchi’s project created approximately 630,000 square feet of new and redesigned space and substantially expanded the museum’s galleries, education areas, research facilities, and relationship with the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building followed in 2006.

The 2019 Expansion Changes MoMA Again

MoMA’s next major transformation came through an expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. The project incorporated space connected to the neighboring 53W53 development and followed the controversial demolition of the former American Folk Art Museum building that MoMA had acquired on West 53rd Street.

The museum closed for several months in 2019 and reopened on October 21 with more than 40,000 additional square feet of gallery space. The expansion also introduced street-level galleries that could be entered without paid museum admission, new performance and education spaces, and a reorganization of the collection intended to place different media, periods, geographies, and artistic traditions in conversation with one another.

The 2019 reopening represented more than an architectural enlargement. MoMA also changed the way it presented its permanent collection, moving away from a strictly linear story of modern art and creating more frequent rotations intended to bring additional artists and perspectives into the galleries.

The MoMA Collection, Library, and Archives Today

MoMA’s collection has grown from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing to approximately 200,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, media and performance works, architectural models and drawings, design objects, and films.

Among the museum’s best-known works are Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, Henri Matisse’s Dance (I), and works by artists ranging from Claude Monet and Frida Kahlo to Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, Joan Mitchell, and many others.

The MoMA Library is a major research collection devoted to modern and contemporary art. Its holdings now include approximately 400,000 books and exhibition catalogs, more than 1,000 periodical titles, and over 90,000 files of ephemera on artists and groups. The Museum Archives preserves institutional records and other primary-source material documenting MoMA and the broader history of modern art.

The museum is led by Christophe Cherix, who became The David Rockefeller Director in 2025.

Visiting the Museum of Modern Art Today

MoMA is located at 11 West 53rd Street in Manhattan. The main entrance is on 53rd Street near Sixth Avenue.

The museum is currently open from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday through Thursday and from 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Fridays. It is closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

General adult admission is currently $30. Visitors age 16 and younger are admitted free. New York State residents can receive free admission during UNIQLO Friday Nights from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., although advance reservations are required.

Hours, admission prices, and special free-admission programs can change, so visitors should check MoMA’s official website before making a trip.

More New York Museum History

Readers can continue exploring New York’s museum history with our History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum History and Tour, History of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and visit to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. The museum’s Midtown story also connects naturally to our History of Rockefeller Center.

MoMA History at a Glance

Updated August 10, 2026.

History of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City article published on ClassicNewYorkHistory.com © 2026