Museum of Modern Art

The museum was the idea of three women: Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who conceived it in 1929. They took modest rooms on a floor of the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, and the doors opened on the seventh of November that year, less than two weeks after the Wall Street Crash.

Alfred H. Barr Jr., a young protégé put forward by Paul Sachs at Goodyear's request, was suggested as director. In November 1929, the same month it opened, its first successful loan exhibition showed paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Seurat.

The permanent home went up on 53rd Street: a building in the International Style by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, which opened in May 1939 before 6,000 guests and a radio address from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Philip Johnson reshaped the garden in 1953, and it still carries the founding benefactor's name.

Six departments now run the collection, from Architecture and Design to Film and Photography. It was under Barr that the museum became the first anywhere to set up curatorial departments for photography and for film, and the museum has been instrumental in shaping the history of modern art, particularly modern art from Europe.

Since the 2019 reopening, which added 47,000 square feet of galleries, the displays have dropped the old separation of painting from design and works on paper: the whole collection now runs as one chronology, every medium in the same thread. The holdings count more than 200,000 works, from drawing and printmaking to film and electronic media.

Photography sits inside the same story rather than beside it: Alfred Stieglitz's cloud photographs, made between 1925 and 1934; Hill and Adamson opened Scotland's first photographic studio in 1843. In Queens, the contemporary affiliate MoMA PS1.

The Starry Night, painted by Van Gogh in June 1889 from his room at the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, its village added from imagination, has hung here since 1941 through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, the trust of the museum's own co-founder. Rousseau's dream of a lion musing over a recumbent woman on a moonlit night arrived in 1939, the gift of Olga Guggenheim.

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, five nude figures in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, painted in 1907, forms part of the permanent collection. Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, the melting clocks of 1931, came in 1934 by an anonymous hand and has never left.

Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950, one of the largest and most prominent examples of his drip-style work; Wyeth's Christina's World of 1948; Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, painted after his 1940 arrival in New York; Warhol's 32 soup-can panels of 1961 and 1962; and Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl of 1963.