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Museum
of Modern Art (MOMA), New York
http://www.MOMA.com/
New
York is a city with more than 750 galleries. Many of these
galleries are devoted to modern and contemporary art. New
exhibitions go up about every six weeks in galleries and
about every three months in museums.
Museum's
foundation goes back to 1929. It was in November, when the
museum opened its doors to the public. Based on Bauhaus
notion of the interrelation of arts, the collection came
to encompass different aspects of creativity. Thus today,
objects in the collection come under the supervision of
six departments:
Painting
and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books,
Architecture and Design, Photography and Film and Video.
At any given time, visitors have the option of viewing
several exhibitions mounted by various departments.
Forward
looking, this was the first museum to recognize motion
picture as an art form and to have begun collecting and
preserving films as early as 1935. Now, with more than
13000 films, it has the strongest international collection
in United States. MOMA was also a pioneer in recognizing
photography as an art form.
The
key figure in this enterprise was Alfred H. Barr, who at
the age of 27 became the first director. Before his
appointment, Barr had been the first person to teach
modern art in an American university and his course
essentially contained seeds for the ideas he was develop
in the museum.
For
several decades, Barr's view influenced the way modern art
was defined. His standards of scholarship continue to be
followed specially in Museum's publications, the most
important of which are catalogues accompanying every
exhibition. These are not mere checklists of exhibited
works but laborious productions with major texts, abundant
illustrations and scholarly material.
What
attract 1.6 million visitors every year to this museum is
the permanent collection combined with the series of
contemporary exhibitions. Relying on private funding and
in almost 70 years of its existence, MOMA has formed an
unparalleled collection of 20th century art, which it
continues or refine with new acquisitions.
Providing
a synoptic view of art in 20th century, this collection
begins with works by the generation of artists known as
Post-Impressionists, who came to maturity in 1880s. These
artists (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat) did not
constitute a school nor were they bound by a common style,
but each, after a brief impressionist phase, carved a
direction which became crucial to the development of art
in 20th century.
One
of the most popular paintings, in this section, is
"Starry Night", painted by the Dutch artist
Vincent Van Gogh, from his window at the asylum in South
of France, where he voluntarily committed himself in 1889.
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