When in New York City: A modernist's enclave we know as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art

Mesmerized by Van Gogh's The Starry Night

The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York is a modernist's enclave.

I have a clear case of addiction. Art addiction. Like they say, once you start, you can’t stop. We haven’t left the art scene of the Big Apple yet. Why should we? The diverse offering of NYC in this field alone is mind-blowing. Best of all, these world-famous museums are a few paces apart. Why stop at one art house when you can have it all?

Straying from the Museum Mile and Central Park, we head down a few blocks to the Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Yes, it’s the direction of the luxury shopping district, and no, we are not visiting Giorgio, Coco, Louis, or Miuccia and their clique. There is just one more place we must see on the checklist before the paper bag filling spree.

Just one more stopover, then I call it a day. It’s on 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. This NYC attraction is where another celebrated art house stands—the Museum of Modern Art. It’s bigger, nearly double its original space, since it reopened in 2004 after an extensive two-and-a-half-year renovation. Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, who redesigned the granite and glass structure, was said to have created one of the finest samples of contemporary architecture on this project.

The concept and appreciation of art has transcended from the finer genre (painting and sculpture) to a broader range where creation and creativity are relevant. Art also embraces other disciplines to include architecture and design, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media. The Museum of Modern Art offers an unparalleled view of modern and contemporary art in these fields as well.

With an expansive collection of modern and contemporary opuses, the Big Apple art house we know as MoMA welcomed an expansion in 2004 and 2006. With a wider area available came more spaces for exhibitions and galleries to display more than 150,000 artworks considered by many to be the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, works by a wide range of influential European and American artists: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, The Dream by Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies Triptych, Henri Matisse’s The Dance, Paul Cezanne’s The Bather, and more. The infrastructure also accommodates research and learning areas, expanding the museum’s library and archives that contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art, holding over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists, and enlarging the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

MoMA’s collection does not stop there. Their holdings also contain the world-renowned art photography and film collections (approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills) under the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video, as well as an important architectural and industrial design collection (ball bearings to chopper!).

“The Ladies,” Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.), Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, couldn’t be more proud of how their vision and perseverance have evolved. From renting modest quarters around Manhattan in 1929 and making it the premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art in America to moving to its permanent home where it currently stands (on land donated by John Rockefeller, who was opposed to his wife’s idea of a museum and modern art), it comes to no surprise why the Museum of Modern Art, with its keen eye and constant efforts in developing and collecting modernist art that lures in more than two million visitors yearly, is often referred to as “the most influential museum of modern art in the world.”

Published in the Sun.Star Davao newspaper on March 03, 2011.