MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, as well as electronic media.

The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director.

[3] Major expansions in the 1980s and the early 21st century, including the selection of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi for a significant renovation, nearly doubled MoMA's space for exhibitions and programs.

[12][13] They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,[12] and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.

[18] First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the 12th floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building,[19] on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next 10 years.

[20] Under Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s direction, MoMA embraced a multidisciplinary approach to modern art by being the first museum to establish departments dedicated to photography and film.

Containing an unprecedented 66 oils and 50 drawings from the Netherlands, as well as poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success due to Barr's arrangement of the exhibit, and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".

[22] The museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its president, in 1939, at the age of 30; he was a flamboyant leader and became the prime instigator and funding source of MoMA's publicity, acquisitions, and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street.

[31][32] MoMA's board of trustees included Nelson Rockefeller and William S. Paley (head of CBS), who reportedly "hit the ceiling" on seeing the proofs of the poster.

), a demonstration of 400 women artists, was held in front of the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art to protest the lack of female representation in its opening exhibition, "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture".

[36]: 205  Taniguchi's initial plan called for two structures, one each to the west and east of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which was to be enlarged from its original configuration.

John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that the new structure "has the enchantment of a bank after hours, of a honeycomb emptied of honey and flooded with a soft glow",[54] while Roberta Smith of The New York Times said MoMA had an "overly refined building, whose poor layout shortchanges the world's greatest collection of Modern art".

[55] Witold Rybczynski of Slate wrote: "Most of what has been written about the new MoMA has lauded its minimalist interiors, which, even if they don't exactly disappear, have an opulently ethereal quality.

The building had been completed in 2001 to designs by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and was sold in connection with a financial restructuring of the Folk Art Museum.

[69] Around the same time as 53W53 was approved, MoMA unveiled its expansion plans, which encompass space in 53W53, as well as an annex on the former site of the American Folk Art Museum.

The plan would add 50,000 square feet (4,600 m2) of gallery space in 53W53, in a new annex designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and in the existing building, as well as expanded lobbies.

[72][73] Spread over three floors of the art mecca off Fifth Avenue are 15,000 square-feet (about 1,400 m2) of reconfigured galleries, a new, second gift shop, a redesigned cafe and espresso bar, and facing the sculpture garden, two lounges graced with black marble quarried in France.

The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following: It also holds works by a wide range of influential European and American artists including Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Aristide Maillol, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, René Magritte, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat and hundreds of others.

The MoMA photography collection consists of over 25,000 works by photographers, journalists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and amateurs, and is regarded as one of the most important in the world.

[87] Steichen's hand-picked successor, John Szarkowski (curator 1962–1991), guided the department with several notable exhibitions, including 1967s New Documents that presented photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand and is said to have "represented a shift in emphasis"[88] and "identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize".

In 1932, museum founding director Alfred Barr stressed the importance of introducing "the only great art form peculiar to the 20th century" to "the American public which should appreciate good films and support them".

The collection Whitney assembled with the help of film curator Iris Barry was so successful that in 1937 the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences commended the museum with an award "for its significant work in collecting films ... and for the first time making available to the public the means of studying the historical and aesthetic development of the motion picture as one of the major arts".

Plays Itself (screened before a capacity audience on April 23, 1974), various TV commercials, and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's All Is Full of Love.

[8] The MoMA's collection of artist books includes works by Ed Ruscha, Marcel Broodthaers, Susan Bee, Carl Andre, and David Horvitz.

[96] It also includes works from such legendary architects and designers as Frank Lloyd Wright,[99][100][101][102] Paul László, the Eameses, Betty Cooke, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson.

The descendants of the original owners sued MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which has another Picasso painting, Le Moulin de la Galette (1900), once owned by the same family, for return of the works.

In a joint statement, the two museums wrote: "we settled simply to avoid the costs of prolonged litigation, and to ensure the public continues to have access to these important paintings.

[135] The museum initially stated that the acquisition was not problematic, because its provenance researcher believed that the Matthiesen transfer was a repayment for debt, and not related to Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Even including the board's 14 "honorary" trustees, who do not have voting rights and do not play as direct a role in the museum, this amounts to an average individual contribution of more than $7 million.