Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The Museum of Modern Art has been founded in 1929 as an educational institution by the three arts collectors Lilli P. Bliss, Miss Cornelius J. Sullivan and Miss John D. (Abby Aldrich) Rockefeller, junior. A few days after the market crash the MoMA in New York was opened, and the then 27 years ofd director Alfred H.Barr, jun., led it.
The intention of the three healthy women was to enable the encountering with arts to the people of New York. Also today the first museum of America continues in private hands, being exceptionally focused on the presentation and collection of contemporaneous art.
The first museum director Alfred H.Barr, jun. developed the museum's concept, which is still valid in its basic form. Core of the concept was to construct a house with several departments and to also use space for applied arts besides the so-called fin-arts. His museum should widely present cultural conception. The idea of also showing modern arts, especially the one of the 20th century in a museum, was known by the curator and president of the MoMA, Alfred H.Barr, jun. out of the crone prince palace in Berlin, the precursor of the new national gallery, where he worked before.
Barr was really delighted by the interdisciplinary approach, as it was exemplarily practiced by the Bauhaus in Dessau. The starting point of the museum was the idea of not only organizing a presentation of an already existing collection in a suitable presentation place, but also to make it possible to initially present and exhibit with loans in the Museum of Modern Art, whereby also American contemporaneous art would be presented besides European modern one.
The creation of the exposition ran schematically only from 1931. Today the museum includes the following curatorial departments: paintings and plastics; drawings; print graphic and illustrated books; architecture and design; photography as well as film, including video.
After the 70 million US $ expensive restoration of the Museum of Modern Art between 2002 and 2004, it has been reopened on the 20th of November in Manhattan.
Besides well-known artworks of famous painters, such as Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Otto Dix, Pail Gaugin, Vincent van Gogh or Roy Lichtenstein, to only name a few, the permanent exposition also includes works of famous architects and designers, such as for example from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Sapper, E ttore Sottsass, Alvar Aalto, Peter Behrens, Richard Riemerschmid, the brothers Thonet, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames and much more famous and pioneering designers.