Glenn Lowry, who served as the sixth director of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for 30 years before stepping down this month, once contemplated the true essence of his institution. His reflections painted MoMA as multiple things: a cherished sanctuary in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, a laboratory for learning, a space where today's most challenging art can be measured against recent achievements, and ultimately an idea embodied by its extraordinary collection.
The museum's collection was originally conceived by its first director, Alfred Barr, as "a torpedo moving through time," with its nose representing the ever-advancing present and its tail the receding past of 50 to 100 years prior. Initially, MoMA was envisioned as a feeder institution, similar to the Musée du Luxembourg's relationship with the Louvre, where contemporary works that proved their lasting value would eventually transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, however, MoMA's collection has grown to encompass more than 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photography spanning from 1872 to the present day.
From its humble beginnings in six temporary rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, which opened in 1929 just nine days after the Wall Street Crash, MoMA has undergone dramatic transformations. These include Lowry's ambitious incorporation of the contemporary art center PS1 in Queens in 2010 and the massive $450 million expansion of the main building on 53rd Street in 2019, which more than doubled the museum's size. Throughout these changes, founders, trustees, staff, and visitors have continuously questioned what the museum represents and whom it serves.
As Christophe Cherix, an internal appointee from the Department of Drawings and Prints, takes over from Lowry, these fundamental questions will need fresh answers from new leadership. "What makes us very different is our collection," Cherix remarked following the 2019 renovation. With this distinction in mind, here are ten essential works that establish MoMA as one of the world's premier art institutions.
**Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso** stands as Picasso's confrontational and psychosexual masterpiece, depicting five naked sex workers in Barcelona's red-light district. Two women push aside brothel curtains while three others strike erotic poses, their bodies fragmented and jagged like flesh-colored glass shards. Their faces appear warped and asymmetrical, with two figures on the right staring directly at viewers through faces inspired by African masks. By abandoning idealized feminine beauty and traditional perspective conventions, this painting foreshadowed Picasso's later Cubist style and remains a defining landmark of Modernist art.
**The Red Studio (1911) by Henri Matisse** showcases the artist's post-Fauvist middle period through his depiction of his atelier in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. "Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don't know," Matisse once remarked. "I find that all these things only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red." This Modernist interpretation of the traditional artist's studio also serves as a small retrospective of his previous works, some visible hanging on the walls. In 2022, MoMA organized an entire exhibition around this painting, reuniting The Red Studio with six surviving paintings depicted on its six-foot-by-seven-foot canvas, including the major Le Luxe II (1907) and lesser-known Corsica, The Old Mill (1898), plus three sculptures and one ceramic.
**Bicycle Wheel (1951, third version after lost original of 1913) by Marcel Duchamp** represents the French-born artist's first "readymade," predating his infamous Fountain—the porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" that caused a sensation at the Society of Independent Artists' inaugural New York exhibition in 1917. "An everyday object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist," Duchamp insisted. His readymades challenged both capitalism, which depends on buying and selling commercially produced objects with predetermined use-values, and centuries-old assumptions that art required skilled creators making original work. Duchamp's influence was later rediscovered by Pop and conceptual artists of the 1950s and 1960s.
**The Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico** exemplifies Surrealism's defining characteristic: juxtaposing familiar but unexpected objects to provoke unsettling viewer responses. The work draws inspiration from Comte de Lautréamont's 1869 poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror, which imagined "the beautiful chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table"—an idea that became central to 1920s Surrealists. Predating André Breton's formal movement foundation in 1924, de Chirico places a rubber glove, plaster head copied from a classical statue, and green ball beside a building in a piazza. De Chirico sought "enduring realities hidden behind outward appearances," believing modern artists must overcome logic and common sense to enter "regions of childhood vision and dream."
**Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936) by Meret Oppenheim** channels imagination through this strange fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, first conceived during a conversation between the 23-year-old Swiss-German artist, Picasso, and his muse Dora Maar at a Parisian café. Oppenheim wore a fur-lined metal bracelet and joked that anything could be covered in fur, including their drinking cups. Made from Chinese gazelle fur, Object embodies Surrealist fascination with how inanimate objects can assume living qualities and reveal hidden subconscious desires, while employing shock tactics against polite bourgeois social behavior.
**Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) by Frida Kahlo** captures the artist's rebellious response to her divorce from muralist Diego Rivera. After cutting her hair short, Kahlo depicted herself holding scissors, surrounded by her severed braid and chopped hair. She wears an oversized grey suit and crimson shirt—both Rivera references—instead of her usual traditional Mexican dresses. Musical notes from a Mexican folk song appear above the scene, with translated lyrics reading: "Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don't love you anymore." While Kahlo and Rivera reunited later in 1940, the painting powerfully represents her legendary self-possession, independence, and artistic flair.
**The Migration Series (1940-41) by Jacob Lawrence** chronicles the Great Migration, when over one million African Americans, including Lawrence's parents, left Southern poverty and prejudice for Northern industrial cities between 1916 and 1930. This epic 60-painting series tells the complex story of personal hardships, sacrifices, and opportunities accompanying this historic demographic shift. Lawrence experiments with various styles, from social realism to near-abstraction and comic-book narration, writing sentence-long legends for each painting to explain his depicted scenes.
**One: Number 31, 1950 (1950) by Jackson Pollock** defines Abstract Expressionism through Pollock's innovative drip technique, created by dropping, pouring, and flinging paint onto canvas spread across his Springs, Long Island studio floor. Critics debate the elusive meaning of Pollock's drips—some recognize attempts to capture post-war American anxieties and pleasures, as Pollock stated that "the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of past culture." Others identify nature's swirling rhythms and underlying order in Pollock's tangled patterns, supporting his response to accusations of not painting from life: "I am nature."
**Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) by Andy Warhol** immortalizes the Hollywood icon who died from a barbiturate overdose in 1962. Warhol used a publicity still from the 1953 noir thriller Niagara, shot in three-strip Technicolor, creating an image that would appear in many other Marilyns throughout the 1960s. Warhol painted the canvas gold, then used commercial silk-screening techniques to place Monroe's face on top. While gold has long symbolized religious devotion in Christian iconography, here Monroe transforms into a martyr pursued by a pernicious public. Warhol's iconoclastic work deconstructs the media-made star and celebrity-obsessed culture while celebrating the individual herself.
**American People Series 20: Die (1967) by Faith Ringgold** was painted during the "long hot summer" of 1967, marked by race riots and police violence eruptions in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere across America. Ringgold's mural-sized tableau depicts traumatized men, women, and children bloodied by knives and gunshots, lurching across the two-panel canvas. Everyone in this interracial scene suffers—none of the figures, despite their business suits and chic cocktail dresses, can control the engulfing madness. When MoMA reopened in 2019 with its radical rehang, curators placed Die in the same room as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, creating striking comparisons between the fleshy tones, treatment of women, and depiction of unsettling confrontation in both major works.
