The Museum of Modern Art or MoMA is one of the premier contemporary art museums of the world. If you are planning to pay a visit, you may be interested in some of the most famous MoMA paintings that you can view at the art museum.
The museum has no shortage of famous paintings. World renowned art works draw in visitors to the museum’s galleries every day. The Museum of Modern Art has an evolving collection that contains almost 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art.
While there are so many art works to look at and enjoy at the Museum of Modern Art, here are five famous paintings at MoMA that you should definitely make it a point to see.
Famous MoMA Paintings that You Must-See
The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh
Arguably the most famous painting at MoMA and the chief reasons that some people will make a trip to the Museum of Modern Art is Vincent Van Gogh’s masterpiece The Starry Night.
Located on the fifth floor of the museum, The Starry Night is a brilliant image of the night sky, full of swirling stars that fill the darkness of the night. The draw of nature is juxtaposed beside the lights of the village, creating a contrast between the natural and the manmade in this captivating 1889 work.
What few may know is that The Starry Night, brilliant as it appears to be, was actually painted by Van Gogh while he was in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy where he spent 12 months.
Today, it still draws crowds who make their way up to the fifth floor to see one of the most famous paintings at MoMA.
Dance (I) by Henri Matisse
This was a study for a painting commissioned by Russian businessman and arts patron Sergei Shchukin. The final work is housed in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The painting is significant as it marks the point in Matisse’s career when he sought to adopt a simpler approach to painting, peeling back his approach to focus on line, color and form.
This switch in form took place against the backdrop of the rise of photographer. In Matisse’s mind, with the ability of photographs to capture details, the painter was now free to express emotion through paintings.
Dance (I) only makes use of four colors but still gives the figures fluidity and form.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have been very shocking when it was first unveiled by Picasso in his Paris studio in 1907. The painting was a departure from the usual style and composition of paintings and depicted five nude women composed of flat, splintered planes. The subject of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were sex workers in a brothel in Barcelona’s red-light district and presented an affront to the conventional ideas of beauty and what paintings were thought to be.
The painting draws on tribal and primitivism, jolting the viewer and challenging the standards of the day. The painting also shows the path that Picasso would take that would lead him to cubism in the future.
Some have also noted its similarity to other famous paintings like Paul Cézanne’s The Bathers and Paul Gauguin’s statue Oviri.
The painting is so significant that in July 2007, Newsweek published a two-page article about Les Demoiselles d’Avignon describing it as the “most influential work of art of the last 100 years”.
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
The Persistence of Memory is the quintessential surrealist work and is instantly recognizable. It is one of the main paintings that draw people to the Museum of Modern Art. Colloquially, you may find The Persistent of Memory being referred to as the melting clocks picture. Others have compared the scene to watching camembert being left outside for too long.
The idea behind Surrealism is the use of different methods to access repressed memories or ideas that remain hidden beneath the consciousness. Salvador Dalí, who was born in Spain, was a great admirer of Pablo Picasso. He was an eccentric character who painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931 when he was just 28 years old.
What a lot of people remark when first come face to face with The Persistence of Memory is how it is so much smaller than they thought it would be. Compared to some of the other works at the Museum of Modern Art, it almost looks like a postage stamp. You will have to get up close to it to see the details. These details include ants that are all over a closed time piece while the other clocks melt on a dead tree.
The Persistence of Memory draws out plenty of guesses by people who try to interpret it and give it meaning. However, Dalí himself said that he didn’t know the meaning of the art work. Instead, he referred to the melting clocks as the camembert of time. Still, this does not stop people who come to view the painting from trying to come up their own interpretation of what the symbols within the painting mean.
If you are wondering about how it ended up in MoMA, that is another mystery. It was given to the Museum of Modern Art by an anonymous donor. Thanks to this anonymous donor, visitor can get a close up look at one of the most famous modern art paintings to be found.
Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
This work by Andy Warhol takes the mundane and common and turns it into art. Made up of thirty two canvas, Campbell’s Soup Cans shows off the tin cans and their packaging, each of them similar except for the label of the soup inside. The thirty two canvases represent the thirty two flavors that sold by Campbell’s back in 1962 when the work was created. By making use of the ordinary as the subject of the work, Andy Warhold subverts the idea of art being something original and inventive.
Warhol himself said, “I don’t think art should be only for the select few,” adding on, “I think it should be for the mass of the American people.”
What may be of interest to know is that even though each of the paintings looks like it could have been mass printed as advertisements, each canvas actually hand painted by Warhol, creating a pop art work that still captures the imagination to this day.
Must-See Paintings at Museum of Modern Art, New York City
It is difficult to distill the numerous paintings found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City down to just five but we have done it! We are sure that there will be many other contemporary pieces that you will enjoy as you make your way around MoMA too!
If you enjoyed this story, we think that you will enjoy this other one about the works at The Metropolitan Art Museum or this one on interesting The Starry Night facts.
