THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART CELEBRATES ITS SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY
MoMA Open Free to the Public
November 8
In celebration of its 70th anniversary––and as a thank-you to the visitors who made 1999 one of the most successful years in its history––The Museum of Modern Art will waive its admission fees and open its doors to the public free of charge on Monday, November 8. The Museum will keep its regular hours, 10:30 a.m.–5:45 p.m.
This is an extraordinary opportunity to view ModernStarts, a probing, unconventional group of exhibitions that explore fresh ways of looking at and thinking about modern art. Focusing on the years 1880 to 1920, the exhibitions of ModernStarts avoid traditional presentations that organize works by chronology, style, medium, or school. Instead, they explore relationships and shared themes, as well as divergent movements and conflicting points of view, by juxtaposing works in new and often provocative ways. ModernStarts: People explores the myriad ways in which artists portrayed the human figure in paintings, sculptures, and photography, and includes works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and other renowned artists from the Museum’s collection. ModernStarts: Places demonstrates how particular sites, real and imagined, urban and rural, were conceived and represented by artists in the period between 1880 and 1920. The exhibition presents such works as Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (c.1920) and Joan Miró’s Birth of the World (1925). ModernStarts: Things, which examines the importance of the object in early Modernism, opens to the public on November 21.
The Museum of Modern Art opened to the public on November 8, 1929, in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, on the southwest corner of 57 Street. Six rooms on the 12th floor served as offices, temporary exhibition galleries, and a one-room library. The Museum was an instant success, hosting 47,000 visitors in its first month. Today, The Museum of Modern Art is visited every year by some 1.8 million people who come to see its art collection as well as to attend temporary exhibitions, film programs, and special events.
MoMA has the foremost collection of twentieth-century art in the world. From an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing given at its founding in 1929, the Museum’s collection has grown to include more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. MoMA also owns some 14,000 films and four million film stills, as well as more than 200,000 books, artist books, and periodicals. A still larger public is served by the Museum’s ambitious national and international programs of circulating exhibitions, its active publishing program, its library, and its educational activities, including its Web site, www.moma.org.
