MoMA Art Icons
This premium collection was created by MoMA and UNIQLO through our partnership. Iconic works were selected from the Museum’s extensive collection and reimagined for everyday wear.
Ruth Asawa
Born on a farm in Southern California, Asawa began her arts education when she was a teenager, as she and her family were among the thousands of persons of Japanese descent who were forcibly incarcerated by the US government during World War II. It was at the internment camp that Asawa began taking classes in painting and drawing, ultimately enrolling at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school in North Carolina. Throughout her career, Asawa experimented with different mediums, including innovative looped-wire sculptures, and lithographs such as this flower print. Consistently inspired by curvaceous natural forms, Asawa captured vivacious natural blooms.
Paul Cézanne
“Painting from nature is not copying the object,” Paul Cézanne wrote, “it is realizing one’s sensations.” Still Life with Apples reflects this view and the artist’s steady fascination with color, light, pictorial space, and how we see. Here, as with his many other works, Cézanne concentrated on the visual and physical qualities of the paint and canvas and worked to capture the full complexity of how our eyes take in the sights before us. In this work the artist demonstrates that a still life can be more than an imitation of life—it can be an exploration of seeing and the very nature of painting.
Claude Monet
Claude Monet, a driving force of the Impressionist movement, documented the ever-changing French countryside throughout his plein air landscape work, made from observing nature. Monet drew endless inspiration from the plants, trees, and pond in his gardens at Giverny.
Paul Gauguin
When Gauguin painted Still Life with Three Puppies he was living in Brittany among a group of experimental painters. He abandoned naturalistic depictions and colors, declaring that “art is an abstraction” to be derived “from nature while dreaming before it.” The puppies’ bodies, for example, are outlined in bold blue, and the patterning of their coats mirrors the botanical print of the tablecloth. It is thought that Gauguin drew stylistic inspiration for this painting from children’s-book illustrations and from Japanese prints, which were introduced to him by his friend and fellow artist Vincent van Gogh that year.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Throughout her career, Taeuber-Arp showcased a remarkable precision that would become her hallmark across diverse artistic pursuits. In 1929, she moved from Zurich to Paris, and turned her attention to abstract paintings and painted wood reliefs that employ a reduced geometric vocabulary; these works display a tension between precision and playfulness that is characteristic of her artistic production, using circles, segments of circles, rectangles, and squares.
Liubov Popova
Liubov Popova is widely known for her abstract paintings, characterized by triangular and rectangular forms, along with superimposed lines that create dynamic, multidimensional designs. Popova’s approach to abstraction is reflected in her use of the term “architectonic,” as she treats planes almost as solid material entities. This allows her to construct monumental compositions that emphasize the interrelationships between individual elements.
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work is recognized for its emotive beauty and vibrant color. He painted with bold brush strokes and a sense of urgency, creating over 2,000 artworks in just a decade.
This image of the night sky was inspired by the view from Van Gogh’s window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where the artist spent 12 months in 1889–90 seeking reprieve from his mental illnesses. While the sky is based on observation, the picturesque village nestled below the hills was based on other views—it could not be seen from his window.