The story
One of the most famous things in the museum is a stuffed Angora goat with a car tyre around its middle, standing on a painted board. Robert Rauschenberg called it Monogram and worked on it through the 1950s, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm acquired it, which tells you the kind of place it set out to be. The museum opened in 1958 in an old naval drill hall on the island of Skeppsholmen, and under its first director Pontus Hultén it built an international reputation quickly, showing Americans like Rauschenberg and staging a large Marcel Duchamp exhibition when few museums bothered.
In 1998 it moved into a purpose-built home by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, low brick pavilions with lantern-shaped rooflights, still on the same island. The collection runs from Picasso and Dalí to Pollock and Matisse. Even the museum's logo is drawn from Rauschenberg's own handwriting.
