Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art opened in November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash, which tells you something about the nerve behind it. It was founded by three women, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who were frustrated that New York's great museums would not take living, modern artists seriously. They started in a few rented rooms on Fifth Avenue with a loan show of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Seurat, and the idea caught on fast.

Its first director, Alfred H. Barr, then 27, gave the young museum its shape. He argued that modern art was one connected story running from Post-Impressionism through Cubism and abstraction, and he built departments not only for painting but for film, photography, design and architecture, which most museums treated as beneath them. That is why a chair, a helicopter or a typeface can share the institution with the paintings.

And the paintings are among the most reproduced on earth. Van Gogh's Starry Night, with its rolling night sky, was bought in 1941. Down the halls are Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the jagged 1907 canvas that opened the door to Cubism, Monet's wall-filling Water Lilies, Dalí's melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory, and Warhol's soup cans. The building itself has been rebuilt and enlarged several times on the same block of West 53rd Street, most recently in a 2019 expansion that added galleries and put more of the collection on view.