(established 1929)
The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York houses one of the world's leading collections of modern art and is centred on six curatorial departments: Architecture and Design, Drawings, Film and Media, Painting and Sculpture, Photography, and Prints and Illustrated Books. Over the first decade of its existence MOMA grew in size, moving three times before occupying a new, strikingly Modernist building in Manhattan designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone. This opened to the public in 1939 but was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to plans by architect Philip Johnson, including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. In 1984 the architect Cesar Pelli's designs included a new west wing and considerable renovation, leading to a further significant expansion of the gallery space and facilities. In the early 21st century MOMA embarked on a momentous building programme that sought to almost double its space, establish a new Education and Research Center, and provide expanded premises for its Library and Archives. MOMA's central Manhattan site was closed in 2002 to enable the new scheme to be completed by 2005, the museum's collections and exhibitions being made available to the public by opening a new museum (MOMA QNS) in a redesigned and renovated factory building in Long Island City in Queen's.
Originally founded in 1929 with the explicit intention of providing a contemporary alternative to the more traditional collections generally found in American museums and galleries, MOMA's first director was Alfred H. Barr Jr. Part of the original mission was ‘to encourage and develop the study of the modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and public life’. In pursuit of this aim the Department of Architecture and Industrial Art was established in 1932. The original ethos of this department reflected the tenets of Modernism as exemplified in the work of the European avant-garde, particularly those architects and designers associated with the Bauhaus in Germany. In 1934, the year in which the Design Collection was formally inaugurated, the first firmly design-oriented show was the Machine Art exhibition, curated by the architectural modernist Philip Johnson. Many industrial products, ranging from laboratory glassware to industrial insulators, were displayed as aesthetic objects and reflected the Modernist penchant for clean, machine-produced forms, characterized by a lack of decoration and a firm embrace of the ‘spirit of the age’. For much of MOMA's early existence a strong sense of moral didacticism pervaded its collecting and exhibiting outlook. Supporting ideas of ‘truth to materials’ and ‘honesty of construction’ that had emerged in the outlook of early design reformers such as Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin, and William Morris were reconciled to the symbolic embrace of 20th-century materials and mass production technologies. Such an outlook was underlined in the design exhibitions put on by MOMA during the 1930s and favoured the work of the European avant-garde rather than the more ephemeral, streamlined outlook of many everyday American products. This was implicitly echoed in the publication in 1949, by MOMA, of the second, enlarged, and more lavishly illustrated, edition of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. Eliot Noyes, a well-known industrial designer, had become Director of Industrial Design at MOMA from 1940 to 1942 and 1945 to 1946,
In 1941 he organized the Organic Design in Home Furnishing competition in which Charles Eames, assisted by his wife Ray and in collaboration with Eero Saarinen, won two prizes, one for a moulded plywood chair and the other for modular design. After Suzanne Wasson-Tucker's brief tenure as director of the Department of Industrial Design at MOMA, the post was taken up by Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The latter mounted a series of Good Design exhibitions from 1950 to 1955, organized in conjunction with the Merchandise Mart, Chicago, and wrote a number of morally charged texts as What is Modern Design? (1950). In it Kaufmann attacked what he saw as the materially excessive and over-indulgent styling of many contemporary American products compared to the clean lines of many of their European counterparts. Typifying these were the Olivetti products and graphic design seen in the Olivetti: Design in Industry exhibition of 1953 described in MOMA publicity as symbolizing ‘all the visual aspects of an industry, unified under a single high standard of taste’. Over succeeding decades there were growing critiques of what was increasingly seen as the restricted language of Modernism, an outlook sustained by the emergence of Pop, Radical Design in Italy, and a growing recognition of pluralism and diversity as realities of everyday life. MOMA's design collecting and exhibiting policies were also undermined by the lecture series delivered by Robert Venturi that culminated in the publication of his Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture (1966). Design policy was further shifted by the Argentinean Emilio Ambasz, Curator of Design from 1970 to 1975, who organized the landmark exhibition on Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in 1972. This showcase for Italian avant-garde design thinking explored the idea of objects as part of a total environment—rather than individual, stand-alone aesthetically self-conscious products. Since then MOMA's design collection has grown to more than 3,000 objects across a wide range of media, including furniture, industrial design, textiles, and a visually diverse collection of graphic design totalling more than 4,000 outputs including typography and posters.
