Ten essential works of art to see at the Museum of Modern Art, New York – The Art Newspaper

Glenn Lowry, the sixth director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), who will be stepping down this month after 30 years at the helm, once posed the question of what exactly his museum was. He then offered his own answers, including “a cherished place, a sanctuary in Midtown Manhattan”, “a laboratory of learning, a place where the most challenging and difficult art of our time can be measured against the achievements of the immediate past”, and “an idea represented by its collection”.

MoMA’s collection was originally envisaged by its first director, Alfred Barr, as “a torpedo moving through time, its nose the ever advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago”. MoMA was then imagined as a kind of “feeder” institution, modelled on the Musée du Luxembourg’s relationship to the Louvre, so that once a contemporary work had stood the test of time it would be handed over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, MoMA’s collection spans more than 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography and more, from 1872 to the present day.

From its temporary quarters of six rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue (which opened in 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash), to Lowry’s ambitious incorporation of the contemporary art centre PS1 in Queens (2010) and the $450m expansion of the main building on 53rd Street (2019)—which more than doubled its size—MoMA’s founders, trustees, staff and visitors have been asking what the museum is, and who it is for. Now, as Christophe Cherix, an in-house appointee from the Department of Drawings and Prints takes over from Lowry, those questions will have to be addressed by a new leader.

“What makes us very different is our collection,” said Cherix after the 2019 revamp. With that in mind here are ten (just ten!) of the essential works that make MoMa one of the world’s foremost art museums.

1. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s confrontational and psychosexual masterpiece depicts five naked sex workers in Barcelona’s red-light district. Two of the women are pushing aside the curtains of the brothel while the other three strike erotic poses. Their bodies are fragmented and jagged, like shards of flesh-coloured glass, and their faces are warped or asymmetrical, with the two figures on the right staring back at us, their faces inspired by African masks. By jettisoning idealised notions of feminine beauty and banishing conventions of perspective, this painting is a precursor to Picasso’s later Cubist style and remains one of the great landmarks of Modernist art.

2. The Red Studio (1911) by Henri Matisse

“Where I got the colour red—to be sure, I just don’t know,” Matisse once remarked. “I find that all these things… only become what they are to me when I see them together with the colour red.” The artist’s depiction of his atelier in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux is an important painting of Matisse’s post-Fauvist “middle period”. It represents a Modernist take on the tradition of artists using their studios as a subject—and is a small retrospective of his previous work, some of which is shown hanging on the walls.

Unusually, an entire exhibition (organised by MoMA) was built around the painting in 2022. It reunited The Red Studio with the six surviving paintings depicted on its six-foot-by-seven-foot canvas. These included the major Le Luxe II (1907) and the lesser-known Corsica, The Old Mill (1898), as well as three sculptures and one ceramic.

3. Bicycle Wheel (1951, third version after lost original of 1913) by Marcel Duchamp

Pre-dating his infamous Fountain, the porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” which caused a sensation at the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917, Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel was the French-born artist’s first “readymade”. “An everyday object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist,” Duchamp insisted. His readymades were a challenge to capitalism, which relies on the buying and selling of commercially produced objects with pre-determined use-values, as well as the centuries-held assumption that art was the remit of only skilled creators making original work. Duchamp was rediscovered as an enormously influential inspiration for the Pop and conceptual artists of the 1950s and 1960s.

4. The Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico

Surrealism was partly defined by the juxtaposition of familiar but unexpected objects in paintings or sculptures, with the intention of provoking unsettling responses in the viewer. In his 1869 poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror the Compte de Lautréamont (the pen name of Uruguayan French writer Isidore Ducasse) had imagined the “beautiful… chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”, and his ideas became a major inspiration for the Surrealists in the 1920s. Pre-dating the foundation of the movement in 1924 by André Breton, in this work Giorgio de Chirico places a rubber glove, a plaster head copied from a classical statue and a green ball beside a building in a piazza. De Chirico sought out the enduring realities hidden behind outward appearances, and believed that the modern artist must overcome the interferences of “logic and common sense” and “enter the regions of childhood vision and dream”.

5. Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936) by Meret Oppenheim

Like de Chirico, Oppenheim channels the imagination with this strange furry cup, saucer and spoon, which was first imagined in a conversation between the Swiss German artist, then only 23, Picasso and his muse and lover Dora Maar, at a Parisian café. Oppenheim was wearing a fur-lined metal bracelet, and joked that anything could be covered in fur, including the cups they were drinking from. Made from the fur of a Chinese gazelle, Object speaks to the Surrealist fascination with the ways inanimate objects can take on living qualities and reveal hidden or subconscious desires, as well as the shock tactics the group used against polite bourgeois social behaviour.

6. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) by Frida Kahlo

Shortly after her divorce from muralist Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo cut her hair short. In this rebellious self-portrait she depicts herself holding a pair of scissors, surrounded by her severed braid and chopped hair. She is wearing an oversized grey suit and crimson shirt, both references to Rivera, instead of the traditional Mexican dresses she usually wears in her paintings. The musical notes from a Mexican folk song appear above the scene, and the translated lyrics read: “Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore”. While Kahlo and Rivera would reunite later in 1940, the painting has often been seen as a powerful artistic representation of her legendary self-possession, independence and flair.

7. The Migration Series (1940-41) by Jacob Lawrence

In the early decades of the 20th century a wave of African Americans left the poverty and prejudice of the southern states and made new lives in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of the north. Between 1916 and 1930 more than a million people moved, including Jacob Lawrence’s parents, in what has become known as the Great Migration. The epic drama of this series tells a clear but complex story of the personal hardships, sacrifices and opportunities that came with this historic demographic shift, and Lawrence experiments with a variety of styles, from social realism to near abstraction and comic-book narration. The latter can be recognised in the way he wrote sentence-long legends for each of the 60 paintings as explanations of what he had depicted.

8. One: Number 31, 1950 (1950) by Jackson Pollock

A defining work of Abstract Expressionism, One is a perfect example of Pollock’s “drip” period, when the artist used an innovative technique of dropping, pouring and flinging paint onto a canvas on the floor of his studio in Springs, Long Island. Critics still disagree over the elusive meaning of Pollock’s drips. Some have recognised an attempt to capture the anxieties and pleasures of post-war America, as Pollock said that “the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms… of past culture”. Others have identified in Pollock’s tangled skeins the swirling rhythms and underlying order of nature, such as the fractal patterns of coastlines or tree branches, which tallies with Pollock’s riposte to an accusation that he did not paint from life: “I am nature.”

9. Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) by Andy Warhol

An icon of the sexual revolution and the Golden Age of Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe died from a barbiturates overdose in 1962. Soon after, Andy Warhol used a publicity still for the 1953 noir thriller Niagara, which was shot in “three-strip” Technicolor, for this work, and the image would appear in the many other Marilyns he made in the 1960s. Warhol painted the canvas with a single colour (in this case, gold) and then used a commercial technique—silk-screening—to place Monroe’s face on top. While the resplendent colour of gold has been long associated with religious devotion in Christian iconography, here Monroe is transformed into a martyr who was pursued by a pernicious public. Warhol’s iconoclastic work deconstructs the star as made by the media and a celebrity-obsessed culture, while celebrating the individual herself.

10. American People Series #20: Die (1967) by Faith Ringgold

Painted during the “long hot summer” of 1967, which was marked by a wave of race riots and eruptions of police violence in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere in the US, Ringgold’s mural-sized tableau depicts traumatised men, women and children, who are bloodied by knives and gunshots, and lurch across the two-panel canvas. Everyone in this interracial scene is suffering: none of the figures, despite their business suits and chic cocktail dresses, have any control over the madness that is engulfing them. When MoMA reopened in 2019 with a radical rehang, curators placed Die in the same room as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, making a striking comparison between the fleshy tones, treatment of women, and depiction of unsettling confrontation in these two major works.