Museum of Modern Art
Updated January 6, 2026 -- MoMA, as it’s nicknamed, doesn’t want for masterpieces. This is where you’ll find seminal works by Picasso, van Gogh, Brancusi, Dalí, and Matisse, among others. But which ones you find here is often in flux: it’s the museum’s policy to rehang works throughout the museum every several months, so that the visitor experience is constantly shifting, based on the way different pieces interact with one another. It may also mean some favorites are taken off rotation (in 2019, there was a hubbub when Andrew Wyeth’s famed Christina’s Word was put in storage for several months). The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, one of the city’s most delightful spots to linger, tends to change less often.
Though there are many masterworks in the museum, be sure you give yourself enough time for the following highlights, which are always on view:
- Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which has an even more vivid impact when viewed in person, the thickness of the brush strokes making it as much sculpture as painting. Created a year before his suicide, when van Gogh was in an insane asylum, the painting is filled with premonitions of what was to come, the foreground taken up with a soaring cypress tree, symbol of death.
- Pablo Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, a massive brothel scene in which Picasso experimented with a number of art styles—look closely and you’ll see that one of the women’s heads looks like an African mask, another profile is taken from Egyptian art, the woman in the middle assumes a classical Venus-like pose, and a leg of one of the figures devolves into cubist abstraction. Reportedly, Picasso painted the work when he was suffering from syphilis, which may be why the women appear so threatening.
- Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory, in which watches melt and a long-nosed figure (some say it was a self-portrait of Dali, others think it represents an unborn baby) lies prostate on the ground. You may be surprised at how small this seminal work is.
Soaring sculptures by Brancusi, vibrantly colorful masterpieces by Matisse, Jackson Pollock’s splatter art, and painted metaphors by Magritte are among the other wonders of the museum’s collection, the most important in the world for art of this era.
Updated January 6, 2026 -- MoMA, as it’s nicknamed, doesn’t want for masterpieces. This is where you’ll find seminal works by Picasso, van Gogh, Brancusi, Dalí, and Matisse, among others. But which ones you find here is often in flux: it’s the museum’s policy to rehang works throughout the museum every several months, so that the visitor experience is constantly shifting, based on the way different pieces interact with one another. It may also mean some favorites are taken off rotation (in 2019, there was a hubbub when Andrew Wyeth’s famed Christina’s Word was put in storage for several months). The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, one of the city’s most delightful spots to linger, tends to change less often.
Though there are many masterworks in the museum, be sure you give yourself enough time for the following highlights, which are always on view:
- Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which has an even more vivid impact when viewed in person, the thickness of the brush strokes making it as much sculpture as painting. Created a year before his suicide, when van Gogh was in an insane asylum, the painting is filled with premonitions of what was to come, the foreground taken up with a soaring cypress tree, symbol of death.
- Pablo Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, a massive brothel scene in which Picasso experimented with a number of art styles—look closely and you’ll see that one of the women’s heads looks like an African mask, another profile is taken from Egyptian art, the woman in the middle assumes a classical Venus-like pose, and a leg of one of the figures devolves into cubist abstraction. Reportedly, Picasso painted the work when he was suffering from syphilis, which may be why the women appear so threatening.
- Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory, in which watches melt and a long-nosed figure (some say it was a self-portrait of Dali, others think it represents an unborn baby) lies prostate on the ground. You may be surprised at how small this seminal work is.
Soaring sculptures by Brancusi, vibrantly colorful masterpieces by Matisse, Jackson Pollock’s splatter art, and painted metaphors by Magritte are among the other wonders of the museum’s collection, the most important in the world for art of this era.
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