Art to see in New York: MoMA and the Metropolitan

The most famous art in New York is in two museums. The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, has van Gogh's The Starry Night, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has art from five thousand years, including Hokusai's The Great Wave and Pollock's Autumn Rhythm. The Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney and the Neue Galerie make the city one of the best in the world for anyone who wants to see modern art.

Facts

MoMA: the classics of Modernism

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 and was one of the first museums in the world devoted to modern art. The collection begins around 1880, and here hangs van Gogh's The Starry Night of 1889, painted in the asylum at Saint-Rémy and partly from memory. The sky swirls, the cypress flames like a fire and the village sleeps. Read the guide to The Starry Night before you go, and you will know what to look for when you stand in front of it.

A few rooms away hangs Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, five women broken up into angular planes. The painting shocked even Picasso's friends and paved the way for Cubism. Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, by contrast, is small, only about 24 × 33 centimetres, and many people are surprised when they find it. MoMA also has the first version of Matisse's Dance; the better-known, red version is in St Petersburg.

Pop art and performance

On the upper floors the story continues after 1945. Andy Warhol's Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962 consists of 32 canvases, one for each flavour in the range. They look like goods on a shelf and asked what separates art from the images of everyday life. Read more in the guide to Pop Art.

MoMA has also shown art that cannot be hung on a wall. For three months in 2010 Marina Abramović sat silently on a chair in the museum's largest hall during all opening hours, and visitors could sit down opposite her, one at a time, for as long as they liked. The work is called The Artist Is Present and was part of the museum's first major exhibition of performance art.

The Metropolitan: the world's art under one roof

The Metropolitan Museum of Art stands on Fifth Avenue by Central Park and is one of the world's largest art museums. It has Egyptian, Greek and Roman collections, European Old Masters and even a whole Egyptian temple, the Temple of Dendur, in a room of its own with a glass wall. It is not possible to see everything in a day, and it is better to choose a few departments.

The museum owns impressions of Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa of around 1831 and of Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge of 1857. Woodblock prints cannot tolerate light and are shown only for short periods, so check in advance whether they are on display. Do read the guide to ukiyo-e. Among the post-war art hangs Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm of 1950, a canvas more than five metres wide of dripped and flung paint with no centre and no edge more important than the others.

The Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Neue Galerie

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of 1959 is Frank Lloyd Wright's last major work, a white spiral that widens upwards. Visitors take the lift up and walk down a sloping ramp around a light well, and the building is at least as worth seeing as the exhibitions. The collection has a strong emphasis on Wassily Kandinsky's abstract painting.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District collects American art from the 20th century to the present, with a large collection of works by Edward Hopper. The Neue Galerie, further up Fifth Avenue, shows German and Austrian art from around 1900, with Gustav Klimt's gold-gleaming portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan and the Neue Galerie all lie along the stretch of Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile.

Art in the city

The art of New York is not found only in the museums. Outside the United Nations headquarters on the East River stands Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd's Non-Violence, a revolver with its barrel tied in a knot. He made it after the murder of his friend John Lennon in New York in 1980, and since 1988 a version has stood here. It is comprehensible anywhere, without words.

The city is also an architecture exhibition. The Brooklyn Bridge of 1883, the Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe of 1958 and Philip Johnson's Postmodern AT&T Building show three periods within a few kilometres. All three are in the architecture section, as is the Guggenheim's spiral.

New York as the capital of art

In the app's data 40 artists have New York as a place of activity. Marcel Duchamp submitted his Fountain to an exhibition in the city as early as 1917. During the Second World War many European artists fled here, among them Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Dalí. After the war New York took over the role of the centre of art from Paris, with Pollock, Mark Rothko and the other Abstract Expressionists. Read more in the guide What is Abstract Expressionism? and in the app's American thread.

Swedes too have been part of the art scene. Öyvind Fahlström and Barbro Östlihn moved to New York in 1961 and moved in the circle around Robert Rauschenberg, and Östlihn painted the city's façades. MoMA and the Metropolitan take half a day each. Book a ticket online, go early or late in the day, and add the museums to the app's map before the trip. The guides to Paris and Stockholm do the same for two other cities.

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Exercise

Where in New York does van Gogh's The Starry Night hang?