Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Museum of Modern Art in New York, known to everyone as MoMA, is one of the most important museums of modern art in the world. In the history of design it plays a unique role: it was the first major museum to consider a chair, a lamp or a household appliance worthy of standing alongside paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh, and for decades its exhibitions decided what modern "good design" was.

The founding

The museum was founded in 1929 on the initiative of three collectors, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It opened to the public on 7 November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash, in a few rooms on Fifth Avenue. Its first director, the young art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr., had a revolutionary idea: the museum should deal not only with painting and sculpture, but also with architecture, design, photography and film. In 1939 MoMA moved to its present home on 53rd Street, a modern building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, later enlarged several times, by Yoshio Taniguchi (reopened in 2004) and by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2019).

The first department of architecture and design

In 1932 MoMA created the world's first museum department devoted to architecture and design, headed by Philip Johnson. That same year Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock organised the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, which gave its name to the International Style and introduced Americans to Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. In 1934 the exhibition Machine Art displayed propellers, springs and ball bearings as if they were sculptures, celebrating the beauty of the industrial object. In 1938 a major exhibition presented the Staatliches Bauhaus to the American public.

The exhibitions that made design

From 1939 the curator of industrial design was Eliot Noyes, who launched the competition Organic Design in Home Furnishings (1940–1941): it was won by two young men from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, with moulded plywood seating that paved the way for Organic design and for the furniture of Charles & Ray Eames. From 1950 to 1955 the Good Design exhibitions, curated by Edgar Kaufmann Jr. together with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, selected the best household objects on the market each year, and the MoMA label became a guarantee of quality. In 1972 Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz, consecrated Italian design, from "official" design to Radical design.

The collection today

The architecture and design collection includes tens of thousands of pieces: furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson, posters, typefaces, cars and even an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter. In recent years the museum has also acquired intangible objects, such as video games and, in 2016, the first emoji, designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for the Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo. Being "in MoMA" is still the most coveted recognition for a design object.