Properties5
| Type | Check-in |
| On | The Museum of Modern Art |
| Rating | 10 |
| Date | Oct 17, 2025, 10:00 AM |
| Note created | Oct 17, 2025 |
When I knew I was traveling to New York, one of the first plans that came to mind was visiting the MoMA: what I expected to be an absolute institution. I had a great time, spend roughly 6h 30m visiting it. These are my notes from that visit, split into floors or exhibitions. The order is simply the order I visited them.
1880s–1940s
- As soon as I came out of an elevator, I saw a Klimt: Hope, II. It was just there, on a random corridor. How crazy is that?
- I found |more art by Paul Signac, just like when visiting the Met. Also Evening, Honfleur by Georges Seurat, where the frame is part of the artwork itself.
- Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso which is iconic. Also some early works and proto-Cubism.
- I and the Village by Marc Chagall was especially jarring for a weird personal reason: as a child, 5 years old or so, I used to have a recurring nightmare. This piece reminded me of it very vividly.
- Dynamism of a Soccer Player by Umberto Boccioni. Not a great fan of futurism but I loved it.
- Still Life with Flowers by Juan Gris – I really like his work.
- There was an early 1900s photography room with a lot of big names and interesting work:
- A Sea of Steps, Wells Cathedral by Frederick H. Evans
- Equivalent series by Alfred Stieglitz, pioneer of the Photo-Secession, or bringing purely abstract into photography.
- Ansel Adams and his thoughts on the spectator being liberated in abstract art to get their own reactions.
- Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp. I have to admit I made peace with Duchamp at MoMA: I never liked his work but the audioguide put it perfectly, and I found him as truly ahead of its time. “Art is whatever the artist says it is” — provocative, defiant, simply sharing an idea is art. It pushed the readymade art, which is now more relevant than ever thanks to AI.
- Suprematist Composition: White on White by Kazimir Malevich was another great audio guide excerpt, explaining his visceral reaction to changes in humanity, the relation to the feeling that we are living the end times.
- Some by Ulrike Müller, talking about body liberation and dysmorphia.
- The Red Studio and other works by Henri Matisse and his super fast process when creating.
- Bird in Space and other sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși
- Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian; a New York-inspired work and other lesser-known color palettes — small blocks of color replacing his typical black lines.
- Abstraction Blue by Georgia O’Keeffe. She is simply the best. She pioneered abstraction and I cannot get over how gorgeous her work is.
- Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien, a film about closeted homosexuality and AIDS.
- American Landscape by Charles Sheeler, surrender to automatism and lack of people.
- The room about Bauhaus — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Ford assembly line
- Construction in White and Black by Joaquín Torres-García, which albeit him presenting a similar approach to Mondrian, I find much more interesting.
- Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso in the L’Esprit Nouveau room: the new experimental aesthetics and intellectualism that arose in Paris in the 1920s.
- Water Lilies by Claude Monet. I simply love it, I spend 20 minutes there. That room also had some of the best audioguide tracks: a blind person saying it feels like a chord, where the colors and patches complement a sound that is no more or is to be, and how it reconciled him with art; as well as the history Monet’s pond in Giverny was fostered by him and taken care of by 6 gardeners, including a master Japanese gardener. It was not even his property; it was next to the train tracks.
- Weimar’s citizens disenchanted, traumatized, jarring art: George Grosz, Departure by Max Beckmann, Max Pechstein
- Untitled Photo-Dessin by Ei-Q. Super interesting 1930s Japanese avant-garde.
- The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. I’m not a fan but I’m slowly liking some of his work.
- Fulang-Chang and I by Frida Kahlo, a gift to a friend of hers: self-portrait with her pet spider monkey, paired with an actual mirror for her friend to be next to her.
- Rural Electrification Administration Posters by Lester Beall. Industrial design
- Broadacre City Project by Frank Lloyd Wright. Vision for industrialized American cities.
- Gas by Edward Hopper, an icon of American realism.
- The Lovers by René Magritte and his take on surrealism: “What does it mean? It does not mean anything.”
1950s–1970s
- Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s room:
- One: Number 31, 1950 by Jackson Pollock. Pollock’s method — moving his body over the unstretched canvas, the demanding choreography and balance.
- Gaea by Lee Krasner.
- Shirley Embracing Sam by Roy DeCarava, the history of black community in Harlem.
- An Afternoon in Astoria by Rudy Burckhardt. 1940s New York through photos.
- Sky Cathedral by Louise Nevelson, and its audioguide track: pitch black darkness and finding your place in the composition.
- Vir Heroicus Sublimis by Barnett Newman, and how a generation of artists who saw the most horrible acts of violence in humanity (Great Depression, Holocaust, the atom bomb) ended up generating a new language.
- Mark Rothko’s room. I spent a lot sitting there. The audioguide narrating the evolution from surreal European influence to shape, color, scale. How he shifted from vibrant colors to darker tones to black. His own son narrates the audioguide — and tells how sometimes Rothko shifted the frame to work on upper parts, so paint drips in both directions. Fuzzy lines, soft edges that feather one shape into another as a way of indicating its humanism: it is not machine-made. He believed pure pictorial properties of abstract art could communicate universal truths and remove all obstacles between artist, idea, and observer. No. 13.
- The importance of calligraphy and symbols in art, mostly from the Arab world
- Other ways to express art apart from painting:
- age, no. 1 by Wolf Vostell. TV wrapped in torn canvas.
- Painting to Be Stepped On by Yoko Ono.
- Spatial Concept: Expectation by Lucio Fontana.
- Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Gorgona group:
- Meander No. 5 by Julije Knifer
- Relation Manifesto by Mangelos on a globe; Paysage de la guerre (war landscape).
- Black Ambience 1 by Ljerka Šibenik. One of the most harrowing installations I have ever seen.
- World Map by Öyvind Fahlström. Geopolitics reimagined as a Monopoly game board.
- Shooting Painting American Embassy by Niki de Saint Phalle. Critique before the American Embassy in Paris.
- Untitled by Lee Bontecou. Depth using fabric; trash from New York streets.
- Flag by Jasper Johns. Colored flag (vs. the White Flag at the Met) with embedded newspapers of that time.
- Current by Jesús Rafael Soto and Bridget Riley.
- I feel in the need to mention Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol. I still hate Warhol and most of Pop Art.
- More interesting repetition than Campbell’s Soup Cans is One Year by George Maciunas.
- Room of art via things:
- “monument” 1 for V. Tatlin by Dan Flavin. Aesthetic from common objects of the time — now feels kind of exotic.
- Series B Relief (Red Prototype) - Charlotte Posenenske (1967) by Charlotte Posenenske. Look different every single time thanks to the lightning.
- Giant Soft Fan by Claes Oldenburg – I found it charming.
- Monochrome Painting by Stephen Prina, a whole evocative room.
- American People Series #20: Die by Faith Ringgold. An absolute crazy work.
- 69 by Sam Gilliam. Drape paintings.
- Raining Down South by Frank Bowling, a map painting.
- F-111 by James Rosenquist. Incredible critique of designing a bomber just to employ population. Probably the closest to art about living in the end times in contemporary epoch.
Pirouette
Funny exhibit featuring original emoji, macOS icons, the NASA logo (the worm), Crocs, and the Aeron chair.
Also included some iconic data visualizations:
- Warming Stripes by Ed Hawkins. Global warming data visualization
- History of Wikipedia editing
- Space junk summaries
1980s–Present
I feel like I was starting to be too tired and/or desensitized by this point. Barely found anything remarkable.
- Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites by Mike Kelley. Interesting sensory experience, jarring.
- Guatemala protest installation.
- Black Shunga by Chris Ofili. Blue and silver paintings are striking
- Equal by Richard Serra. An incredible way to root art back to physicality.