25 Artworks Not to Miss at New York’s Museum of Modern Art

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889 (Floor 5, 504)

Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of his postman and friend, Joseph Roulin was included in MoMA’s very first exhibition, “Van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, and Gauguin,” in November 1929. Like Cézanne’s Bathers, it had been on view in a gallery dedicated to that show. It subsequently moved to gallery 504, which revolves around the Vienna Secession art movement formed by a group of Austrian painters at the beginning of the 20th century.

Josef and Jacob Kohn, Child’s cradle (model 1573), ca. 1895 (Floor 5, 504)

This cradle is in the Vienna Secession gallery, which opened in July 2023. There it’s in dialogue with other design objects and furniture, posters from Secession exhibitions, and paintings by artists who were part of the movement, along with some interlopers like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who was a member of the Neue Secession.

This cradle is included as a precursor to many of the works in the gallery. It is durable, light, and innovative in form, and in its construction—it is made from steam-molded bentwood pieces—it presaged the predominant Art Nouveau style of the movement.

Henri Matisse, Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal), early 1914 (Floor 5, 506)

This painting started in very vivid blues, greens, and oranges before it was largely covered with gray. It sits right next to another of his works, The Piano Lesson (1916), in a gallery dedicated to the artist. The Piano Lesson is a portrait of Matisse’s son Pierre in the family’s living room, where Woman on a High Stool can be seen in the background.

Lygia Clark, The Inside Is the Outside, 1963 (Floor 5, 507)

Brazilian artist Lygia Clark started out as an abstract painter, later turning to three-dimensional objects. In this sculpture, Clark transforms a sheet of stainless steel into an open volume with no clear front or back, no inside or outside, and no stable form. It is paired with works by Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, who explored the relationship “between the space contained within the sculpture and the space situated outside the sculpture.”

Joseph Stella, First Light, ca. 1928 (Floor 5, 509)

Joseph Stella was born in Italy and came to New York at age 19, often traveling between the United States and Europe. This painting is in a gallery focused on modernist depictions of the American landscape. While many of the artists here borrow from styles and techniques developed in Europe, the center of the movement in the 1910s through 1930s, they bring an unmistakably American flair to their subject.

Agnes Pelton, The Fountains, 1926 (Floor 5, 509)

A more mystical approach to landscape painting can be found in this nearly abstract work by Agnes Pelton. Located in the same gallery as the Stella, the piece demonstrates the breadth of ways American modernists depicted nature.

Jacob Lawrence, The railroad stations in the South were crowded with people leaving for the North, 1940-41 (Floor 5, 520)

Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” of which this work is a part, comprises 60 paintings on board depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North beginning in the 1910s. In the series, Lawrence used sequential images and descriptive titles to tell the story of a defining Black experience.

José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940 (Floor 5, 522)

This six-panel mural by Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco has been on view at MoMA since its 2019 reopening. It has a long history with the museum, having been commissioned by the institution in 1940 for the exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.” Executed over the course of just 10 days, it is an ominous depiction of the machinery of war. This year—in keeping with Orozo’s design for the work—the painting’s panels were rearranged. The new configuration, appropriately, emphasizes chaos over unity.

Jean-Michel Frank, Chess Table, 1929 (Floor 5, 530)

Though this chess table is only for looking at, it is a rewarding sight. Jean-Michel Frank, a designer and interior decorator, created it specifically for a set of chess pieces—also in MoMA’s collection—by the artist Man Ray.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974 (Floor 4, 400)

Before a condemned house in Niagara Falls, New York, was demolished by the City Planning Commission, Matta-Clark took the facade and cut it into sections; Bingo is composed of three of those sections. Currently it can be seen in a gallery with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the museum’s garden and surrounding streets, which is appropriate given that Matta-Clark’s practice was rooted in real-world experiments. The work is paired with the film Man Walking Down the Side of a Building by Trisha Brown, which shows a performer, suspended by mountaineering equipment, walking down the wall of a SoHo building. Both pieces represent the artists’ interaction with the built environment—a topic of particular interest to artists in the 1970s.

Yente (Eugenia Crenovich), Tapestry no. 6, 1958 (Floor 4, 401)

Eugenia Crenovich, who went by Yente, was the daughter of Russian immigrants who settled in Argentina in the late 19th century. She was part of a few artist groups in the 1940s and ’50s, including Argentine’s Arte Concreto movement. Then, in 1956, she began a series of tapestries of which this work is one. In this work, acquired by MoMA in 2019, she embellishes a painted panel with wool thread to make a new kind of abstract painting. Sharing a gallery with the likes of Jackson Pollock’s large-scale paintings, it’s in dialogue with the language of Abstract Expressionism.

Robert Frank, Profile, Venice, 1952 (Floor 4, 402)

MoMA’s “Fields and Figures” gallery brings together a selection of both figurative and abstract works made in New York in the 1950s. It focuses on the group of avant-garde artists working at that time known as the New York School, which included the Abstract Expressionists but also photographers like Robert Frank. Here, Frank’s black-and-white photographs are paired with one of Barnett Newman’s color field paintings and other abstract works.

Mark Rothko, No. 1 (Untitled), 1948 (Floor 4, 403)

Located in a gallery devoted to the work of Mark Rothko, this early painting foreshadows his Color Field canvases, which he began making a year later. Within it, one can see hints of the blocky forms and subtle color shifts that Rothko would perfect in his better-known pieces.

Brice Marden, Couplet IV, 1988–89 (Floor 4, 407)

MoMA honors abstract painter Brice Marden’s life and career in this gallery, which features a selection of his works. In nearby Gallery 404, earlier calligraphic abstractions by artists such as Mira Schendel and Kumi Sugaï contextualize Marden’s oeuvre.

James Rosenquist, Doorstop, 1963 (Floor 4, 412)

Entering the gallery devoted to Pop art, a lot of people fail to notice this James Rosenquist installation because it’s hung from the ceiling. Unless you know to look for it or happen to glimpse the label, it’s easy to miss. A painting of an apartment floor plan, Doorstop incorporates a number of lightbulbs, one of which is usually not on. Some observant visitors report this to the museum, but it’s supposed to be that way. In the fall, it is slated to move to a gallery devoted to Coenties Slip, where a group of artists settled in a three-block area on the southern tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s. There, the likes of Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman, among others, had studios in the cheap lofts along the city’s waterfront.

Kate Millett, Piano & Stool, 1965 (Floor 4, 412)

Kate Millett’s installation Piano & Stool, a hand-carved wood piano and piano stool, can be found in the same gallery as the Rosenquist. Under the rubric of “Domestic Disruption” the room’s current selection of Pop art works focuses on artists’ various takes on 1960s consumer culture and quotidian life. Millett was known as a feminist writer and activist, but as this piece attests, she also made whimsical and witty sculptures, usually from found objects.

John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem, 1968 (Floor 4, 414)

This interactive piece by artist and poet John Giorno invites visitors to pick up a phone and dial a number to hear one of 200 randomized poems—some of them dirty, others sincere—written and recorded by Giorno and his peers. MoMA originally showed the work in 1970 as part of its seminal 1970 exhibition “Information.”

T.C. Cannon, Two Guns Arikara, 1973/1977 (Floor 4, 415)

This canvas by Kiowa-Caddo artist T.C. Cannon is one of the first paintings by a Native American artist to be acquired by MoMA. It currently hangs in a gallery, dubbed “The Divided States of America,” that focuses on activist and socially conscious art of the 1960s and 1970s. Depicting a Native American man with two guns laid casually across his lap, the work is an important precursor to the figurative paintings of contemporary artists of color such as Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and others.

Donna-Lee Phillips, Fragments from a Visual Journal (16 November, 1977–12:00 pm), 1977 (Floor 4, 419)

This photo is in the “Photography and Language,” titled after a project initiated by the artist Lew Thomas in 1976. That year Thomas sent out a call for submissions for an exhibition that stated, “We are [soliciting] all types of photography in which words and images are joined in a visual presentation.” The show, which opened in San Francisco, was accompanied by a book designed by Donna-Lee Phillips and edited by Thomas. Though the original exhibition focused on Bay Area photographers, this gallery features photographic works by a range of artists who have been influenced by Conceptual art.

Isa Genzken, Red-Yellow-Black Double Ellipsoid ‘Twin’, 1982 (Floor 2, 203)

Nearby, a gallery titled “Random Access Memory” focuses on the technological advances at the end of the cold war in the 1980s, and the military origins of the computing tools we now use every day. Here, a sleek but vaguely threatening piece by Isa Genzken, designed with the help of a computer programmer, seems to hover between anxiety over, and optimism about, those technologies.

Mike Kelley, Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999 (Floor 2, 207)

In this large-scale installation by Mike Kelley, stuffed animals have been sewn together into planetlike orbs that hang from the ceiling. They are flanked by 10 abstract sculptures that release a pine-scented mist into the air. As with much of Kelley’s work what at first seems like a playful artwork becomes, on closer inspection, a darker commentary on our country’s collective id.

Montien Boonma, House of Hope, 1996–97 (Floor 2, 211)

This work, a templelike structure, is made almost entirely of spices and aromatic herbs, made into beads or painted as a wash on the walls. Boonma made this work after his wife’s death from cancer in 1995. Her diagnosis the year prior had led to Boonma’s immersing himself in Buddhist devotional practices. This work considers death but is not entirely dark, intended as it is to bring a feeling of hope and comfort to the viewer.

Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Witches are Flowers Sis, 2020 (Floor 2, 215)

Like a traditional Chinese handscroll, Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s Witches Are Flowers Sis stretches horizontally, spanning roughly 25 feet. Joining disparate subjects such as botanical motifs and images of violence against women with short texts, the work is intended to act something like protective spell for trans and queer people. It’s on view in the “Clandestine Knowledge” gallery, which considers how knowledge is passed down. Here it shares space with ceramic piece by Rosemarie Trockel, a large Kerstin Brätsch sculpture, a tapestry by Otobong Nkanga, a Hilma af Klimt painting, among other works by women artists.

Julia Lohmann, “Waltraud” Cow-Bench, 2004 (Floor 2, 216)

In the gallery “Systems,” which considers networks of production, German-born designer Julia Lohmann’s leather bench in the shape of a headless, hoofless, hideless cow is situated next to an enlarged Google Maps “pin” (designed by Jens Eilstrup Ramussen in 2005). Though somewhat odd, juxtapositions like this one feel increasingly relevant in today’s world, where real human labor and resource extraction coexist with big data. Here, Lohmann asks us to consider our relationship to other animals and to the products and byproducts of the meat industry.