Museum of Modern Art

11 W. 53d St. IRT Broadway-7th Ave. subway (local) to 50th St.; or 8th Ave.
(Independent) Queens subway to 5th Ave. (53d St.); or 5th Ave. bus to 52d St.
Hours: weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 12 to 6 p.m. Admission 25c; free on
Monday.

The Museum of Modern Art is New York's permanent meeting place
for the contemporary artistic energies of Europe and America. About a
mile and a half uptown, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sedately displays
its accumulated masterpieces of the past, but here, amid brownstone fronts
and small sidewalk trees, the strikingly modern building of the Museum of
Modern Art has become a symbol of those technical and imaginative in-
novations that have transformed the character of art during the past seventy
years.

Before the establishment of the museum the more advanced forms of
modern art had made their appearance in the famous "Armory Show" of
1913, in Alfred Stieglitz' "291 Fifth Avenue" and in the exhibitions of
the Société Anonyme. These showings, with occasional purchases, infre-
quent exhibitions, and such private collections as that of John Quinn, had
given New Yorkers a hint of the strange aesthetic events taking place here
and across the Atlantic.

Today the Museum of Modern Art sponsors the more important forms
of aesthetic experiment. As a consequence New York has been treated for
the first time in its history to the spectacle of long lines of people waiting
on the street for a chance to look at paintings. The great Van Gogh exhi-
bition of 1935 caused New York journalists suddenly to note that art can
attract as many people as a prize fight.

Founded in 1929 under the sponsorship of a group of prominent col-
lectors, the museum set out to encourage the study and appreciation of
modern art. At that time it still remained to be seen whether there existed
enough public interest in the newer art to justify the eventual establishment
of a permanent institution of exhibition and education.

To carry out its purpose more effectively, the museum decided at the
start to renounce the conventional policy of a single permanent exhibition
occasionally increased by acquisitions or loans. Contact with new aesthetic
movements could be maintained only if works were kept constantly pass-
ing through the museum. Modern art also had to be presented in such a
way that its implications and antecedents would be clarified.

The manner in which this program has been accomplished may be illus-