Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/14" (73.7 x 92.1 cm).

Acquired
through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

Vincent van Gogh produced emotional, visually arresting paintings over the course of a
career that lasted only a decade. Nature, and the people living closely to it, first stirred
his artistic inclinations and continued to inspire him throughout his short life. But rather
than faithfully depicting his surroundings, he painted landscapes altered by his
imagination, including The Starry Night. Van Gogh was seeking respite from plaguing
depression at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy in southern France when he
painted The Starry Night. It reflects his direct observations of his view of the countryside
from his window as well as the memories and emotions this view evoked in him. The
steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland,
while the mountains in the background describe those in his surrounding landscape.
Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942–43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50" (127 x 127 cm). Given
anonymously

In the fall of 1940, Dutch-born artist Piet Mondrian left his adopted city of Paris for New
York to escape the Nazi takeover of France. In Europe, he had established himself as
one of the pioneers of De Stijl, a form of abstraction that renounced naturalistic
representation in favor of a stripped-down formal vocabulary consisting of straight lines,
rectangular planes, and primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) meant to create visual
harmony and restore order and balance to everyday life. Painted decades
later, Broadway Boogie Woogie still reflects the De Stijl aesthetic—but jolted by
Mondrian’s enamored response to New York City and his love of the boogie-woogie
jazz music that flourished there. Claiming, “The emotion of beauty is always obscured
by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the
picture,” he captured the city’s buildings, lights, crowds, traffic, and the rhythms of its
jazz music in an abstract language of colored squares.
Gordon Matta-Clark. Bingo. 1974. Building fragments: painted wood, metal, plaster, and glass, three
sections, overall 69" x 25' 7" x 10" (175.3 x 779.8 x 25.4 cm). Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest
Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund. © 2016 Estate of Gordon
Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Unlike most architects, who would be inclined to renovate old buildings or replace them
with new ones, Gordon Matta-Clark used his training in architecture to dismantle
buildings—including a derelict house in Niagara Falls, New York—and transform them
into works of art. Once thriving, this town had lost its luster by the 1970s. Matta-Clark
saw in its abandoned homes an opportunity to practice what he called
“anarchitecture”—a combination of anarchy and architecture—through which he drew
attention to non-functional or overlooked buildings, architectural sites, and spaces. With
a small team of workers, he cut the house’s northern façade into nine equally sized
rectangles so that it resembled a bingo game card, after which this work is titled. He left
the central rectangle on the house, deposited five in a nearby sculpture park where he
hoped they would be reabsorbed into the earth, and kept three, which are now in
MoMA’s collection. These are displayed aligned on the gallery floor so that viewers can
walk around them and see segments of both the interior and exterior of the house. By
inserting pieces of the outside world into an art museum, Matta-Clark hoped to draw
attention to the troubled state of a real world place and its affected residents.
Norman Lewis. City Night. 1949. Oil on wood, 24 x 18" (61 x 45.7 cm). Gift of Marie- Josée and
Henry R. Kravis

Lewis’s paintings, like those of many Abstract Expressionists, straddle the boundary
between abstraction and figuration. The predominantly dark palette of this work evokes
the nocturnal cityscape of the title; the delicate lines that crisscross the surface have
been interpreted as laundry lines or power lines. In City Night Lewis has transformed
this quotidian subject matter into an atmospheric and luminous abstraction. “The
elements of painting constitute a language in themselves,” the artist wrote in 1949; the
dynamic interplay of light and dark in City Night demonstrates his deft control over the
medium.
Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World. 1948. Tempera on panel, 32 1/4 x 47 3/4" (81.9 x 121.3 cm).
Purchase

Andrew Wyeth painted the landscape, objects, and residents of only two places: his
lifelong home village of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and the area around the
neighboring coastal villages of Port Clyde and South Cushing, Maine, where he spent
summers. Anna Christina Olson, who appears in this and many of his other paintings,
was Wyeth’s neighbor in Maine. A neuromuscular disease had left her unable to walk.
When he saw her dragging herself home one day across her family’s yard, he was
inspired to make a painting conveying her indomitableness. He did this by combining
direct observation with imagination. While he faithfully depicted her fragile arms and
hands, for example, he replaced her family’s small yard with a vast field. “Christina’s
world is, because of her physical handicap, outwardly limited—but in this painting I tried
to convey how unlimited it really is,” he once wrote.
Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13" (24.1 x 33 cm). Given
anonymously. © 2016 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York

With its uncanny, otherworldly feel, and its melting pocket watches and mollusk-like
central figure strewn about a barren landscape, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of
Memory seems wholly imaginary. In fact, it sprang not only from the artist’s imagination,
but also from his memories of the coastline of his native Catalonia, Spain. As he once
explained: “This picture represented a landscape near Port Lligat, whose rocks were
lighted by a transparent and melancholy twilight; in the foreground an olive tree with its
branches cut, and without leaves.” Dalí applied the methods of Surrealism, tapping
deep into the non-rational mechanisms of his mind—dreams, wild imaginings, and his
subconscious—to generate the unreal forms that populate this painting. These blend
seamlessly with features based on the real world, including the rocky ridge in the
painting’s upper-right-hand corner, which describes the cliffs of the Cap de Creus
peninsula.
Edward Hopper. House by the Railroad. 1925. Oil on canvas, 24 x 29" (61 x 73.7 cm). Given
anonymously

Painter and printmaker Edward Hopper produced closely observed urban views,
landscapes (largely of New England), and interior scenes—all either devoid of or
sparsely populated by people. Though he insisted that his paintings were
straightforward representations of the real world, their overall sparseness imbues them
with a sense of loneliness, estrangement, and stillness. Light, whether from electric
bulbs or the sun, defines the places he depicts and shapes the mood of his works. A
late afternoon glow pervades House by the Railroad, which features a grand Victorian
home fronted by the tracks of a railroad. The tracks create a visual barrier that seems to
block access to house, which appears moored and isolated in the surrounding empty
landscape. Its old-fashioned architecture and lack of any sense of occupancy imply that
the house may be a relic of tradition, lonely and forgotten in the push towards
urbanization and progress, as suggested by the railroad tracks.
Hippolyte Blancard. Untitled. 1889. Platinum print, 8 15/16 x 6 1/8" (22.7 x 15.6 cm). Purchase.

Paris was burgeoning in the late 1880s. The wholesale modernization of the medieval
city—a vast public works program overseen by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann—
was nearly complete and La Belle Époque, a period of invention, art production, and
relative peace, was at hand. In 1887, construction began on the Eiffel Tower, the latest
technological and architectural marvel, which was built to serve as the entrance to the
1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair). Pharmacist and amateur photographer
Hippolyte Blancard was there with his camera, documenting the tower’s rise. The
platinum prints he produced span from July 1887 to April 1889 and detail its stages of
construction, from the assembly of its pyramidal base to its pointed tip. Blancard’s
images capture the making of a symbol of a rapidly changing city, one met with both
awe and resistance in his time, as Parisians reacted to the new world developing all
around them.

Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1914–26. Oil on canvas, three panels, Each 6' 3/4" x 41' 10 3/8" (200 x
1276 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund
While Claude Monet’s Water Lilies may appear to be largely abstract, they reflect a
fidelity to nature stemming from his careful observations of his beloved garden outside
of his Giverny studio. This elaborate garden (requiring six full-time gardeners to
maintain) featured a Japanese-style lily pond, which became the subject of a series of
paintings that the artist worked on over the course of many months, and sometimes
years. In them, he aimed to convey the sensation of water without end. He filled his
enveloping canvases from edge-to-edge with layered color and brushstrokes, capturing
his perception of the water lilies, the play of sunlight and shadow, and the reflections of
the sky, clouds, and garden surroundings on the pond’s ever-changing surface. His
impressionistic approach to rendering the real world in paint foregrounds light and color,
which he used to model his flower-dotted waterscapes.

Rachel Whiteread. Water Tower. 1998. Translucent resin and painted steel, 12' 2" (370.8 cm) x 9'
(274.3 cm) diam. Gift of the Freedman Family in memory of Doris C. and Alan J. Freedman. © 2016
Rachel Whiteread
“Something that I often do is try and give those places and spaces that have never
really had a place in the world some sort of authority, and some sort of voice,” sculptor
Rachel Whiteread once explained. Among the objects that have captured her attention
are the ubiquitous yet easy-to-overlook water towers dotting New York’s skyline.
Though these rooftop structures once held water for the city’s buildings, they are now
falling out of use. On commission for the Public Art Fund, Whiteread decided to highlight
the presence of these towers. Using translucent resin—which she chose for its
evocation of water and ability to capture and take on the changing light of the sky—she
made a cast of the interior of a cedar water tower (a space we would otherwise never
see) and then installed it on a rooftop in Soho, a neighborhood characterized by low-rise
buildings. It now sits on a rooftop of The Museum of Modern Art, surrounded by the
high-rises of Midtown.
Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher. Water Towers. 1988. Gelatin silver prints, 67 11/16 x 55 1/8" (172 x
140 cm). Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser. © 2016 Hilla Becher

Husband-and-wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher spent more than 40 years seeking out
and photographing examples of European and American industrial architecture—
including grain elevators, blast furnaces, and oil refineries—that were starting to
disappear as these societies transitioned away from reliance on industry. The nine
individual water towers appearing in this gridded arrangement are just a handful of the
hundreds they photographed over the course of their career. In order to capture their
subjects with the utmost precision and clarity, they used a large-format camera and
finely grained, black-and-white film, shooting them straight on and under overcast skies.
The Bechers then classified the subjects in their photographs by function and displayed
their images in grids, so that the individual structures could be compared. “We studied
this anonymous architecture, object after object, until we understood the enormous
variety of the subject,” Hilla Becher has said.

Yun-Fei Ji. Three Gorges Dam Migration. 2009. Woodcut scroll, composition (image): 13 3/8 x 120
11/16" (34 x 306.5 cm); sheet (full sheet): 17 5/16 x 337 3/16" (44 x 856.5 cm). Gift of the Library
Council of The Museum of Modern Art. © 2018 Yun-Fei Ji

Started in 1994 and completed in the late 2000s, the Three Gorges Dam was built to
curb flooding of China’s Yangtze River and provide hydroelectric power for a 10th of the
country’s population. However, this massive public works project also brought with it
controversy: Archaeological sites were destroyed, villages were inundated, and millions
of residents were forced to relocate. In this work, Ji depicts the Three Gorges Dam’s
“floating weeds”—his name for displaced people, a term that he adapted from an
ancient Chinese phrase. He borrows his style from classical Chinese landscape
painting. Here, however, Ji subverts the typically serene images by inserting realistic
renderings of hardship that resulted from the dam construction. Among bamboo shoots
and rocks, children pull on their mothers’ shirts, a woman sleeps on the ground, and
families sit surrounded by bags filled with their belongings. Ji also incorporates
fantastical imagery within the busy scene, such as the monstrous beast on the right side
of the print. On the far ends of the scroll, Ji wrote in Chinese calligraphy texts describing
China’s longstanding wish to tame the river.
Louis I. Kahn. Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh (Study for National
Assembly Building). 1962–83. Cardboard, 14 1/2 x 89 x 49" (36.8 x 226.1 x 124.5 cm). Gift of the
architect. © 2016 Estate of Louis I. Kahn

The construction of Louis I. Kahn’s Sher-e-Bangla Nagar (the city of the Bengal
Tiger) unfolded over the course of 20 years in a radically shifting political context. Kahn
was a lauded architect known for his monumental buildings when the Pakistani
government commissioned him in 1963 to design a governmental and civic complex
incorporating a national assembly building, a mosque, residences, offices, a dining hall,
courtrooms, a hospital, a museum, and schools. It was to be situated in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, and was begun when that country was still a part of Pakistan. In addition to
functioning as the political center of Pakistan’s second capital city, it was meant to stand
as a symbol of national unity. Kahn addressed these goals by designing a monumental
structure based on square, circular, and triangular shapes and permeated with
apertures that allow light to flood its grand interior spaces. In 1971, Bangladesh won
independence from Pakistan. This inevitably changed the purpose of Sher-e-Bangla
Nagar, which would not be completed for another 12 years, and it became instead an
emblem of a newly independent nation.
Zarina. Home is a foreign Place. 1999. Portfolio of 36 woodcuts with letterpress additions, mounted
on paper, composition: 8 x 6" (20.3 x 15.2 cm); sheet: 16 x 13" (40.7 x 33 cm). Acquired through the
generosity of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Edgar Wachenheim III. © 2018 Zarina

Born in Aligarh, India, to a Muslim family, Zarina grew up aware of the political and
religious struggles between her native country and neighboring Pakistan, a majority-
Muslim state, which had gained its independence from the majority-Hindu India in 1947.
Zarina, once explained: “This piece is my narrative of the house I was born in and left in
my early twenties never to return.”
Home Is a Foreign Place consists of 36 woodblock prints, each of which presents a
geometric, monochromatic design. To make these images, Zarina jotted down a list of
Urdu words that she considered meaningful, such as “axis,” “distance,” “road,” and
“wall.” She sent the list to a calligrapher in Pakistan, who wrote them in the traditional
nastaliq script. Back in her New York studio, Zarina developed what she has described
as “idea-images, which flowed from these words.” The resultant images serve as a
visual vocabulary to express feelings of home, memory, and loss. “I understood from a
very early age that home is not necessarily a permanent place,” Zarina said. “It is an
idea we carry with us wherever we go. We are our homes.”