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 innovations 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 Steiglitz’ “291 Fifth Avenue” and in exhibitions of the Société Anonyme. These showings, with occasional purchases, infrequent 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 exhibition of 1935 caused New York journalists suddenly to note that art can attract as many people as a prize fight.
Excerpted from New York City Guide: American Guide Series: A Comprehensive Guide to the Five Boroughs of the Metropolis – Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Richmond – Prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in New York City. Copyright 1939, Random House.