A museum experience should be enjoyable. To engage and appreciate art, take your time. When looking at a work, observe its details such as color, shape, and texture. Explore the subject matter and consider the work's meaning. Think about what the artist is trying to express or communicate. Also think about your response or reaction to the work upon first viewing and after multiple views.
When visiting an art museum, especially a large institution like MoMA, where do you start? The calendar of events is useful to see what the current exhibitions are. You can also do some preliminary research about the museum’s collection and approach the visit through these suggested ways of looking at art:
These four methods of exploration are presented using MoMA’s dataset of its collection. First, consider what modern art is and what MoMA collects.
What is modern art?
An introduction to MoMA's collection
Modernism does not have set dates. Loosely, the modern era covers the late nineteenth century (some place it earlier in the mid-1800s with realism) to the 1960s. Modern art includes various movements such as cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. MoMA's collection goes beyond the modern era to include postmodernist and contemporary works.
In its
mission statement, MoMA explains that experimentation and exploration with various media and materials—features of modernist art movements—are not limited to that time period. New ways of making art continue to emerge from all over the world.
How to explore MoMA's collection
4 suggested methods
There are many ways to explore and appreciate art depending on your interests and the time you have available for a museum visit. If you have a favorite artist, medium, or art movement, consider looking at art across time, cultures, media, and/or artists. Understanding what's available in the collection and what's on view ahead of time will help to maximize your visit.
In the visuals that follow, there is a focus on 32 artists with works available online or on view at the museum. These artists, a few of the multitude of creative individuals in the collection, represent four broad time periods:
Early modernism, which includes impressionism, postimpressionism, and avant-garde such as fauvism, expressionism, and cubism
Between the wars (the two world wars), which includes Dada, surrealism, de Stijl, Bauhaus, and the Harlem Renaissance
Postwar, which includes abstract expressionism, assemblages, happenings, pop art, minimalism, and postmodernism
Contemporary, which includes works created from the 1980s on
Mouse over each visual’s labels for suggested works to view and explore.
These suggested methods of looking at art hopefully encourage close, meaningful engagements with works of art to consider context, their creators, and the process of making art. Visit the
MoMA collection page to explore more and to check which works are on view or online to plan your visit.
For a printable one-pager of the 4 ways to look at art, download this
PDF document.
