The Museum of Modern Art

The fifth floor of MoMA is where you’ll find some of the most recognizable paintings in the world – Van Gogh’s *The Starry Night*, Picasso’s *Les Demoiselles d'Avignon*, and Monet’s massive *Water Lilies* are all here. This is the museum’s center of gravity, but the collection is huge, spanning six floors and over 200,000 works of modern and contemporary art. The museum was one of the first in the U.S. to treat industrial design, architecture, photography, and film as serious art forms, and those departments are just as core to its identity as painting and sculpture. The building itself has evolved over time. What started as a sleek, six-story International Style structure in 1939 is now a much larger complex of glass and steel on 53rd Street. Inside, the galleries are organized around a central atrium, connected by a series of escalators that guide you up through the different eras and movements. The design is minimalist and precise, with a focus on creating clean, light-filled spaces for the art. Down at ground level, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden provides a quiet, open-air contrast to the busy galleries inside. It’s a well-known spot to take a break among works by artists like Matisse and Picasso. The museum can get extremely crowded, particularly around the most famous pieces, so the garden offers a bit of breathing room. A visit takes at least two hours to see the highlights, and you could easily spend a whole day working through the entire collection. The large gift shop on the main floor is a destination in its own right, full of art books and well-designed objects.