Starry Night, the melting clocks, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Warhol's soup cans, in six floors that can genuinely be done in three hours.
Manageable, unlike the Met
MoMA is the museum you can actually finish. Six floors, a clear chronology, and a collection that is famous almost to the point of parody — you will recognise a startling proportion of what is on the walls without reading a single label.
The 2019 expansion added a third more gallery space and, more importantly, rethought the hang. The collection galleries are no longer a straight march of European modernism; they mix media, geography and period within each room, so a Picasso might share a wall with a photograph, a chair and a film. Some people find this illuminating and some find it irritating. The famous paintings are all still there.
Where the things you came for are
Fifth floor, Painting and Sculpture 1880s–1940s: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, Monet’s Water Lilies triptych in its own room, Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory — which is roughly the size of a sheet of A4 paper and disappoints a lot of people for that reason.
Fourth floor, 1940s–1970s: Pollock, Rothko, Johns, Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Gold Marilyn Monroe.
Third floor: photography, drawings, architecture and design. The design collection is the underrated part of the museum — the original Apple Macintosh, a Bell helicopter hanging from the ceiling in some hangs, the Sony Walkman, the New York subway map.
Second floor: contemporary work and the media galleries.
Ground floor: the sculpture garden, free to enter from the street in the mornings before the museum opens, and a good place to sit.
Free Friday evenings
MoMA is free to everyone on Friday evenings from four until eight — the UNIQLO Free Friday Nights programme. Tickets are released online in advance and go quickly, and the museum is very full. It is a real free entry, not a discount, and if the budget is tight it is worth setting an alarm for the release.
New York City residents get discounted admission with ID at any time.
Practical
Book a timed slot online. The walk-up queue on a Saturday afternoon in summer runs down 53rd Street.
Three hours is a comfortable full visit; two is enough if you skip the temporary exhibitions. The temporary exhibitions are usually excellent and usually the busiest rooms in the building.
The film programme is included with admission and is one of the best repertory cinemas in New York, showing restorations and archive prints in two theatres downstairs. Almost no visitor uses it.
The bookshop across the street is significantly better than the one inside.
More Museums
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Two million objects across five thousand years, in a building you cannot see in a day. Pick three departments and accept that you are missing the rest.
American Museum of Natural History
The blue whale, the dinosaurs and the dioramas, in a rambling complex of twenty-odd interconnected buildings on the west side of Central Park.
9/11 Memorial and Museum
Two voids where the towers stood, with the names of every person killed cut through the bronze parapets. The plaza is free. The museum below is not, and it is very hard.