Our visit to the museums of New York began with the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Museum of Modern Art or MoMA) located in the Manhattan area. The MoMA is considered to hold today one of the most important collections of modern art in the world, with works by the most important painters of the 20th century. 

His story begins in 1929 in the Heckscher building, when three progressive women - from one of the most powerful families in America - the Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan decided to challenge the conservative practices of traditional museums and innovate by founding a space dedicated exclusively to modern art. Thus, they went down in history as "The Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies".

Ten years later, the architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone designed a building specifically for the needs of the museum, which was its first permanent home. The glorious inauguration ceremony in May 1939 was attended by 6.000 people and with a live radio address from White House and the President Franklin D.Roosevelt.

In 1997 the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi won ten other international architects in a competition to redesign the museum, which after being closed in Manhattan for a time during the process (a temporary space opened in Queens' Long Island City) reopened and opened in 2004.

His building MoMA in its current form, it consists of six floors and occupies a total of 58.000 μm housing the exhibits which include more than 150.000 individual pieces in addition to about 22.000 films and 4 million film snapshots.

A cafe on the second floor and an elegant restaurant on the fifth overlooking the courtyard of the MoMA, give the opportunity for a short break, to regain strength and plan visits per floor. Periodical exhibitions are held in many of the rooms of the Museum, but the permanent collection with many of the most important works of contemporary painting remains unique.

Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, Paul Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Andy Walhol are some of the protagonists of the Museum moma, with works that changed the perception of the art of painting.

Ο Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906) the important French painter represents the transition from Impressionism to the Cubist movement. According to him, he wanted to turn Impressionism "into something solid that lasts as long as the art on display in museums." His greatest contribution to Impressionism is considered to be the addition of pure geometric elements that later influenced the Cubist movement. His work at the MoMA Museum is Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879-80) (Still life with fruit tray).

The dance consists of two related tables made by Henri Matisse between 1909 and 1910. The first painting is the preliminary edition so that the painter can study the second edition which was, after all, commissioned by the Russian businessman and collector Sergei Shchukin. The composition of the dancing figures is reminiscent of Blake's watercolor "Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies dancing" from 1786. The first edition of dance is a composition where brighter colors and fewer details are used. The other painting is in the museum The Hermitage of St. Petersburg. The dimensions of the table are 259.7 cm × 390.1 cm. Despite all the "imperfections" of the draft, the relationship of colors, the movement of the bodies -especially at the point where the circle of dancers breaks- make the work of exceptional beauty.

The "The demons of Avignon" (1907) of Pablo Picasso is considered the beginning of his time Cubism. It was characterized as a "trigger" that shook the data of 20th century painting.  O André Breton he even stated that "in mystical terms we said goodbye to all the other paintings of the past". Much ink has been spilled around the effect of the work and its contribution to the evolution of contemporary painting. First of all, the young ladies - prostitutes on Avignon Street in Barcelona - are the work that the painter worked on more than anything else, with numerous studies and around 800 drawings. This absolute departure from the generally accepted conventions for centuries, gives the "Misses" the subversive and groundbreaking character. African masks, savagery of the phobia movement, African sculpture, invocation of emotions and mental states, rejection of the coherence and coherence of the representational art are a few elements that characterize this work.

"The Dream" or "On the Road" (the Dream) his work Henri Rousseau painted in 1910 was one of 25 paintings by the painter on the theme of the jungle. The French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), is considered perhaps the greatest of the self-taught naΐve painters of all time. He was also known as "Le Douanier" (The Customs Officer), because for many years he worked as a clerk in the Paris customs. Rousseau began painting as an amateur shortly after 1870. Having no formal training, he was unable to predict the magnitude of the success due to his original style, particular vision and fantastic images. The childlike simplicity of his forms and the imagination of his subjects were a real revelation for a number of artists who were looking for new means of expression.

The Starry Night is a dazzling in color and movement painting of the great Dutch post-impressionist  Vincent Van Gong. It was created in June 1889 and depicts the view outside the window of a room in the sanatorium Saint-Remy-de-Provence (located in southern France) during the night, although painted during the day. It belongs to the permanent collection of MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941.

Ο Joan Miró (1893-19830) was born in Barcelona 1893 and at the age of 14 he studied at the School of Commerce, although at the same time he attended secret classes at the School of Fine Arts and later at the Galí Academy until 1915. In 1920 he moved to Paris where he participated in Montmartre artistic circles and first became acquainted with his movement Dandaism and later with them surrealists, under the influence of which he began to form a special and personal style in his painting. Perhaps the greatest theorist of surrealism and one of its leading figures, the Andre Breton, referring to Joan Miró stated that "He is the most surreal of all." 

The Spanish Civil War moved many artists who sided with the Democratic Army. One of the first with him Picasso and Miro, where in one of the most beautiful "war" posters he calls on the world to help Spain, commenting:

"In the current situation, you see the fascist side of the perimeter forces, from the other side of the roof whose creative creative resources do not come to Spain a message that etonnera the world"

His work Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-1943) is one of the most characteristic works of his period neoplastic movement, of the Dutch painter. His stay in 1912 for about two years in Paris is marked by his contact with his work Georges Braque, of Picasso but also his Cézanne and the significant influence that these painters exert on his personal work. His works gradually acquire more intense geometric features while tending to become more abstract, using elements of cubism, but without fully adopting it. Here at work Broadway Boogie-Woogie which took place during his acquaintance with New York, connects one of his well-known design grids with the rhythms of music and the urban fabric of the city.

Ο Paul Jackson Pollock  (1912–1956) is one of the most important representatives of the movement of abstract expressionism and is one of the most popular painters in America. Around 1940, a period considered one of the most creative for Pollock, he invented his technique dripping. The techniques he develops are often called by the broader term action painting. Despite the seemingly random nature of his technique, Pollock meticulously crafted his paintings, which are mostly abstract compositions of large murals. The play One Number 31  is huge (180x360) and was painted in 1950 with two other paintings, spreading the crates on the floor and throwing the colors freely.

His most famous work Jasper johns is "Flag", which is valued at $ 110 million. He painted it at the age of 24, in 1955, two years after completing his military service. Today it is housed in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. THE "Flag" is as distinctive a work of art and an image of pop culture as "Camping Soup Box" of Andy Warhol. The American flag, which was an important source of inspiration for him, is presented in an unnatural position. It does not wave, but looks flat on a horizontal surface or very carefully nailed from the upper horizontal side. It is an unconventional way of representing the national symbol of the artist's homeland.

On the fifth floor of the MoMA, at the entrance of the restaurant, is its double table Elvis Presley,  one of the 22 made by Andy Warhol for his American rock idol, while his triple Elvis, was sold for $ 81,9 million at a post-war and contemporary art auction in New York. O Andy Warhol  studied at the Carnegie Institution of Technology and then settled in New York, where he was noticed by the then famous gallery owner Alexandros Iolas and promoted him to the magazine Glamour as an illustrator. With paintings depicting soup boxes of the company Campbell or bottles Coca Cola, gained more fame and by 1963 had mass-produced such sophisticatedly commonplace representations of consumer products, as well as portraits of celebrities in fancy colors and often as silkscreens, thus creating the fame of its metro. pop art 

Η Guernica was the victim of the Hitler and Mussolini bombers who made extensive use of incendiary bombs in a general rehearsal before the massive terrorist operations of World War II against civilians (2 dead - 1600 wounded). Picasso conceived the idea of ​​the painting immediately after the destruction of the city and completed it within two months (May to June 800) in order to be sent to the Paris International Exhibition, as requested by the Spanish Democratic government. H Guernica is on display today at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid). He was in MOMA for about 40 years and returned to Spain only after the Franco regime collapsed. The play American People Series,  The, 1967, is a contemporary work by the African-American painter Faith Ringgold inspired by Guernica but on racial differences in the US.