The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest and most visited art museum in the United States. While bigger doesn’t always mean better, the Met is undoubtedly one of the best in the country.
Another star of Manhattan’s Museum Mile is the MoMA Museum of Modern Art, founded in the 1920s with the help of the Rockefeller family.
The private museum was founded by entrepreneur and philanthropist Ronald Lauder in memory of his friend, art dealer Serge Sabarsky, who shared his passion for German and Austrian art and design in the 1890s and 1940s.
The museum continued the tradition of the Museum of Non-Figurative Art, the first of its kind, which Solomon Guggenheim opened in the late 1930s in a specially rented apartment in Manhattan.
The museum’s founder, wealthy heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney became interested in art after visiting Europe in the early twentieth century.