Famous Paintings at MoMA: 11 Works Worth Finding in New York

Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Dalí's melting watches in The Persistence of Memory and Monet's Water Lilies all belong to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. So do Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950 and Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans. These MoMA famous paintings and five more follow in the order they were painted, from 1889 to 1962. For older icons, browse a broader list of famous paintings.

MoMA moves works between its galleries and storage. On October 15, 2026, seven of the 11 below were on view. For the four that were not, we name a work by the same artist that was hanging that day.

MoMA famous paintings at a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where at MoMA (Oct. 15, 2026)
1	The Starry Night	Vincent van Gogh	1889	Floor 5, gallery 501
2	The Sleeping Gypsy	Henri Rousseau	1897	Floor 5, gallery 501
3	Les Demoiselles d'Avignon	Pablo Picasso	1907	Floor 5, gallery 502
4	Dance (I)	Henri Matisse	1909	Floor 5, gallery 506
5	The Dream	Henri Rousseau	1910	Not on view
6	Water Lilies	Claude Monet	1914–26	Floor 5, gallery 515
7	The Persistence of Memory	Salvador Dalí	1931	Floor 5, gallery 517
8	Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair	Frida Kahlo	1940	Not on view
9	Broadway Boogie Woogie	Piet Mondrian	1942–43	Not on view
10	One: Number 31, 1950	Jackson Pollock	1950	Not on view
11	Campbell's Soup Cans	Andy Warhol	1962	Floor 4, gallery 412

1889 to 1910: Van Gogh, Rousseau, Picasso and Matisse

01The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in mid-June 1889, while he lived at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, in southern France. The view starts from his window, but he painted it in several daytime sessions. The village could not be seen from his room, so he built it from other views. He also pulled the cypress much closer than it stood.

The bright moon is at right, and the large star left of center is Venus. To compare it with other icons, see our ranking of 30 world-famous paintings. In mid-October 2026 it hung on the fifth floor, in gallery 501.

MoMA acquired it in 1941. The museum's press release that September announced it as the first canvas by Van Gogh to enter a New York museum. Until a few years earlier it had belonged to Miss G. P. van Stolk of Rotterdam.

Lillie P. Bliss, one of the three women who brought together the group that founded MoMA, had wanted a Van Gogh and never owned one. Ten years after her death, director Alfred Barr wrote to a dealer to ask whether The Starry Night was still for sale. The dealer offered to trade it for three pictures from her collection. That is why the credit line reads "Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange)."

Van Gogh himself was less sure of the picture. In a November 1889 letter to Émile Bernard, he admitted that he was once again allowing himself "to do stars too big." He called that a "new setback." The Van Gogh Museum's edition of the letters reads this as a reference to The Starry Night. The canvas still went on to overtake Sunflowers as his best-known work.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

02The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau (1897)

Rousseau worked for decades in a customs office outside Paris and took up painting seriously only in middle age. The job gave him his nickname, le Douanier, the Customs Officer. In 1897 he sent The Sleeping Gypsy to the Salon des Indépendants as La Bohémienne endormie.

A woman in a striped dress sleeps in the desert while a lion stands over her, and nothing happens. The figure and her desert setting reflect Rousseau's interest in northern Africa.

The New York collector John Quinn owned the canvas for some years, and after his death it went to a Swiss collector. MoMA announced the purchase in January 1940, made possible by a gift from Mrs. Simon Guggenheim. Alfred Barr said Rousseau "painted larger canvases but this is unique in the concentrated power of its composition." In mid-October 2026 it hung in the same room as The Starry Night.

03Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso (1907)

Picasso began Les Demoiselles d'Avignon during the winter of 1906 to 1907, in his cramped Paris studio. He was a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant, and he made hundreds of preparatory sketches before he finished the canvas in June and July 1907. Five women are pressed into a shallow space, built from angular lines and splintered planes.

Visitors who saw it in the studio that summer were shocked. It was first shown in public in 1916, and it got its title around then. The title refers to sex workers on the carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona, the city where Picasso spent his youth.

The striding figure at left echoes ancient Egyptian and South Asian sculpture. The raised elbows of the middle pair go back to Roman copies of Greek statues, and the faces at right recall African and Oceanic masks. Picasso's dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, called the painting the "beginning of Cubism," though others deny that it is Cubist at all.

In November 1908 Picasso threw a party for Rousseau in his studio. The 64-year-old guest of honor reportedly thanked his host with this line:

By "Egyptian," Rousseau seems to have meant the flattened planes and jutting forms of Picasso's newest work. That reading comes from Annemarie Iker's 2021 essay on Rousseau, written for MoMA.

04Dance (I), Henri Matisse (1909)

In March 1909 the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin commissioned two large panels from Matisse, Dance and Music, for the staircase landing of his house. Matisse painted Dance (I) quickly in Paris as a study for the first panel. The finished pair, completed in 1910, is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Five dancers circle on a green hill against a blue sky. Matisse used only four colors on the whole canvas, blue and green for the setting and black and pale pink for the figures. When it was new, the simplified bodies and missing perspective were attacked as inept or willfully crude. Matisse felt the picture evoked "life and rhythm."

Nelson A. Rockefeller gave it to MoMA in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum's first director. In mid-October 2026 it hung in gallery 506, a room given over to Matisse.

05The Dream, Henri Rousseau (1910)

The Dream is the last and largest of Rousseau's jungle paintings. He painted his first jungle in 1891 and about 20 more over the next two decades. This one, almost ten feet wide, went to the Salon des Indépendants in 1910, the year he died.

A curious critic asked him why a couch stood in a rainforest. Rousseau replied: "This woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported into the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter."

Like Dance (I), it came to MoMA from Nelson A. Rockefeller. It was not on view on October 15, 2026, so The Sleeping Gypsy was the Rousseau to find that day.

1914 to 1943: Monet, Dalí, Kahlo and Mondrian

06Water Lilies, Claude Monet (1914 to 1926)

MoMA's Water Lilies is three canvases hung in a row, almost 42 feet across in all. Monet made some forty large panels of the lily pond in his garden at Giverny. He kept reworking them from 1914 until his death in 1926.

Twenty-two went onto curved walls at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, his gift to France. The rest stayed in his studios until the late 1940s, when collectors and MoMA's curators began to take an interest.

To see many Monets in one place, start with which museum has the most Monet paintings. Our oil copy of his 1905 Water Lilies shows a different picture, a single canvas he signed and dated that year.

07The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí (1931)

Dalí's melting watches fill a canvas just over a foot wide. He called them "the camembert of time." Ants swarm a gold watch as a sign of decay. The soft creature across the middle is roughly his own face in profile, and the golden cliffs behind it are the coast of Catalonia, Dalí's home.

A year before he painted The Persistence of Memory, he set out what he called his "paranoiac-critical method," cultivating hallucinations on purpose to make art. The credit line says only "Given anonymously," so the donor is not named. In mid-October 2026 the painting hung in gallery 517, and MoMA's page on the melting watches shows where it is now. Dalí and Picasso both appear among Spanish masterpieces from El Greco to Picasso.

08Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Frida Kahlo (1940)

Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in late 1939. In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, a canvas under 16 inches tall, she wears a loose man's suit. Gone are the embroidered Tehuana dresses and flowers she often wore in her self-portraits; only her high heels and one earring remain. Locks of hair cover the floor, a cut braid lies by her chair, and she holds the scissors in her lap.

The words across the top come from a popular Mexican song: "Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don't love you anymore." After the divorce, Kahlo vowed to support herself by selling her own work.

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. gave the painting to MoMA. It was not on view on October 15, 2026, but her My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936) was, in gallery 517.

09Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian (1942 to 1943)

Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, one of many European artists escaping the war. He heard boogie-woogie on his first evening in the city. In Broadway Boogie Woogie, a square canvas a little over four feet on each side, he leaves out black entirely.

His once uniform bars of color break into small multicolored blocks. They jump from crossing to crossing like traffic on New York's streets.

Mondrian died in 1944. This painting was not on view in mid-October 2026, but five other Mondrians were, in galleries 503, 508, 512 and 513. He also has a place in a survey of famous abstract canvases, which runs from Hilma af Klint to Mark Rothko.

After the war: Pollock and Warhol

10One: Number 31, 1950, Jackson Pollock (1950)

One: Number 31, 1950 is a field of interlaced threads of oil and enamel paint, more than 17 feet wide. It is one of three wall-size canvases Pollock made in quick succession in the summer and fall of 1950.

He laid the canvas on the floor and poured, dribbled and flicked paint onto it. Sometimes the paint came straight from the can, sometimes from sticks and stiffened brushes. "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement," he said.

On October 15, 2026, One was not on view. Number 1A, 1948 was, in gallery 401, and Echo: Number 25, 1951 hung in gallery 405.

11Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol (1962)

Warhol first showed Campbell's Soup Cans, 32 canvases in acrylic with metallic enamel, in July 1962 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. They stood on shelves like products in a grocery aisle. Only the label changes from can to can.

"I used to drink it," he said of the soup. "I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again."

The cans look printed, but Warhol painted each one by hand. Only the fleur-de-lys band along each bottom edge is stamped. In mid-October 2026 the full set hung on the fourth floor, in gallery 412.

Before you go to 53rd Street

MoMA rotates its galleries, so open each painting's page on moma.org in the week of your visit. The page says "On view" with a floor and gallery number, or "Not on view."

A second museum day in New York could go to the Met's best-known paintings. Monet's water lilies also end a tour of French painting since Napoleon. Van Gogh's Starry Night, The Dream and The Sleeping Gypsy are among the famous paintings our artists copy in oil.

Sources

• MoMA, Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (collection record and label)
• MoMA audio, Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern: The Starry Night
• MoMA press release, "Museum of Modern Art Acquires Important Van Gogh," September 29, 1941
• Van Gogh Museum, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, letter 822 to Emile Bernard (c. 26 November 1889)
• MoMA, Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy (collection record)
• MoMA press release, "The Museum of Modern Art Acquires Two Important Paintings," January 22, 1940
• MoMA, Henri Rousseau (artist essay by Annemarie Iker, 2021)
• MoMA, Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Henri Matisse, Dance (I) (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Henri Rousseau, The Dream (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Claude Monet, Water Lilies (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950 (collection record and label)
• MoMA, Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans (collection record and label)