MoMA: What to See, Floor by Floor, and Where the Famous Paintings Hang

The Museum of Modern Art sits on West 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. It opened in 1929 with a plan to collect the art of its own time while that art was still being made. Today the collection runs from the 1880s to work made a few years ago, and it takes in painting, sculpture, photography, film, architecture and design. Can you do MoMA in two hours? Yes, if you choose your floor. Nearly every painting on a postcard hangs on Floor 5.

How the floors are laid out

MoMA's own map now labels the collection floors by era, and they stack in order of time.

• Floor 5: 1880s to 1940s. Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Dalí, Hopper. This is the floor most first-time visitors come for.
• Floor 4: 1950s to 1970s. Rothko, Pollock, Jasper Johns, Warhol, and James Rosenquist's F-111.
• Floor 3: changing exhibitions, with a 1945-design Bell helicopter on show in the open space between them.
• Floor 2: 1980s to today. Newer work, plus the double-height atrium.
• Floor 1: the lobby from 53rd Street through to 54th, and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, laid out by Philip Johnson and finished in 1953.

The escalators run straight up the middle of the building. The simplest plan is to ride to Floor 5 and work down.

Where the famous paintings hang (October 2026)

Gallery numbers are the ones MoMA listed on 10 October 2026. MoMA rehangs its galleries from time to time, so check a work's page on the museum's website before you go.

Work	Artist	Floor	Gallery
The Starry Night	Vincent van Gogh	5	501
The Sleeping Gypsy	Henri Rousseau	5	501
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon	Pablo Picasso	5	502
I and the Village	Marc Chagall	5	503
Dance (I) and The Red Studio	Henri Matisse	5	506
Water Lilies (the triptych)	Claude Monet	5	515
The Persistence of Memory	Salvador Dalí	5	517
Object (the fur teacup)	Meret Oppenheim	5	517
Gas	Edward Hopper	5	519
Christina's World	Andrew Wyeth	5	521
No. 10	Mark Rothko	4	403
Flag	Jasper Johns	4	408
Campbell's Soup Cans	Andy Warhol	4	412
F-111	James Rosenquist	4	418
She-Goat	Pablo Picasso	1	Sculpture Garden

Not on view this autumn. Some famous MoMA works were not on MoMA's on-view list on 10 October 2026: Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950, Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl, Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Brancusi's Bird in Space, Newman's Broken Obelisk and Rousseau's The Dream. If one of them is the reason for your visit, check its page first.

What to see in about two hours

Floor 5, the first rooms. In Gallery 502, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is almost square, about 2.4 by 2.3 metres, and each of its five women is painted a different way. He did not show it in public until 1916, nearly nine years after he painted it. Next door in 501 is The Starry Night, smaller than most people expect at 73.7 by 92.1 centimetres. Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy shares the room: a lion sniffs at a sleeping woman under a full moon, painted by a man who never left France.

Matisse. Gallery 506 holds Dance (I), about 3.9 metres wide in essentially three colours: pink bodies, a green hill and a blue sky. Beside it, The Red Studio floods Matisse's own studio with one rusty red. The furniture survives only as thin pale lines, and the grandfather clock on the centre line has no hands.

Monet. At the west end of the floor, Gallery 515 is given over to Monet's late paintings of his lily pond at Giverny. The triptych runs almost thirteen metres. See Water Lilies at MoMA for the story of how they reached New York.

Dalí, Hopper and Wyeth. In 517, The Persistence of Memory is tiny, about 24 by 33 centimetres, and the one watch that does not melt is crawling with ants. Gallery 519 has Hopper's Gas, a lone attendant at three red pumps as evening falls. In 521, Christina's World shows Christina Olson, Andrew Wyeth's neighbour in Maine, who could not walk and pulled herself across the field with her arms.

Floor 4. Go down for Warhol's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans in 412, one canvas for each variety the company sold in 1962, and finish with Rosenquist's F-111 in 418, about 26 metres long and made to wrap around a room.

Tickets, hours and the museum's own audio

MoMA is open daily from 10:30 to 17:30, and until 20:30 on Fridays. It closes on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. In October 2026 adult admission was 30 dollars, and children under 16 got in free; buying online ahead is the way to guarantee entry. Free Friday evenings are now for New York State residents. MoMA's own audio guide is free with admission, on the museum's website and in the Bloomberg Connects app.

How this fits the Roamer guide

Roamer's independent audio guide to MoMA works room by room: open any gallery on Floors 5, 4 or 2, or the Sculpture Garden, and play its story. If time is short there are four routes, "MoMA in an Hour", "The Unmissables in 90 Minutes", "Designed for Everyday Life" and "Ordinary Things, Made Art". You can find it here: the MoMA guide. It is not affiliated with the museum, and admission is separate.

Cover photo: tommao wang, via Unsplash.