Museums in New York

There are hundreds of museums and galleries in New York. However today we are going to speak about the most visited and popular museums in NY.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art is the third most visited museum in the world after Louvre and British museums. More than 5 million people visit the museum each year. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is boasting a collection of millions of artworks and decorative objects tended by some of the nation's foremost scholars and conservators. Its main building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with its majestic Beaux-Arts facade and dramatic central staircase, has gone through several expansions to accommodate the steady growth in its collection through gifts and strategic purchases (Among the most heralded in recent years was the 2004 purchase of a painting of a Madonna and Child by the early Renaissance master Duccio for more than $45 million).

Among the principal strengths of the Met's collection are its vast European paintings and sculpture holdings, including masterworks of the Italian, Dutch, French and Spanish schools, and its American Wing, with its legendary holdings in painting, sculpture, drawing, furniture, silver, textiles and glass. The museum's arms and armor collection is among the world's most comprehensive, as is its trove of ancient Egyptian art. (The first-century B.C. Temple of Dendur has been reassembled in a glass-pyramid extension of the museum to look much as it may have in ancient times.) Another lure for visitors is the museum's wing for classical antiquities, centered on a soaring light-drenched court populated by Roman and Greek statuary.

Fees:

General Fee for Adults is $25, for seniors (65 and older) $17,

Students can buy tickets for $12, for children (under 12) free.

MoMa

Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) is the seventh most visited museum in the world. More than 3 million people visit the museum each year. New York's famous Rockefeller family was largely responsible for the creation of the Museum of Modern Art. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller proposed the idea for the museum. She enlisted the help of two dear friends, Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, and together the ladies succeeded in opening the first modern art museum just a few days after the stock market crash of 1929.

Today, according to the museum's records, it houses 150,000 pieces including works of architecture and design, drawings, paintings, sculpture, photographs, prints, illustrated books, film, and electronic media. The library and archives holds another 300,000 items.

Some of the museum's top works of art include Monet's Water Lilies, Van Gogh's Starry Night, Dali's Persistence of Time, Andy Warhol's Gold Marilyn Monroe and Wyeth's Christina's World. Other notable artists whose works are included in the collection are Rousseau, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, Pollock, Kahlo, Mondriaan, Léger, and Lichtenstein.

Fees:

General Fee for Adults is $22.5, for seniors (65 and older) $16,

Students can buy tickets for $12, for children (under 16) free.

The Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is known for its spiral structure and unique museum experience. Displays of modern paintings, sculpture and film rotate throughout the year at the Guggenheim Museum.

This revolutionary building is a fitting memorial to Guggenheim. Thanks to its founder’s forward-thinking views on the art of his time, the Guggenheim Museum has one of the largest collections of Vasily Kandinsky’s art in the world in addition to works by such modern masters as Marc Chagall, Franz Marc, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. The collection has since evolved through major acquisitions: Karl Nierendorf’s inventory of German Expressionist and early Abstract Expressionist art; Peggy Guggenheim’s collection of abstract and Surrealist painting and sculpture; Justin K. Thannhauser’s array of early modern masterpieces; important works from the estates of Katherine S. Dreier and Rebay; Dr. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s vast holdings of European and American Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, Environmental, and Conceptual art; an extensive contribution from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; and the Bohen Foundation’s gift of contemporary photography, video, and installation art.

Fees:

General Fee for Adults is $18, for seniors (65 and older) $15,

Students can buy tickets for $15, for children (under 12) free.

The American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History, whose complex of 27 interconnected buildings sit in an 18-acre park off Central Park West in Manhattan, is home to 45 permanent exhibition halls, a library and a planetarium, as well as space for temporary exhibits and for research by its scientific staff.

The institution began as a museum and library in 1869, with a mission to foster the study of science. It sponsored exploratory expeditions to what were then remote areas of the globe, like far-flung Pacific islands and the interior of Africa. These research trips helped build its collection of more than 32 million specimens and artifacts, and the effort continues today with some 120 expeditions and field projects conducted annually throughout the world.

Generations of children have flocked to the Fossil Halls, where the famous dinosaurs reign. The museum, which has the world's largest collection of vertebrate fossils, renovated the Fossil Halls in the mid 1990s to create a continuous loop on the fourth floor that tells the story of vertebrate evolution through more 600 specimens (nearly 85 percent are real fossils, not casts).

Another museum favorite is the 94-foot-long model of a blue whale, which dominates the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life on the first floor, surrounded by videos of ocean life. The Hayden Planetarium is in the Rose Center for Earth and Science, an illuminated sphere inside a transparent cube designed by James Stewart Polshek that opened in 2000.

Among the most impressive sights at the museum are its internationally renowned dioramas, where science meets art. Painters, photographers, naturalists and taxidermists recreate geographically precise scenes from nature and then populate them by mounting anatomically correct specimens: thundering elephants, the American bison, African lions, the wading birds of the Everglades and many others.

Fees:

General Fee for Adults is $19, for seniors (65 and older) $14.50,

Students can buy tickets for $14.50, for children (under 12) $10.50.