11 Must-See Famous Paintings at MoMA in 2026, Starry Night First

Some of the most famous paintings at MoMA are ones you already know. Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Dalí's melting watches 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 poured paint and Warhol's soup cans. Add five more and you have eleven pictures, painted between 1889 and 1962. For older works, browse a bigger list of famous paintings. To save your feet, the table starts on the fifth floor with The Starry Night and works down.

MoMA is at 11 West 53 Street, and it moves works between its rooms and storage. On October 15, 2026, seven of these 11 paintings were on view. For the four that were not, we name a work by the same artist that was hanging that day.

Famous paintings at MoMA, in walking order

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

01The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in the middle of June 1889. At the time he was living at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole hospital in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. The view starts from his window, but he painted it during the day, over several sittings. The village couldn't be seen from his room, so he made it up from other views. He also moved the cypress tree much closer than it really stood.

The bright moon is on the right, and the large star left of center is the planet Venus. Van Gogh himself wasn't sure about the picture. In a letter that November to the painter Émile Bernard, he said he had let himself "do stars too big" once again, and he called it a "new setback." Even so, it went on to beat Sunflowers as his best-known work. You can compare it with other icons in our ranking of 30 world-famous paintings.

In 1941 it became the first Van Gogh painting to enter a New York museum. On October 15, 2026, it was on view on the fifth floor. Our hand-painted copy of The Starry Night keeps the cypress, the moon and the church spire where Van Gogh put them.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

02The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau (1897)

Henri Rousseau worked for many years in a customs office outside Paris. He only started to paint seriously in middle age, and the job gave him his nickname, the Customs Officer. In 1897 he sent The Sleeping Gypsy to an art show called the Salon des Indépendants.

A woman in a striped dress sleeps in the desert, with her lute and water jug beside her. A lion stands over her under a full moon, and nothing happens. The desert scene comes from Rousseau's interest in northern Africa. In mid-October 2026, it hung in the same room as The Starry Night.

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

Pablo Picasso was a 25-year-old Spanish painter living in Paris when he began Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He worked on it in his small, crowded studio, starting in the winter of 1906. He made hundreds of sketches first, and he finished it in the summer of 1907. Five women are squeezed into a shallow space, and they are built from sharp lines and broken, flat shapes. The faces on the right look like masks from Africa and the Pacific islands.

People who saw it in the studio that summer were shocked, and it wasn't shown in public until 1916. Picasso's art dealer called it the "beginning of Cubism," but others say it isn't Cubist at all. It hung on the fifth floor in mid-October 2026.

In November 1908, Picasso threw a party for Rousseau in his studio. Rousseau was 64 years old and the guest of honor, and he is said to have thanked Picasso with this line:

“We are the two greatest painters of the era, you in the ‘Egyptian’ genre, I in the modern genre.”

By "Egyptian," Rousseau seems to have meant the flat shapes and sharp edges in Picasso's newest paintings.

04Dance (I), Henri Matisse (1909)

In March 1909, a Russian collector named Sergei Shchukin asked Henri Matisse for two large paintings, Dance and Music, to hang where his staircase turned. Matisse painted Dance (I) quickly in Paris as a practice version of the first one. Both finished panels ended up at the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg.

Five dancers move in a circle on a green hill against a blue sky. Matisse used only four colors on the whole canvas, which are blue, green, black and pale pink. When the painting was new, some people attacked it for its simple bodies and flat space, and they called it clumsy. But Matisse felt it showed "life and rhythm." In mid-October 2026, it hung in a room just for Matisse on the fifth floor.

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 followed over the next twenty years. This one is almost ten feet wide, and he showed it in 1910, the year he died.

A critic asked him why there was a couch in the middle of a rainforest. Rousseau gave this answer: "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." In fact, Rousseau never went to a tropical jungle, even though he often said he had. He built The Dream from magazines, novels and postcards. He also used his own sketches from the botanical garden and zoo in Paris.

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)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

MoMA's Water Lilies is three canvases hung side by side, and together they stretch almost 42 feet across. There is no horizon, so the pond looks like one surface across all three. Monet made about forty large paintings of the lily pond in his garden at Giverny. He kept working on them from 1914 until he died in 1926.

Twenty-two of them went onto curved walls at the Orangerie in Paris as his gift to France. The rest stayed in his studios until the late 1940s, when collectors and MoMA began to take an interest. In mid-October 2026, MoMA's three panels were on view on the fifth floor. Our oil copy of his 1905 Water Lilies is a different picture, a single canvas he signed and dated that year. To see many Monets in one place, find out which museum has the most Monet paintings.

07The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí (1931)

Salvador Dalí's melting watches fill a canvas just over a foot wide. He called them "the camembert of time," and camembert is a soft French cheese. Ants crawl all over a gold watch, and they stand for things rotting away. The soft shape across the middle is roughly Dalí's own face, seen from the side. The golden cliffs behind it are the coast of Catalonia, Dalí's home.

In mid-October 2026, it was on view on the fifth floor. Dalí and Picasso both appear among Spanish masterpieces from El Greco to Picasso.

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

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in late 1939. Soon after, she painted Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair on a canvas less than 16 inches tall. In it she wears a loose man's suit instead of the embroidered Mexican dresses and flowers she often wore in her self-portraits. Only her high heels and one earring are left. 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 promised herself that she would live by selling her own art. The painting was not on view on October 15, 2026. But her My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936) was hanging in the same room as Dalí's melting watches.

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

Piet Mondrian came to New York in 1940, like many European artists who were escaping the war. On his very first evening in the city, he heard boogie-woogie music. In Broadway Boogie Woogie, a square canvas a little over four feet wide, he leaves out black completely. In his older paintings, each bar of color was all one color. Here the bars break into small blocks of many colors, and they jump from crossing to crossing like traffic on New York's streets.

This painting was not on view in mid-October 2026, but five other Mondrians were. He also has a place in a tour of famous abstract paintings, 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 tangled threads of paint, and it is more than 17 feet wide. Jackson Pollock painted it in the summer and fall of 1950, as one of three wall-size canvases he made one after another. He laid the canvas flat on the floor, and then he poured, dripped and flicked paint onto it. Sometimes the paint came straight from the can, and sometimes he used sticks and stiff brushes. He even squeezed paint from the tube, punched holes in paint cans and once in a while used a turkey baster.

"Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement," Pollock said. One was not on view on October 15, 2026, but his Number 1A, 1948 was hanging that day.

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

Andy Warhol first showed Campbell's Soup Cans in July 1962, at a gallery in Los Angeles. There are 32 paintings, and they stood on shelves like cans in a grocery store. Only the label changes from can to can. "I used to drink it," Warhol said about 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. The detail to look for is the little row of lily shapes along the bottom of each can. That row is the only part he stamped. In mid-October 2026, all 32 cans hung together on the fourth floor.

Before you go to 53rd Street

MoMA moves its paintings around, so check each one on moma.org in the week of your visit. Its page will say "On view" with a floor and a room number, or it will say "Not on view."

If you have a second museum day in New York, spend it on the Met's best-known paintings. Monet's water lilies also close a tour of French painting since Napoleon. If one of these famous paintings at MoMA stays with you, look for it among the famous works our studio paints by hand.

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)