Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was a philanthropist and a patron of the arts no less than her husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (son of the great industrialist). Her tastes ran towards to the modern artists, however –  Van Gogh, or Picasso, who were painting into the 1900s – which put her at odds with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which thought the works too recent to display. So along with Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, two other prominent patrons of the arts, and art collector A. Conger Goodyear, she created a society to bring those works to the public.

On this day, November 7, in 1929, just days after the “Black Friday” stock market crash, Rockefeller’s Museum of Modern Art opened, displaying works by turn-of-the-century painters Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne.

The small gallery did not have a permanent home yet, going on display in a rented space on the sixth floor of Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue (corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street) in Manhattan. But its popularity spread, with more wealthy patrons joined the museum’s board, bringing in more artworks, and creating the need for a permanent exhibition space in New York. Abby’s husband donated the land where it stands today, and by 1939 the permanent MOMA building opened, to grand fanfare.