The house that inspired Psycho

MoMA's very first acquisition

The Museum of Modern Art opens its doors in November 1929. In January 1930, barely two months later, it acquires its first work for the permanent collection — a gift from trustee Stephen C. Clark. That first painting now hangs in room 521, surrounded by other scenes of American life painted over the following two decades.

1. House by the Railroad: the painting that haunted Hitchcock

Painted by Edward Hopper in 1925, House by the Railroad shows an isolated Victorian house, cut off from the world by a railway line that runs across the entire bottom of the canvas. It was this painting, bought by MoMA in January 1930, that became its very first acquisition — a choice that immediately signalled the young museum's interest in contemporary American art, not only European avant-gardes.

Director Alfred Hitchcock himself acknowledged this house as the main inspiration for the Bates mansion in Psycho (1960) — a link the painting has carried ever since as part of its legend, somewhere between pictorial solitude and the American imagination of horror.

2. Christina's World: the woman who refused the wheelchair

Andrew Wyeth paints Christina's World in 1948, after watching his Maine neighbour, Anna Christina Olson, crawl through a field toward her house from his window. Christina Olson suffered from a degenerative muscular condition, likely polio, that left her unable to walk — she refused a wheelchair, however, and preferred to move using only her arms, exactly as the painting shows her, seen from behind in her pink dress amid the grass.

The painting is first shown at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. Alfred Barr, MoMA's founding director, buys it for $1,800 — a modest sum even for the time — and actively promotes it within the museum. Its popularity grows slowly over the following decades until it becomes one of the most reproduced images in twentieth-century American art; the museum now lends it only rarely.

3. Kenneth Fearing: a poet whose heart literally bleeds

Alice Neel paints the poet Kenneth Fearing in 1935, a few years after meeting him upon arriving in Greenwich Village in 1932. Fearing, a leading figure of Depression-era poetry, sits at his desk under a bare lightbulb — but his chest is split open, and a small skeleton inside it squeezes a miniature heart. Neel later explained that this bleeding heart symbolised the poet's compassion for the suffering around him during the Depression.

Around him, Neel packs in details drawn directly from Fearing's life: the Sixth Avenue elevated train, near which he lived and which he cited as a source of inspiration for his poems, appears in miniature within the composition. It is a portrait that seeks not physical likeness alone, but a kind of condensed biography within a single frame.

4. The Subway: a Mexican muralist looks at New York

José Clemente Orozco paints The Subway in 1928, during his second stay in New York. Already a recognised muralist in Mexico, grouped with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros under what would be called the Mexican Mural Renaissance, he nonetheless struggles to make a name for himself in a city that barely knows his work yet. The small 41 x 56 centimetre canvas, given to the museum by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, shows several riders on the New York subway — opened in 1904 — with stone-faced, almost expressionless features, set in sharp contrast against the metallic gleam of the poles structuring the car.

Orozco stayed in New York until 1934 without ever gaining the recognition he had at home; his greatest American achievement of the period remains a five-panel mural cycle painted in 1931 for the New School for Social Research. The Subway, with its urban melancholy and anonymous figures, foreshadows the outsider's gaze the painter kept on the city throughout that stay.

5. Tongues (Holy Rollers): a Pentecostal church in Bronzeville

Archibald Motley paints Tongues (Holy Rollers) in 1929, right as his painting shifts toward vibrant urban scenes of Black life in Bronzeville, the Chicago neighbourhood where his family had settled. The canvas shows a Pentecostal service in full ecstatic motion: worshippers caught mid-gesture, moved by what practitioners call the gift of tongues — speaking in an unintelligible language under religious ecstasy.

Motley is as interested in the spectacle of this collective trance as in the new musical forms accompanying it: the canvas captures a form of worship still taking shape, specific to Chicago's Black working class in the 1920s. It belongs to the same decade as his cabaret and street scenes, but here chooses an entirely different register, more interior and more sacred.

6. In the Spring: a Grant Wood print, Iowa for the price of a novel

In the Spring, made by Grant Wood in 1939, is the only work in this room that is not a painting: a lithograph roughly 30 x 40 centimetres, printed in an edition of 250 by printer George C. Miller for the organisation Associated American Artists. Founded in 1934, this mail-order outfit sold signed prints by recognised artists at a deliberately low price — about the cost of a book — with the explicit aim of democratising art during the Depression.

The image shows a farmer at work, shovel in hand, on the rolling land typical of Wood's native Iowa, in a composition of soft curves characteristic of his style. Unlike Hopper's isolated house or Christina's immobilised body, this scene of agricultural labour treats the same subject — a rural, hard-working America — in a register of optimism rather than melancholy.

7. Blume and Stuart Davis, two more views of industrial America

Parade, painted by Peter Blume in 1930, is the artist's first large canvas, developed from sketches made along the industrial piers of the Hudson River in New York. Blume fuses riverside dock imagery — cranes, steel structures — with armored figures inspired by the medieval armor he had studied at the Metropolitan Museum; the painting was the centrepiece of his first solo show, at the Daniel Gallery, that same year.

Barber Shop Chord, a lithograph made by Stuart Davis in 1931 on his return from a stay in Paris, belongs to a series of five lithographs made with master printer George C. Miller. Davis combines real and imagined motifs drawn from Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he retreated to paint, exploiting the rich blacks and greys particular to lithography — a technique he used only rarely across his career.

How much time

Eight works, eight short stories to tell — the room takes a little over an hour if you pause on each one; about fifteen minutes is enough if you keep only to the three best-known paintings (Hopper, Wyeth, Neel).

Background on MoMA's very first acquisition — 5 minutes.
House by the Railroad (Hopper) — 7 minutes.
Christina's World (Wyeth) — 7 minutes.
Kenneth Fearing (Neel) — 7 minutes.
The Subway (Orozco) — 7 minutes.
Tongues (Holy Rollers) (Motley) — 7 minutes.
In the Spring (Wood) — 6 minutes.
Parade (Blume) — 7 minutes.
Barber Shop Chord (Stuart Davis) — 7 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against MoMA's collection pages (moma.org) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the MoMA website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Continue your visit

MoMA, New York

The painting Picasso hid for nine years Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and its road from a Paris studio to MoMA. The Matisse room A studio repainted red, and a commission a Moscow collector first refused.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.

The house that inspired Psycho, and the woman who refused the wheelchair