It’s getting easier to relive art history

Frank Lloyd Wright’s wood-block model for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Paper neckties with flowery designs by Picasso. Mies van der Rohe’s “projects-general correspondence 1920’s 1930’s.” MoMA’s first guestbook from 1929.

A rich trove of background for all the legendary works in the Museum of Modern Art will become more accessible to the public with the opening today of MoMA’s new education and research building in Midtown Manhattan.

With five times the previous space for archives and study areas, the building named for philanthropists Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman completes the last leg of MoMA’s five-year, $425-million makeover. The museum has attracted 5 million visitors since its reopening two years ago, a MoMA record.

The new center will “greatly enhance the museum’s capacity to offer an array of dynamic programs for visitors of all ages,” MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry said at a media preview last week.

The eight-story, 63,000-square-foot building has about half the exhibition floor space of MoMA’s soaring galleries on the other side of the sculpture garden. But both structures share the same ultra-modern profile -- twin porticos, flat roofs and sleek glass and stone walls.

The mirror-image design carries inside the research center, where Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi built an 80-foot-high version of the galleries’ 110-foot atrium and a somewhat smaller grand staircase leading to the archives, framed by Andy Warhol’s cow-head wallpaper. Balconies, high ceilings, light wells and large windows reinforce the airiness, just like in the museum next door.

But instead of Picassos on the walls and Brancusis on the floors, the research center has its treasures tucked away in “object files” on three floors of archives devoted to film and media studies, painting and sculpture, and architecture and design. Every piece of art in the collection is documented in the files.

Holdings include the illustrated silk tie Picasso gave to MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr; a film showing Picasso’s “Guernica” rolled up in the early 1980s for shipment to Spain; and a recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt calling the museum a “citadel of civilization” at the 1939 building dedication.

Scattered about six floors are classrooms and workshop spaces, study and conference areas, screening rooms and a 121-seat theater, and a 40-seat library reading room with plug-ins for laptops. The sixth-floor library boasts 160,000 books and catalogs and includes 40,000 vertical files and extensive special collections. The stacks and filing cases are open to qualified researchers by appointment only.

A glass-walled corridor on the second floor connects the research center to the gallery, affording visitors another view onto the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden and the high-rise vistas surrounding MoMA.

Together the library, archives and study centers constitute one of the world’s most comprehensive research collections for modern and contemporary art, MoMA says, bolstering its reputation as the premier collection of modernist art.