Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

The Museum of Modern Art is the Himalayas of Modernism. The galleries brim with masterpieces, and then some. In fact, this overstuffed museum now hangs drop-dead works everywhere: in hallways, by the elevators, in the stairwells. The art you’re walking past on your way to the famous stuff is sometimes better than what you’ll see when you get there. These eight paintings are located smack-dab on MoMA’s psychic median strip. Avoid traffic while looking, and deploy elbows as needed.

*This article originally appeared in the December 2, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Salt Shaker by Stuart Davis, 1931 MoMA is hooked on European Modernism and habitually sidelines American masters like Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe. This jazzy Cubistic jumble by Davis—a true American genius—flickers with a wild zebra background, an inner architecture that echoes churches and arrows jostling your vision willy-nilly, and maybe a bowl of soup inside the shaker, plus the trace of some red-tipped fingers spicing up the whole thing. Davis rules the thirties. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.

Greenwich Village Cafeteria by Paul Cadmus, 1934 Made by one of the few openly gay artists of his era, this scene teems with cruising dudes, dapper Dans, floozies, and transvestites. Check out the package on the guy at the left, or the painted fingernails of that dreamboat ducking into the men’s room. It’s a super-dense Brueghel scene of New York life. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.

Leda and the Swan by Cy Twombly, 1962 Only a museum as packed with masterpieces (and cramped for space) would hang such an epic work in a hallway. Here, trying to break the AbEx stranglehold, Twombly seemingly reaches into his own body to paint with mucus, feces, semen, and blood. A tumbling array of abstract scribbly loops, a scrawled title, and flying vulvas and buttocks with little holes, it’s a two-dimensional sixties Odyssey that must be savored. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.

Flower Festival of Santa Anita by Diego Rivera, 1931 Rivera isn’t American, but he’s not European either. He’s Mexican. So here he is by the escalator. Notice the huge internal scale of this work. A man in the center becomes a human parade float and some flesh column of an imaginary temple. He carries a crown of swollen lilies as a solemn crowd watches and three amazing kneeling girls with incredibly rendered toes sing the body electric. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.

Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, 1962 Yes, it’s cute and clever to hang these 32 paintings by the café—but it also turns this revolutionary work into a joke. (I end up smelling the painting more than seeing it.) But I’ve always maintained that art works anywhere, no matter how you see it, so step right up and come to internal terms with this twentieth-century landmark. Then have some lunch. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.

The Street by Balthus, 1933 Maybe to piggyback on the Met’s Balthus show, MoMA has brought out this work for the first time in several years. But MoMA doesn’t privilege realist Modernism, so it’s hidden by the elevators. It still simmers. The boy on the left was once grabbing the girl’s genitals, until Balthus repainted him; now he’s just reaching, as she seems to flee. I would, too. MoMA reported at press time that this painting may have been relocated by the time you read this. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.

Hide and Seek by Pavel Tchelitchew, 1940–42 What a past this painting has! This mushrooming carnival is among the most popular in the collection. It’s a hoot to see Tchelitchew’s exploding scene of babies, feet, faces, vaginas, veins, birds, vines, branches, a baby’s emergence from the birth canal, and (some say) a phallus in the trunk of the tree. Whoa! MoMA reported at press time that this painting may have been relocated by the time you read this. Photo: Courtesy of The Museum of Modern ArtNew York/Digital Image ? MoMA, N.Y.