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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum located at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. It adopted its current name after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1952.
The museum's collection has grown over eight decades and is founded upon several important private collections, beginning with that of Solomon R. Guggenheim. The collection is shared with sister museums in Bilbao, Spain and elsewhere. In 2013, nearly 1.2 million people visited the museum, and it hosted the most popular exhibition in New York City.
Solomon R. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, had been collecting works of the old masters since the 1890s. In 1926, he met artist Hilla von Rebay, who introduced him to European avant-garde art, in particular, abstract art that she felt had a spiritual and utopian aspect (non-objective art). Guggenheim completely changed his collecting strategy, turning to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, among others. He began to display his collection to the public at his apartment in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. As the collection grew, he established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in 1937, to foster the appreciation of modern art.
The foundation's first venue for the display of art, the "Museum of Non-Objective Painting", opened in 1939 under the direction of Rebay, in midtown Manhattan. Under Rebay's guidance, Guggenheim sought to include in the collection the most important examples of non-objective art available at the time by early modernists such as Rudolf Bauer, Rebay, Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.
By the early 1940s, the foundation had accumulated such a large collection of avant-garde paintings that the need for a permanent museum building had become apparent. In 1943, Rebay and Guggenheim wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright asking him to design a structure to house and display the collection. Wright accepted the opportunity to experiment with his organic style in an urban setting. It took him 15 years, 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings to create the museum.
Rebay conceived of the space as a "temple of the spirit" that would facilitate a new way of looking at the modern pieces in the collection. She wrote to Wright that "each of these great masterpieces should be organized into space, and only you ... would test the possibilities to do so. ... I want a temple of spirit, a monument!" The critic Paul Goldberger later wrote that, before Wright's modernist building, "there were only two common models for museum design: Beaux-arts Palace ... and the International Style Pavilion." Goldberger thought the building a catalyst for change, making it "socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim."
The museum's atrium
At the same time, before settling on the site for the museum at the corner of 89th Street and the Museum Mile section of Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, Wright, Rebay and Guggenheim considered numerous locations in Manhattan, as well as in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, overlooking the Hudson River. Guggenheim felt that the site's proximity to Central Park was important; the park afforded relief from the noise, congestion and concrete of the city. Nature also provided the museum with inspiration. The building embodies Wright's attempts "to render the inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture". The Guggenheim was to be the only museum designed by Wright. The city location required Wright to design the building in a vertical rather than a horizontal form, far different from his earlier, rural works.
The skylight in the center of the museum
The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with continuous spaces flowing freely one into another. Even as it embraced nature, Wright's design also expresses his take on modernist architecture's rigid geometry. Wright ascribed a symbolic meaning to the building's shapes. He explained, "these geometric forms suggest certain human ideas, moods, sentiments – as for instance: the circle, infinity; the triangle, structural unity; the spiral, organic progress; the square, integrity." Forms echo one another throughout: oval-shaped columns, for example, reiterate the geometry of the fountain. Circularity is the leitmotif, from the rotunda to the inlaid design of the terrazzo floors. Several architecture professors have speculated that the double spiral staircase designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932 at the Vatican Museums was an inspiration for Wright's ramp and atrium. Jaroslav Josef Polivka assisted Wright with the structural design and managed to design the gallery ramp without perimeter columns.
Peter B. Lewis Theater
The Guggenheim's surface was made out of concrete to reduce the cost, inferior to the stone finish that Wright had wanted. Wright proposed a red-colored exterior, which was never realized. The small rotunda (or "Monitor building", as Wright called it) next to the large rotunda was intended to house apartments for Rebay and Guggenheim but instead became offices and storage space. In 1965, the second floor of the Monitor building was renovated to display the museum's growing permanent collection, and with the restoration of the museum in 1990–92, it was turned over entirely to exhibition space and christened the Thannhauser Building, in honor of one of the most important bequests to the museum. Wright's original plan for an adjoining tower, artists' studios and apartments went unrealized, largely for financial reasons, until the renovation and expansion. Also in the original construction, the main gallery skylight had been covered, which compromised Wright's carefully articulated lighting effects. This changed in 1992 when the skylight was restored to its original design.
