CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheims are a group of museums with locations around the world founded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In addition to the New York office, they are located in Venice (Italy), Bilbao (Spain) and Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates). The collections collect and preserve works of modern and contemporary art and the buildings that house them, with the exception of Venice, are works of modern architecture itself. The most famous is certainly Fifth Avenue, designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In a letter dated June 1, 1943, Hilla Rebay, the curator of the foundation and director of the museum, commissioned Wright to ask him “a temple of the spirit, a monument!”. His project was based on the inverted design of a circular ziggurat, but its construction only began in 1956. The reasons for the delay were manifold, such as the numerous changes to the project, the acquisition of additional property, the increase in the cost of building materials after the Second World War and the death of the museum’s benefactor, Solomon R. Guggenheim. Wright’s masterpiece, probably one of the most important buildings of his career, was opened to the public on October 21, 1959, six months after his death, and was immediately recognized as an architectural icon. A monument to modernism, it features a single exhibition space with a spiral ramp that climbs up to a domed skylight. The original project included a ten-storey tower behind the smaller rotunda to house galleries, offices, workshops, warehouses and private studio apartments that was not built for financial reasons. However, in 1990 Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects built an eight-storey building, which houses exhibition space, offices and warehouses. This structure has a simple facade with a grid that highlights Wright’s unique spiral design.
The permanent collection includes works by painters such as Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vasily Kandinsky (the largest collection in the world), Édouard Manet, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

References

Kenneth T. Jackson, Lisa Keller, Nancy Flood. The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition. Yale University Press, 2010. p. 1203
Francis Morrone. The Architectural Guidebook to New York City . Gibbs Smith, 2002. pp. 323-324
About Us (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Wikipedia)
Guggenheim Museum (Encyclopædia Britannica)

Useful links

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation (Google Arts & Culture)