Description
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is the modern art museum on Fifth Avenue, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in a white spiral building by Frank Lloyd Wright that is as famous as what hangs inside. Its collection counts around 8,000 works, and the building is part of the visit.
Start with the rotunda: look up at the skylight, 95 feet above the ground floor. Then follow the ramp, 1,416 feet long, that winds around the open atrium. Wright likened the shape to a nautilus shell, and the art follows the curve.
The collection began with abstract art, so look for the Kandinskys: the founding collection alone counts more than 150. The Thannhauser Collection, in the top floors of the monitor, adds Van Gogh, Manet and 32 works by Picasso.
When Hilla von Rebay wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 about the future museum, she thought he might be dead. He was 76, very much alive, and had never seen a museum that was "properly designed." She asked him for "a temple of spirit, a monument." It took him 15 years.
Rebay was the painter who had turned the mining magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim from old masters to abstract art, Kandinsky above all. By the 1940s the collection needed a home. What Wright drew looked like no museum before: no rooms in a row, but a single spiral.
The collection had been shown since 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in rented rooms on 54th Street; the name Guggenheim came in 1952, three years after the founder's death.
Building it was a battle: wartime shortages, city building codes, and a director, James Johnson Sweeney, who ended up not speaking to the architect at all. Wright died in April 1959, six months before the opening. Solomon Guggenheim had died ten years earlier.
Critics compared it to a corkscrew, a washing machine and a marshmallow; Solomon's niece Peggy Guggenheim saw "a huge garage." Twenty-one artists protested against hanging their work on its curved walls. In 2019 it joined UNESCO's World Heritage List with seven other Wright buildings.
Don't miss
• The rotunda and its skylight.
• The ramp.
• The Kandinskys.
• The Thannhauser Collection.
Did you know?
• The ramp works like a giant arch, keeping the gallery's columns from collapsing inward.
• A writer for the New York Daily Mirror said the building "should be put in a museum to show how mad the twentieth century is."
Start with the rotunda: look up at the skylight, 95 feet above the ground floor. Then follow the ramp, 1,416 feet long, that winds around the open atrium. Wright likened the shape to a nautilus shell, and the art follows the curve.
The collection began with abstract art, so look for the Kandinskys: the founding collection alone counts more than 150. The Thannhauser Collection, in the top floors of the monitor, adds Van Gogh, Manet and 32 works by Picasso.
When Hilla von Rebay wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 about the future museum, she thought he might be dead. He was 76, very much alive, and had never seen a museum that was "properly designed." She asked him for "a temple of spirit, a monument." It took him 15 years.
Rebay was the painter who had turned the mining magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim from old masters to abstract art, Kandinsky above all. By the 1940s the collection needed a home. What Wright drew looked like no museum before: no rooms in a row, but a single spiral.
The collection had been shown since 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in rented rooms on 54th Street; the name Guggenheim came in 1952, three years after the founder's death.
Building it was a battle: wartime shortages, city building codes, and a director, James Johnson Sweeney, who ended up not speaking to the architect at all. Wright died in April 1959, six months before the opening. Solomon Guggenheim had died ten years earlier.
Critics compared it to a corkscrew, a washing machine and a marshmallow; Solomon's niece Peggy Guggenheim saw "a huge garage." Twenty-one artists protested against hanging their work on its curved walls. In 2019 it joined UNESCO's World Heritage List with seven other Wright buildings.
Don't miss
• The rotunda and its skylight.
• The ramp.
• The Kandinskys.
• The Thannhauser Collection.
Did you know?
• The ramp works like a giant arch, keeping the gallery's columns from collapsing inward.
• A writer for the New York Daily Mirror said the building "should be put in a museum to show how mad the twentieth century is."