The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is home to one of the world’s finest collections of modern and contemporary art. The Wright building, the youngest to be designated a New York City landmark, is itself one of the greatest works of the Guggenheim Collection.

In 1943, Solomon R. Guggenheim commissioned Wright to design a unique building to house his collection of avant-garde art. During the subsequent years of planning and design, Wright applied his vision of fluid and organic architecture to the museum, and in the process, completely redefined how a museum was supposed to look. With a prestigious Fifth Avenue address, the new Guggenheim was opened in 1959 amidst much controversy and protests of its daring, curvaceous design that broke the rectilinear grid of Manhattan. The building has never lost its power to excite and provoke, and it stands today as one of the great works of architecture produced in this century.

In 1992, the Guggenheim underwent a major renovation that updated the original building and expanded the Museum’s exhibition space with the addition of an adjacent tower. However, the designers made sure that Wright’s building remained essentially the same as the famed architect wanted it.

The Guggenheim Museum has expanded its operations not only in its own building, but also throughout the world. With the addition of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (1979), the Guggenheim Museum SoHo (1992), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) and the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (1997), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is the founding member of the first international museum.

The collection was founded during the late 1920s by Solomon R. Guggenheim with the assistance of his art adviser, Hilla Rebay. Inspired by Rebay’s commitment to abstract painting, Guggenheim began collecting in Europe and America. In 1937 he set up the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation with the specific purpose of creating a museum to house works by such artists as Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian. Originally called the Museum of Nonobjective Painting, the new institution was housed in a former automobile showroom on East 54th Street. It was renamed for its founder in 1952, and opened to the public at its present location in 1959.

In 1976 Justin K. Thannhauser, one of the great collectors of the modern era, bequeathed masterworks by Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh and others to the Museum. The donation, augmented by further gifts from Justin’s widow, Hilde Thannhauser, is permanently installed in the expanded galleries of the restored small rotunda, which bears the Thannhausers’ name.

Also in 1976 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, including Cubist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist works of art, was transferred to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The addition of the collection, which is housed in a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, enhanced the foundation’s international profile.

In 1990, the museum acquired the important Panza di Biumo collection of more than 200 works of American Minimalist art from the 1960s and 1970s, further enriching the Guggenheim Museum’s growing collection of the art of this century. In 1993, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation bequeathed nearly 200 photographs and objects by this seminal artist, formally introducing photography into the Museum’s collection and inaugurating a gallery, which bears Mapplethorpe’s name, in the Museum’s fourth floor tower for photography exhibitions.

Photo credit: David Heald
Hours: Monday - Wednesday & Sunday 9 AM - 6 PM, Friday - Saturday 9 AM - 8 PM, closed Thursdays

Admission: Adults $12, students & seniors $8, children under 12 free

Location: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is located at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, on New York City’s Museum Mile.
For tickets/information, call: 212-423-3500
Hours to call: 24-hour information line

Visit their Web site at: http://www.guggenheim.org