Guggenheim

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was founded in 1937, and it opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, its first New York–based venue for the display of art. The unusual gallery—designed by William Muschenheim at the behest of Hilla Rebay, the foundation’s curator and the museum’s director—was built in a former automobile showroom on East Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. With its exhibitions of Solomon Guggenheim’s somewhat eccentric art collection, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting provided many visitors with their first encounter with great works by Vasily Kandinsky—such as In the Black Square (June 1923)—as well as works by his followers, including Rudolf Bauer, Alice Mason, Otto Nebel, and Rolph Scarlett. Hung low to the ground on walls covered with thick drapery, these paintings were to be surveyed while the music of Bach and Chopin played on the sound system.

The need for a permanent building to house Solomon Guggenheim’s art collection was evident in the early 1940s; by this time, an elderly Solomon had amassed a vast number of avant-garde paintings. Hilla Rebay has been credited as giving the commission for the museum building to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943. Over the next twelve years Wright would create seven designs for the museum that opened on October 21, 1959, several months after Wright’s death and ten years after Solomon’s. Once it shed its narrowly focused name, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was poised to grow well beyond the original intention of its founders.

The guiding principle often attributed to Hilla Rebay was to collect the most important examples of nonobjective art available, including Kandinsky’s Composition 8 (July 1923), Fernand Léger’s Contrast of Forms (1913), and Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (1912). In 1948, the Guggenheim Foundation’s collection expanded by some 730 objects with the purchase of the entire estate of Karl Nierendorf, a New York art dealer who specialized in German paintings. The Guggenheim collection now included a rich array of major Expressionist and Surrealist works with paintings by Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and Joan Miró. But in 1953 the institution’s collecting boundaries would extend further by its new director, James Johnson Sweeney, when he rejected Rebay’s earlier dismissal of sculpture and acquired Constantin Brancusi’s Adam and Eve (1921), thus opening the way for the acquisition of works by other great modernist sculptors, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, and David Smith. Sweeney would also dispense with the notion that the Guggenheim collection needed to be limited to twentieth-century art with the acquisition in 1954 of Paul Cézanne’s Man with Crossed Arms (ca. 1899).

The next leap forward occurred in 1963, when Thomas M. Messer, who had succeeded Sweeney as director two years earlier, acquired a large group of works from art dealer Justin K. Thannhauser’s private collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, including important works by Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Vincent van Gogh, as well as 32 works by Pablo Picasso. With the Thannhauser Collection, which now numbers 73 works, the Guggenheim Foundation’s holdings gained significant historical depth.

Messer surpassed that achievement in the 1970s by convincing Peggy Guggenheim to donate her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and entire collection—more than 300 important abstract and Surrealist works—upon her death. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection includes masterpieces by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, a rare Kazimir Malevich Suprematist painting, various Picasso masterpieces, and perhaps most importantly, 11 works by Jackson Pollock.

The pre-Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue

When Peggy Guggenheim died in 1978, the Guggenheim Foundation began to operate more than one venue at the same time, and this expansion became an important part of the foundation’s identity. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, located in Venice on the Grand Canal, opened to the public in 1985, the same year the United States selected the Guggenheim Foundation to operate and maintain the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, which is today owned by the foundation.

The next broadening of the Guggenheim Foundation’s holdings occurred in 1991, with the addition of the Panza Collection. These works of the 1960s and 1970s were acquired from the vast collection assembled by Count Giuseppe di Biumo in collaboration with his wife, Giovanna Panza. The Panza Collection was the first major acquisition by Thomas Krens, who became director in 1988, and its emphasis on abstract sculpture and painting was a natural fit within the historical parameters of works acquired by the foundation. The Panza Collection includes many definitive examples of Minimalist sculptures by such artists as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd; equally strong examples of Minimalist paintings, by Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman; and a rich array of Post-Minimal, Conceptual, and perceptual art by Robert Morris, Richard Serra, James Turrell, and Lawrence Weiner, among others.

During the course of the 1990s, Krens oversaw a greater than 50 percent increase in the Guggenheim Foundation’s collection overall. Perhaps more important than the quantity of acquisitions has been the broadening of the collection’s scope to include contemporary photography, which had been all but ignored by the foundation, and multimedia art.

Without losing sight of the foundation’s deep commitment to expanding the permanent collection, one of Krens’s most significant initiatives was to build on the institution’s distinctive international presence. The Basque government proposed Bilbao as the site for a third Guggenheim Museum, and in 1991, California-based architect Frank Gehry was selected to design the building. When it opened in 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—a spectacular structure made of titanium, glass, and limestone—was greeted with glowing praise from critics around the world. Having just past its tenth anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has presented more than 90 exhibitions to over ten million visitors. In addition to highlighting its permanent collection that includes works by modern and contemporary Basque and Spanish artists like Eduardo Chillida, Juan Munoz, and Antonio Sauro, as well as works from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has organized multiple special exhibitions and featured exhibitions curated by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. These shows have included monographic exhibitions of artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Nam June Paik, and in-depth historical surveys such as China, 5,000 Years and Russia!: Nine Hundred Years of Masterpieces and Master Collections.

After the opening of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Guggenheim Foundation further expanded its reach by collaborating with Deutsche Bank on an exhibition space in Berlin. From opening its doors in 1997 to closing its final exhibition in 2013, the Deutsche Guggenheim presented a dynamic annual schedule of four exhibitions complemented by educational programming. Perhaps the most unique aspect of this programming were the Deutsche Guggenheim’s commissions, which charged contemporary artists with creating artworks or series that then debuted in exhibitions organized in collaboration with Guggenheim Museum curators. Working in a diversity of mediums, the artists, including William Kentridge, Jeff Koons, James Rosenquist, Phoebe Washburn, and Rachel Whiteread, created some of their best work. The vibrant programming and commissions at the Deutsche Guggenheim are a testament to the Guggenheim Foundation and Deutsche Bank's commitment to artists and public access to contemporary art.

In 2001 the Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg jointly opened the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas. This small museum, designed by internationally acclaimed architect Rem Koolhaas, focused on presenting masterworks from the permanent collections of the allied museums. The inaugural exhibition, Masterpieces and Master Collectors: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings from the Hermitage and Guggenheim Museums, showcased a selection of 42 key works highlighting the distinct but highly complementary strengths of these two world-renowned collections. In May of 2008 the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, known as the “Jewel Box,” concluded its seven-year tenure at the Venetian, attracting over 1.1 million visitors with ten exhibitions of masterworks by leading artists from the last six centuries—from Van Eyck, Titian, and Velázquez, to Van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock.

In the past ten years the Guggenheim Foundation has conducted numerous feasibility studies for projects in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Currently, the foundation, in collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum, is conducting a study for a new museum in Vilnius. While managing existing museums and exploring new ventures the Guggenheim Foundation regularly travels its loan exhibitions and coorganizes exhibitions with other museums in order to share its expertise and strengthen public outreach. Occasionally the foundation receives requests for cultural programming on a broader international scale, providing the opportunity to organize an exhibition of its global collections that is specifically tailored for another international venue. The aim of this collection exhibition program is to educate the public about modern and contemporary art through the celebrated Guggenheim collections.

Today the Guggenheim operates museums in New York, Venice, and Bilbao, with plans for a fourth in Abu Dhabi. Designed by architect Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, a 450,000 square foot museum of modern and contemporary art, will be built on Saadiyat Island, adjacent to the main island of Abu Dhabi city, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The Guggenheim joins the Louvre and other leading institutions in the unprecedented creation of a vibrant cultural district in the Middle East. With nearly three million annual visitors worldwide, the Guggenheim and its network of museums is one of the most visited cultural institutions in the world.