Finding 63: Brochure for Al's Grand Hotel, 1971

In conducting research for the 1977 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, Nine Artists: Theodoron Awards, curator Linda Shearer collected printed ephemera, artists' books, and small catalogues pertaining to the artists she included in the show. One of these items, a brochure for Allen Ruppersberg's Al's Grand Hotel (1971), is featured here. Part installation work and part performance piece, Al's Grand Hotel was situated on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and remained open for six weeks during the spring of 1971. Visitors could make advance reservations to spend the night in such rooms as the Jesus Room or Ultra Violet Room, or just stop by to tour the space and have a drink in the hotel bar. One could also purchase items from the installation, including the life-sized cardboard figures from the Al Room pictured in the top right of this brochure.

-Amanda Brown, Archives Assistant

Finding 62: Robert Motherwell Supervising the Installation of his Exhibition

A retrospective exhibition of the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell was shown at the Guggenheim Museum from December 7, 1984 to February 3, 1985. It was the sixth and last stop for the exhibition, which toured throughout the country beginning in October of 1983 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the organizing institution for the exhibition. The show included about 150 paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, and prints executed between 1941 and 1984. The artist and then Museum Deputy Director Diane Waldman chose approximately 60 of the 150 exhibited works specifically for the Guggenheim showing of the retrospective. Most of these works came from the artist's collection and had never been exhibited before. The photograph shows the artist and Waldman during the exhibition's installation in the High Gallery, where most of these additional works were installed. A diagram of the gallery's south wall, which accompanies the exhibition wall list, matches the configuration of paintings seen in the photograph.

-Shirin Khaki, Archives Assistant

Finding 61: Removal of Brickwork from Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian House

From October 22nd to December 13th, 1953, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted the exhibition Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In order to accommodate the show, a temporary pavilion was erected on the site of the future Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum building. In addition to the pavilion, a model Usonian House was constructed on the lot and furnished with pieces designed by Wright. Conceived of by Wright as a sample of affordable housing for the average American, the two-bedroom house was built on a human scale, and had an open floor plan and ample natural light. The photograph shown here documents the final removal of brickwork from the Usonian House at the conclusion of the exhibition.

Before coming to New York, Sixty Years of Living Architecture had been shown in various European cities as well as in Mexico and proved to be immensely popular with the public. During the course of the exhibition in New York, over eighty-thousand visitors came to the museum, which remained open every day and had extended hours until 10 pm several days a week.

-Amanda Brown, Archives Assistant

Finding 60: Exterior Sign for the Museum of Non-Objective Painting

As evidenced by the sign visible through the museum window, this photograph, found within the Exhibition files, was taken during the Kandinsky Memorial Exhibition, which was held at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting from March 15 to April 29, 1945. Although the photograph shows the museum facade, documents found in the Hilla Rebay records help paint an even clearer picture of the exterior of 24 East 54th Street, where the museum was housed from 1939 until 1947. Correspondence between Rebay and the Reliance Sign Company, accompanied by a sketch and paint sample, reveal that the simple "Museum" sign had a blue metal background and raised white wooden letters. The 16-foot, 8-inch-high and 22-inch-wide sign hung 10 feet above the sidewalk, placing it approximately in the center of the 41-foot-high building. The blue paint samples, like the sign, are on galvanized metal. Correspondence from the sign company also reveals that Rebay, who picked sample A, was limited in her choice of blue shades for the sign due to the tendency of blue paint to fade. The sign was erected on the extreme west end of the building in February of 1940 and presumably remained there until the museum's move into a townhouse at 1071 Fifth Avenue in 1948.

–Shirin Khaki, Archives Assistant