In conjunction with the exhibition Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960, the Guggenheim has produced a special exhibition site and several videos, illuminating the 1950s as a period of radical experimentation and highlighting the Guggenheim’s commitment to the contemporary avant-garde.

In the exhibition site, browse a selection of twenty of the nearly one hundred works on view by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Asger Jorn, and Jackson Pollock. Read about their relationship to abstraction and how the artists challenged traditional concepts of subject, material, and process. Six stories, such as “Expanding the Sculpture Collection” and “Tastebreakers of the 1950s,” unfold while exploring the site. Each special selection showcases ephemera from the archives, including correspondence between director James Johnson Sweeney and artists he championed as “tastebreakers,” Jackson Pollock’s application for employment at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (forerunner of the Guggenheim Museum), and vintage airline tickets from the director’s travels in pursuit of discovering new artists.

Along with the exhibition overview video above, several additional videos provide further insight into the time period and the development of the Guggenheim collection. Watch archival footage of the Guggenheim’s inaugural exhibition, which integrated nonobjective painting and other modernist works along with contemporary art; find out more about the Guggenheim International Award, established in 1956 and the largest art prize of its time; and learn about Sweeney’s organization of early exhibitions devoted to younger, or emerging, European and American painters.