The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his long-time art advisor, artist Hilla von Rebay. The foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preservation, and research of modern and contemporary art and operates several museums around the world. The first museum established by the foundation was The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in New York City. This became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952, and the foundation moved the collection into its first permanent museum building, in New York City, in 1959. The foundation next opened the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, in 1980. Its international network of museums expanded in 1997 to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, and it expects to open a new museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates after its construction is completed.
The mission of the foundation is "to promote the understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, and other manifestations of visual culture, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, and to collect, conserve, and study" modern and contemporary art."Mission Statement", Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved March 6, 2012 The Foundation seeks, in its constituent museums, to unite distinguished architecture and artworks. The foundation's first permanent museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is housed in a modern spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Guggenheim Bilbao was designed by Frank Gehry. Both of these innovative designs received wide press and critical attention. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in an 18th-century Italian palace, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal.
The permanent collection of the foundation is based primarily on nine private collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection of non-objective paintings; Karl Nierendorf's collection of German expressionism and early abstract expressionism; Katherine S. Dreier's gift of paintings and sculptures; Peggy Guggenheim's collection, concentrating on abstraction and surrealism; Justin K. and Hilde Thannhauser's collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern masterpieces; part of Hilla von Rebay's collection; Giuseppe Panza's holdings of American minimalist, post-minimalist, environmental and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s; a collection of photographs and mixed media from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; and the Bohen Foundation's collection of film, video, photography and new media."Guggenheim Museum New York", Encyclopedia of Art, visual-arts-cork.com. Retrieved April 18, 2012 The foundation's collections have expanded greatly through eight decades and include every major movement of 20th- and 21st-century art. Its directors and curators have attempted to form a single collection that is not encyclopedic, but rather based on their unique visions.Spector, pp. 6–7 The collection has grown in scope to include new media and performance art, and the foundation has entered into collaborations with YouTube and BMW.
History
Hilla Rebay and early years Solomon R. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, began collecting works of the old masters in the 1890s. He retired from his business in 1919 to devote more time to art collecting. In 1926, at age 66, he met artist Hilla von Rebay, who was commissioned by Guggenheim's wife, Irene Rothschild, to paint his portrait."Exhibition of Works Reflecting the Evolution of the Guggenheim's Collection Opens in Bilbao", artdaily.org, 2009. Retrieved April 18, 2012 Rebay introduced him to European avant-garde art, in particular abstract art that she felt had a spiritual and utopian aspect (non-objective art). Guggenheim completely changed his collecting strategy."Biography: Solomon R. Guggenheim", Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved March 8, 2012 In 1930, the two visited Wassily Kandinsky's studio in Dessau, Germany, and Guggenheim began to purchase Kandinsky's work. The same year, Guggenheim began to display the collection to the public at his apartment in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Guggenheim's purchases continued with the works of Rudolf Bauer, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and great artists who were not of the non-objective school, such as Marc Chagall, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Pablo Picasso and László Moholy-Nagy. Pieces from the collection were first shown outside New York City in 1936, when the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, displayed 128 of the collection's paintings.;
In 1937, Guggenheim established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to foster the appreciation of modern art. The foundation's first venue for the display of art was called the "Museum of Non-Objective Painting". It opened in 1939 under the direction of Rebay, its first curator, in a former automobile showroom at East 54th Street in midtown Manhattan.Vail, pp. 25 and 36 This moved, in 1947, to another rented space at 1071 Fifth Avenue. Under Rebay's guidance, Guggenheim sought to include in the collection the most important examples of non-objective art available at the time, such as Kandinsky's Composition 8 (1923), Léger's Contrast of Forms (1913) and Delaunay's Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (1912).Calnek, Anthony, et al. The Guggenheim Collection, pp. 39–40, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2006
By the early 1940s, the foundation had accumulated such a large collection of avant-garde paintings that the need for a permanent building to house the art collection had become apparent.Winter, Damon. "Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum", The New York Times, October 21, 2009. Retrieved March 7, 2012 In 1943, Guggenheim and Rebay commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design the museum building.Vail, p. 333 Rebay conceived of the space as a "temple of the spirit" that would facilitate a new way of looking at the modern pieces in the collection.The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum, pp. 217–18, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2009 In 1948, the collection was greatly expanded through the purchase of art dealer Karl Nierendorf's estate of some 730 objects, notably German expressionist paintings. By that time, the foundation's collection included a broad spectrum of expressionist and surrealist works, including paintings by Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Joan Miró. Guggenheim died in 1949, and the museum was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952. The foundation expanded its display activities with a series of traveling exhibitions."Biography: Hilla Rebay", Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved March 8, 2012
After Guggenheim's death, members of the Guggenheim family who sat on the foundation's board of directors had personal and philosophical differences with Rebay, and in 1952 she resigned as director of the museum. Nevertheless, she left a portion of her personal collection to the foundation in her will, including works by Kandinsky, Klee, Alexander Calder, Gleizes, Piet Mondrian and Kurt Schwitters.
Sweeney and completion of the first building
In 1953, the foundation's collecting boundaries extended even further under its new director, James Johnson Sweeney. Sweeney rejected Rebay's dismissal of "objective" painting and sculpture, and he soon acquired Constantin Brâncuși's Adam and Eve (1921), followed by works of other modernist sculptors, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti and David Smith. Sweeney reached beyond the 20th century to acquire Paul Cézanne's Man with Crossed Arms (c. 1899). In 1953, the foundation received a gift of 28 important works from the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, a founder of America's first collection to be called a modern art museum, the Société Anonyme. Dreier had been a colleague of Rebay's. The works included Little French Girl (1914–18) by Brâncuși, an untitled still life (1916) by Juan Gris, a bronze sculpture (1919) by Alexander Archipenko and three collages (1919–21) by German Hanoverian Dadaist Schwitters. It also included works by Calder, Marcel Duchamp, El Lissitzky and Mondrian. Among others, Sweeney also acquired the works of Alberto Giacometti, David Hayes, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.The Global Guggenheim, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Publications. Retrieved March 8, 2012 He also established the Guggenheim International Awards in 1956. Sweeney oversaw the last half dozen years of the construction of the museum building, during which time he had an antagonistic relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright, especially regarding the building's lighting issues. "James Johnson Sweeney Administrative papers", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Publications. Retrieved March 8, 2012Glueck, Grace. "James Johnson Sweeney Dies; Art Critic and Museum Head", The New York Times, April 15, 1986
The distinctive cylindrical building, wider at the top than the bottom, with a spiral ramp climbing gently from ground level to the skylight at the top, turned out to be Wright's last major work, as the architect died six months before its opening."Last Monument", Time magazine, November 2, 1959 The building opened in October 1959 to large crowdsSpector, p. 16 and instantly polarized architecture critics,, The News and Courier, October 22, 1959, p. 9-A. Retrieved March 1, 2012 though today it is widely praised."The Wright Stuff," USA Today (Weekend). November 6, 1998 Some of the criticism focused on the idea that the building overshadows the artworks displayed inside, and that it is difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow, windowless, concave exhibition niches that surround the central spiral. Prior to its opening, twenty-one artists signed a letter protesting the display of their work in such a space. Upon opening, the museum received a largely favorable response from the public, despite the early misgivings: "overall Wright's design was, and still is, admired for being highly personal and inviting".Wolf, Justin. "The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum", The Art Story Foundation, accessed July 3, 2014
Messer and the ramp
Thomas M. Messer succeeded Sweeney as director of the museum (but not the foundation) in 1961 and stayed for 27 years, the longest tenure of any of the city's major arts institutions' directors. When Messer took over, the museum's ability to present art at all was still in doubt due to the challenges presented by continuous spiral ramp gallery that is both tilted and has curved walls. Almost immediately, in 1962, he took a risk putting on a large exhibition that combined the Guggenheim's paintings with sculptures on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum. Three-dimensional sculpture, in particular, raised "the problem of installing such a show in a museum bearing so close a resemblance to the circular geography of hell", where any vertical object appears tilted in a "drunken lurch" because the slope of the floor and the curvature of the walls could combine to produce vexing optical illusions.
It turned out that the combination could work well in the Guggenheim's space, but, Messer recalled that at the time, "I was scared. I half felt that this would be my last exhibition." Messer had the foresight to prepare by staging a smaller sculpture exhibition the previous year, in which he discovered how to compensate for the space's weird geometry by constructing special plinths at a particular angle, so the pieces were not at a true vertical yet appeared to be so. In the earlier sculpture show, this trick proved impossible for one piece, an Alexander Calder mobile whose wire inevitably hung at a true plumb vertical, "suggesting hallucination" in the disorienting context of the tilted floor.