Frank.LloydWright.info

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867—1959)

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Upper East Side in New York City 1937

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum, located on a section of Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile, is housed in one of the most unique buildings in New York City. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum is shaped roughly like a teacup or an upside down terraced hill. It is not unusual to see adults with their children here, going up and down the spiraling ramp.

Exploring the Guggenheim is extremely enjoyable, but a floor plan is a necessity. The amount of artwork on display is significant, so much so that a visitor might feel a kind of art overload, which is why the museum offers self guided audio tours and group tours for interested visitors. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum houses some fine collections of world famous painters like Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky, and many other modern artists. The major part of the collection contains paintings, but sculptures and photos are also on display in the museum.

The collection was started by Solomon R. Guggenheim in the late 1920s. In 1937, he founded the Museum of Nonobjective painting, located on East 54th street. It later moved to its present location near Central Park. The collection was expanded several times. In 1976, an important collection of paintings from Gauguin, Picasso, van Gogh and many others were donated by Justin K. Thannhauser.

In 1990, more than 200 works of American Minimalist art were added to the collection. Expect to spend at least half a day going through the galleries and exploring the building. Try to head here early and avoid the weekends when the museum gets extremely crowded. 

History

Originally called "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting," the Guggenheim was founded to showcase avant-garde art by early modernists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. It moved to its present location, at the corners of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue (overlooking Central Park), in 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the site was completed.

The distinctive building, Wright's last major work, instantly polarized architecture critics,[1] though today it is widely revered. From the street, the building looks approximately like a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art "look like a Protestant barn."

Internally, the viewing gallery forms a gentle spiral from the ground level up to the top of the building. Paintings are displayed along the walls of the spiral and also in viewing rooms found at stages along the way.

Most criticism of the building has focused on the idea that it overshadows the artworks displayed within, and that it is particularly difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow windowless exhibition niches which surround the central spiral. Although the rotunda is generously lit by a large skylight, the niches are heavily shadowed by the walkway itself, leaving the art to be lit largely by artificial light. The walls of the niches are neither vertical nor flat (most are gently concave) meaning canvasses must be mounted proud of the wall's surface. The limited space within the niches means that sculptures are generally relegated to plinths amid the main spiral walkway itself. Prior to its opening, twenty-one artists signed a letter protesting the display of their work in such a space.

In 1992, the building was supplemented by an adjoining rectangular tower, taller than the original spiral, designed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates Architects. By that point, the building had become iconic enough that this augmentation of Wright's original design was itself controversial.
 

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