Frank Lloyd Wright's last major work, the Guggenheim opened in 1959 with a spiraling ramp gallery that lets visitors view art along one continuous descending path.
The building itself is part of the experience — many visitors ride the elevator to the top and walk down the spiral ramp rather than climbing up.
The institution predates the building by twenty years. Solomon Guggenheim assembled his holdings with the German painter Hilla Rebay, who opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting at 24 East 54th Street in 1939 and ran it until 1952. Wright was hired in June 1943. Sixteen years of revisions, budget fights and a change of director followed, and the museum was dedicated on October 21, 1959, six months after Wright's death on April 9 of that year. He never saw it occupied.
The ramp runs 1,416 feet through six stories and seventy bays, rising to the oculus about ninety-five feet overhead, and Wright meant visitors to take the elevator up and walk down. Not everyone thought this was a good idea. In 1956 a group of artists wrote to the director James Johnson Sweeney arguing that the sloping walls and curving ramp were unsuitable for the sympathetic display of painting and sculpture; the signatures included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb. The complaint was never really resolved so much as absorbed — the rotunda now suits installation and single-artist work far better than it suits a conventional hang, and it is usually given over to exactly that.
Which leads to the thing most visitors miss. The permanent collection largely lives off the spiral, in the smaller drum Wright called the monitor. The Thannhauser Collection, acquired in 1963 from the dealer Justin Thannhauser and shown there from 1965, occupies the monitor's upper stories and holds the Impressionist and early modern paintings people assume are on the ramp. A 1992 tower annex by Gwathmey Siegel added further gallery space behind the rotunda. The building was restored between 2005 and 2008 and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019 among a group of Wright's works.
1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128 · Official site ↗
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It hosts a permanent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. It was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. The museum adopted its current name in 1952, three years after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim. It continues to be operated and owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
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