The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum located at 1071 Fifth Avenue on East 89th Street in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood, New York City, New York. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting under its first director, Hilla von Rebay. It adopted its current name in 1952, three years after its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim. Top HVAC NYC
In 1959, the museum moved from rented space to its current building, a landmark 20th-century architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The cylindrical tower, more comprehensive at the top than at the bottom, was conceived as a “temple of the spirit.” Its unique ramp gallery extends up from ground level in a long, continuous spiral along the outer edges of the building to end just under the ceiling skylight. The building underwent extensive expansion and renovations in 1992 when an adjoining tower was built from 2005 to 2008.
The museum’s collection has grown over eight decades and is founded upon several important private collections, beginning with Solomon R. Guggenheim. The group is shared with sister museums in Bilbao, Spain, and elsewhere. In 2013, nearly 1.2 million people visited the museum, and it hosted the most popular exhibition in New York City.
Solomon R. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, had been collecting works of the old masters since the 1890s. In 1926, he met artist Hilla von Rebay, who introduced him to European avant-garde art, particularly abstract art that she felt had a spiritual and utopian aspect (non-objective art). Guggenheim completely changed his collecting strategy, turning to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, among others. He began to display his collection to the public at his apartment in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. As the group grew, he established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 to foster the appreciation of modern art.
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting
The foundation’s first venue for the display of art, the “Museum of Non-Objective Painting,” opened in 1939 under the direction of Rebay in midtown Manhattan. Under Rebay’s guidance, Guggenheim sought to include the most important examples of non-objective art available at the time by early modernists such as Rudolf Bauer, Rebay, Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.
Address: 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY
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