Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim's real strength is depth in two narrow, well-chosen bands rather than breadth across the whole of modern art. The first is Vasily Kandinsky, whose work the museum can follow from his pre-First World War Munich years through the Bauhaus and into his final period near Paris, a run built on Solomon Guggenheim's own direct purchases from the artist starting in the late 1920s. The second is the postwar American and European art bought in bulk from Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo between 1990 and 1992 - Flavin, Judd, Morris, Nauman, Weiner and Irwin among more than 350 works - which gave a museum built for European abstraction a serious postwar wing almost overnight. The Thannhauser gift supplies most of what a visitor expecting Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting will actually find. What the museum does not offer is comprehensive survey coverage of any period: with roughly 8,000 works and only a fraction on view at a time, it is a collection of concentrations rather than a chronological walk through modern art.

In June 1943 Hilla Rebay, the artist and adviser who had introduced the mining heir Solomon R. Guggenheim to European abstraction more than a decade earlier, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright and asked him to design a home for Guggenheim's collection of non-objective art. Guggenheim's one instruction was that the building should look like nothing else in the world. Wright had no love for the site: writing in 1949, he said he could think of several more desirable places to build a great museum, but that New York would have to do. He settled on Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets for one reason above the rest, its proximity to Central Park, the closest the city came to open ground and light. The contract dated to 1943; the building did not open until October 21, 1959, sixteen years and 749 recorded drawings later, six months after Wright's own death that April.

What Wright built was meant to work as an instrument rather than a container: a continuous, gently rising ramp winding a quarter of a mile and ninety-two feet up to a skylit dome, so a visitor could ride an elevator to the top and walk back down through the collection along one unbroken path rather than through a sequence of separate rooms. Wright described the goal as creating the best possible setting for showing paintings or listening to music, and local resistance to the design had already stalled construction for years before Guggenheim's death in 1949.

Twenty-one painters signed a letter of protest against the design before it opened, arguing that the ramp's inward-sloping walls and curved bays made it impossible to hang paintings properly. Wright dismissed the signatories in a letter of his own that December and pressed on. When the museum opened, the New York Times critic John Canaday used his opening-day review to argue the spiral had been built with more regard for effect than for showing pictures, and that the building and the paintings hung in it worked against each other. Other critics disagreed just as strongly: the Herald Tribune's Emily Genauer called it the most beautiful building in America even while noting it had already been mocked as a corkscrew, a washing machine and a marshmallow, and the Times Magazine's architecture writer likened it to an inverted cupcake and a giant Jello mold in the same breath as praising it. Six decades on, the criticism has faded and the praise has not: the building is one of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019, and it is routinely named among the most significant buildings of the twentieth century regardless of what happens to be on view inside it.

The building's first purpose was to house a specific idea: non-objective art, the term Rebay and Guggenheim used for abstraction that referred to nothing in the visible world. Guggenheim had begun buying paintings by Vasily Kandinsky directly in the late 1920s, years before the Foundation existed, and a predecessor institution, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, had already opened on East 54th Street in 1939 to show that collection before Wright's building was even commissioned. Kandinsky had set out the theory behind his own paintings in a 1911 treatise arguing that color and form could carry meaning without depicting anything at all, and the museum's collection is still organized around that argument: paintings such as Composition 8 from 1923 and Several Circles from 1926 sit alongside dozens of other Kandinsky canvases and watercolors tracing the idea from his Munich years through the Bauhaus to his final period in France. The Foundation that formalized this collection was established in 1937, and it is that year, not 1959, the institution itself dates its own founding to.

Much of what the Guggenheim shows from outside the non-objective tradition arrived as a single gift. Heinrich Thannhauser had run the Moderne Galerie in Munich, the gallery where Kandinsky's own circle first exhibited before the First World War; his son Justin Thannhauser fled Germany for New York and, through a 1963 gift and later bequests from his widow Hilde, gave the museum the core of what is now called the Thannhauser Collection. It is the reason a museum built for abstraction also owns Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings: Pablo Picasso's Woman with Yellow Hair from 1931, Vincent van Gogh's Landscape with Snow from February 1888, and Marc Chagall's Paris Through the Window and I and the Village, both painted in the Paris years just before 1914. These rooms are the part of the museum most likely to be on a visitor's list even if they came for the building alone.

In May 1990, under director Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim sold three works from its own founding collection at Sotheby's in New York - a Kandinsky, a Chagall and a Modigliani - for a combined 47 million dollars. The sale helped fund the Foundation's purchase, between 1990 and 1992, of more than 350 works from the collectors Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo: one of the most complete surviving collections of Minimal, Post-Minimal and Conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s, with major holdings of Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and Robert Irwin. The deaccessioning was not received quietly; the artist Donald Judd wrote publicly against it that same year, and the sale is still cited as one of the more contested American examples of a museum trading its own collection to buy another one. Whatever the argument over the method, the Panza acquisition gives the Guggenheim's twentieth century holdings a second center of gravity alongside the Kandinsky and Thannhauser material, and the museum spent much of the 2010s on a dedicated research project, concluded in 2021, cataloguing the fabrication and ownership history of more than 140 of those Panza works.

The museum doubled its own exhibition space in 1992 with a ten-story limestone annex designed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, built alongside a broader renovation of the original rotunda. By then the Guggenheim name had already begun to travel: the Foundation now operates what it calls a constellation of museums that includes the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, a separate institution built around Solomon's niece's own collection; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997; and a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi still under development. Each is a distinct institution with its own director and its own collection, and none of them is the subject of this page. Nearer home, the museum's education wing, opened as the Sackler Center for Arts Education, dropped the Sackler name in 2022, part of a wider pattern of museums distancing themselves from a family whose fortune came from the marketing of opioids; the space is now the Gail May Engelberg Center for Arts Education.

In 2019 the Guggenheim gave Chaedria LaBouvier the job of organizing Basquiat's Defacement: The Untold Story, making her the first Black curator to lead a show there. She subsequently accused the museum's longtime chief curator, Nancy Spector, and its leadership of racist treatment, including being excluded from a public panel about the exhibition she herself had curated. Twenty-two of the twenty-three members of the museum's curatorial department signed a letter that summer describing a work environment that enabled racism and other discrimination. The Guggenheim hired the law firm Kramer Levin to investigate; in October 2020 the museum announced the inquiry, which reviewed more than 15,000 documents, had found no evidence LaBouvier was treated adversely because of her race, and that Spector, after 34 years at the museum, was leaving anyway. LaBouvier said she had never been interviewed for the investigation and had been warned by a board member in 2019 not to go up against the Guggenheim; the museum said its investigators had tried to reach her. Separately, in 2019, roughly 140 of the museum's maintenance and installation staff unionized, the first time Guggenheim employees had organized in this way.

Maurizio Cattelan's America, a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet, was installed as a working restroom for visitors from September 2016, and in its year on view an estimated 100,000 people used it. On its last day in New York, September 15, 2017, Nancy Spector, still the museum's chief curator, wrote to the White House's curatorial office, which days earlier had asked to borrow van Gogh's Landscape with Snow for the President's residence. She declined, citing the painting's fragility and its restrictions on travel, and offered America instead. The White House did not take her up on it, and records later showed the same van Gogh went on loan to four European exhibitions between 2018 and 2023. The toilet went to a real exhibition two years later, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, where thieves stole it within minutes on the morning of September 14, 2019; it has never been recovered and is widely presumed melted down for its scrap gold value, worth close to 9 million dollars at 103 kilograms. A related work, an edition of Cattelan's taped-banana sculpture Comedian, was later donated to the Guggenheim outright, so the museum that lost one Cattelan sculpture to theft still owns another.

Visitors consistently say the building itself, more than any single work inside it, is the reason to come: the continuous spiral ramp and the light falling through the dome are what people describe first, and the architecture is treated as inseparable from the collection rather than a container for it. Complaints cluster around cost weighed against how quickly the single building can be seen, and around how small a share of the roughly 8,000-work collection is on view against expectations set by the Guggenheim name.