The Guggenheim Museum: Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Great Gift to New York City
New York is more than America’s greatest city: it has been and continues to be the inspiration behind much of the country’s most enduring works of art and literature. From Langston Hughes to Jonathan Safran Foer, and from Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko, New York City has been the driving force behind many American cultural movements since the early 20th century. This fact is made even more evident by the wide variety of museums and art galleries in the city, of which the most prominent are the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, among many. others.
Both artistically and architecturally, New York’s Guggenheim Museum (technically called the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) is one of the city’s most interesting landmarks and art forums. The eminent novelist EB White once said, “New York is to the nation what the white spire is to the people,” and artistically speaking, the white spire of New York is arguably the Guggenheim. Located at the corners of 89th Street and 5th Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, its architect Frank Lloyd Wright set out to make the building look like what has been described as “a white ribbon wound into a cylindrical stack,” and he was determined. because of its avant-garde design that makes the Metropolitan Museum of Art look like “a Protestant barn.” Although widely condemned at the time, the building is now considered one of the finest in New York, as is often the case with the finest pieces of architecture.
Originally established in 1937 as “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting”, the Guggenheim was established primarily to exhibit works by early modernists, such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. In particular, it continues to exhibit the work of Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock on an ongoing basis. Recent exhibitions have included various displays of Russian and Socialist art, Robert Mapplethorpe and the classical tradition, David Smith: A Centennial, and images of Baghdad-born artist Zaha Hadid. Its planned showcases for the future include the work of Lucio Fontana and Spanish painting from El Greco to Picasso. This eclectic range of artists and artwork demonstrates the Guggenheim Museum’s continued commitment to its original goal, to showcase the work of the new modernism, while continuing to embrace new forms of modern art in the 21st century. While “high” modern and postmodern art have been the main artistic lines followed by the Guggenheim, it has also been host to a variety of commercial art, including seasons showcasing Giorgio Armani motorcycles and suits.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York is part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by the eminent philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and artist Hilla von Rebay. Since establishing the first Guggenheim in New York, the foundation has opened more museums in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Las Vegas, and is in the process of establishing another Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. For the art tourist, a perfect vacation idea might be a trip around the world to all the Guggenheim museums. This idea isn’t even as expensive as it might seem: for example, there are Hilton hotels in all of these cities, and by using the Hilton Honors rewards system, traveling art fans can use their accumulated points to claim hotel and mileage rewards. aerial. with a variety of different airlines, to make your world tour of the Guggenheim a vacation with a difference.
