Founded in
1937, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a modern art museum
located on the Upper East Side in New York City. It is the best-known
of several museums founded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
and is often called simply "the Guggenheim".
Originally
called "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting", the Guggenheim
was founded to showcase avant-garde art by high 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 itself became the best-known work of art. From the street,
the building looks approximately like a white ribbon curled into
a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom.
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.
In 1992, the
building was supplemented by an adjoining rectangular tower, taller
than the original spiral. This augmentation of Wright's original
design---widely regarded as a classic of American architecture---was
controversial. The building's white color, and the relative proportions
of the boxy, rectangular tower and the squat, cylindrical rotunda,
led some observers to remark that the new ensemble resembled a
toilet bowl.
Lloyd Wright's building has proved to be unpopular with some art
critics, who feel the building 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 atrium 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.
