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.
The museum's building, a landmark work of 20th-century architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, drew controversy for the unusual shape of its display spaces and took 15 years to design and build; it was completed in 1959. It consists of a six-story, bowl-shaped main gallery to the south, a four-story "monitor" to the north, and a ten-story annex to the northeast. A six-story helical ramp extends along the main gallery's perimeter, under a central ceiling skylight. The Thannhauser Collection is housed within the top three stories of the monitor, and there are additional galleries in the annex and a learning center in the basement. The museum building's design was controversial when it was completed but was widely praised afterward. The building underwent extensive renovations from 1990 to 1992, when the annex was built, and it was renovated again from 2005 to 2008.
The museum's collection has grown over the decades and is founded upon several important private collections, including those of Guggenheim, Karl Nierendorf, Katherine Sophie Dreier, Justin Thannhauser, Rebay, Giuseppe Panza, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Bohen Foundation. The collection, which includes around 8,000 works , is shared with sister museums in Bilbao and Venice. In 2023, nearly 861,000 people visited the museum.
History
Early years and Hilla Rebay
Solomon R. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, began collecting works of the old masters in the 1890s. who introduced him to European avant-garde art, in particular abstract art that she felt had a spiritual and utopian aspect (non-objective art). Guggenheim and Rebay initially considered building a museum at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
thumb|left|225px|[[Albert Gleizes, 1915, Composition for "Jazz", oil on cardboard, 73 × 73 cm]]
The foundation's first venue, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, opened at 24 East 54th Street in midtown Manhattan in 1939, under Rebay's direction. He wanted to display the collection at the 1939 New York World's Fair in Queens, but Rebay advocated for a more permanent location in Manhattan. and Rebay wanted to establish it before Guggenheim died. Rebay thought the 76-year-old Wright was dead, but Guggenheim's wife Irene Rothschild Guggenheim knew better and suggested that Rebay contact him. Wright accepted the opportunity to experiment with his "organic" style in an urban setting, saying that he had never seen a museum that was "properly designed". He was hired to design the building in June 1943. He was to receive a 10 percent commission on the project, which was expected to cost at least $1 million. the cost eventually doubled from the initial estimate.
Rebay envisioned a space that would facilitate a new way of seeing modern art. She wrote Wright that "each of these great masterpieces should be organized into space, and only you ... would test the possibilities to do so. ... I want a temple of spirit, a monument!" Critic Paul Goldberger later wrote that Wright's modernist building was a catalyst for change, making it "socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim." The Guggenheim is the only museum Wright designed; its urban location required him to design it in a vertical rather than horizontal form, far different from his earlier, rural works.
thumb|[[Bramante Staircase|Staircase at the Vatican Museums designed by Giuseppe Momo in 1932]]
From 1943 to early 1944, Wright produced four differing designs. One had a hexagonal shape and level floors for the galleries, though all the others had circular schemes and used a ramp continuing around the building.