Episode notes
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum began with a conversion. Solomon R. Guggenheim, a Gilded Age mining magnate who collected old masters, met the artist Hilla von Rebay in 1926, and she turned him toward non-objective art, which she believed carried spiritual and utopian power. He bought works by Wassily Kandinsky in bulk and showed them in his apartment at the Plaza Hotel, then in 1939 opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in a Midtown townhouse. In 1943 Rebay asked for a temple of spirit and chose Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she thought was dead until Irene Guggenheim pointed out he was 76 and still working. Wright, who had never designed a museum, proposed an inverted ziggurat with a continuous spiral ramp under a glass skylight on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park.
The project took 15 years and six sets of working drawings. World War II caused material shortages, postwar inflation pushed the budget from about $1 million to $2 million, and Guggenheim died in 1949. In 1952 the trustees forced Rebay to resign and renamed the institution the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Construction began in 1956, the same year 21 artists published a letter protesting that the slanted, curved walls were unfit for paintings. It opened in October 1959 to crowds of 600 people an hour. Director Thomas Messer, who feared his first show there would be his last, invented angled mounts to hang flat canvases on walls that lean back.
- Rebay's belief that art without recognizable subjects could speak to the soul after the devastation of World War I
- Giuseppe Momo's 1932 double-helix staircase at the Vatican Museums as a likely inspiration for the ramp
- Wright's goal of letting a wheelchair user travel from top to bottom without a single stair
- An Alexander Calder mobile hanging perfectly plumb and exposing how steeply the walls tilt
- The 1963 Thannhauser Impressionist collection, Rebay's own bequest in 1971, and Thomas Krens's $24 million restoration with a 10-story annex