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 is the permanent home of a continuously expanding 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.
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. The main gallery contains a six-story helical ramp that extends along its perimeter, as well as 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 expansion and 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, beginning with that of Solomon R. Guggenheim. The collection, which includes around 8,000 works as of 2022, is shared with sister museums in the Spanish city of Bilbao and elsewhere. In 2013, nearly 1.2 million people visited the museum, and it hosted the most popular exhibition in New York City.[7]
