Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, founded in 1937, is a modern art museum located on the Upper East Side in New York City. Originally called "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting," the Guggenheim was founded to showcase avant-garde art by early modernists.

Information

Location	1071 5th Avenue (at 89th St), New York, NY
Directions	4, 5, 6 Trains to 86th Street; walk west on 86th St, turn right at 5th Ave, walk north to 88th St
Hours	Saturday – Wednesday 10 a.m. – 5:45 p.m. Friday 10 a.m. – 7:45 p.m. Closed Thursday
Cost	$15 with college ID Fridays 5:45 p.m. - 7:15 p.m. - Pay What You Wish
Website	http://www.guggenheim.org
Additional Info	First Friday of every month: Enjoy a drink with friends, explore the galleries, and listen to some of the best DJs in town in the spectacular Lloyd Wright–designed building. Admission $25, 9 p.m. - 1 a.m.

Current Exhibitions

Thannhauser Collection (Ongoing)
Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) was the son of art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser (1859–1935), who founded the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909. From an early age, Thannhauser worked alongside his father in the flourishing gallery and helped to build an impressive and versatile exhibition program that included the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Italian Futurists, and regularly featured contemporary German artists. The Moderne Galerie presented the premier exhibitions of the New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), both of which included Vasily Kandinsky, in 1901 and 1911, respectively. Kandinsky later described the gallery’s rooms as “perhaps the most beautiful exhibition spaces in all of Munich.” The Moderne Galerie also mounted the first major Pablo Picasso retrospective in 1913, thus initiating the close relationship between Justin K. Thannhauser and Picasso that lasted until the artist’s death in 1973.

An ambitious businessman, Thannhauser opened a second gallery in Lucerne in 1919 with his cousin Siegfried Rosengart (1894–1985). Eight years later, the highly successful Galleries Thannhauser—as the Munich and Lucerne branches were collectively called—tested the waters in Berlin with a major special exhibition before permanently relocating its Munich gallery to this thriving art center. Business operations were nonetheless hindered throughout the next decade due to increasing anti-Semitism in Germany and a National Socialist (Nazi) government bent on purging the “degenerate art” of the avant-garde. The Galleries Thannhauser officially closed in 1937, shortly after Thannhauser and his family immigrated to Paris. Thannhauser eventually settled in New York in 1940 and, together with his second wife, Hilde (1919–1991), established himself as a private art dealer.

The Thannhausers’ commitment to promoting artistic progress paralleled the vision of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949). In appreciation of this shared spirit, and in the memory of his first wife and two sons—who might have continued in the family’s art trade had they not died at tragically young ages—Thannhauser gave a significant portion of his art collection, including over 30 works by Picasso, to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1963. From 1965 until Thannhauser’s death in 1976 (when his collection formally entered the Guggenheim’s holdings), the Thannhauser Collection was on long-term loan to the museum. A bequest of 10 additional works received after Hilde Thannhauser’s death in 1991 enhanced the legacy of this family of important art dealers.

Kandinsky and Expressionist Painting before World War I (Ongoing)
The work of Post-Impressionists, such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and the Cubists in Paris, all informed the development of Expressionist art in the years immediately preceding World War I. The practitioners of this style, largely working and exhibiting in Germany, crossed paths via various associations and were also deeply influenced by their encounters with Japanese and African art, as well as Germanic folk art. From Vasily Kandinsky to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, artists who came to be associated with Expressionism sought to convey the communicative force of color through vibrantly hued canvases and bold forms.

Kandinsky, an artist who has been closely linked to the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and to whom this gallery is dedicated, became a leading theoretician on chromatic symbolism after arriving in Munich from his native Russia at the turn of the century. Kandinsky’s color theories, as outlined in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), were echoed by Franz Marc and Alexej Jawlensky, among others. Marc first met Kandinsky and Jawlensky when he joined the New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München or NKVM) in 1911. At this time, Marc was exclusively depicting animals in nature and endowing his colors with expressive value and symbolic meaning in a manner similar to Kandinsky in his Bavarian landscapes. Meanwhile, Matisse’s 1910 Munich exhibition had left a strong impression on both Jawlensky and Kandinsky. The two shared an affinity for Matisse’s brilliant canvases and those of the other Fauves—works Kandinsky had had the opportunity to observe during his visit to Paris in 1906–07.

In 1911, Kandinsky and Marc formed The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group along with Jawlensky, Paul Klee, and other members of the German avant-garde. The premier exhibition of this group took place that December at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie and included Marc’s monumental Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh) (1911). Two months after the first showing, the Berlin Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, led by Kirchner, was invited to participate in a second Blue Rider exhibition. Kirchner and the other members of Die Brücke frequently employed dissonant color patterns and angular stylizations to increase the intensity of their paintings. Furthermore, Marc Chagall, who had been working in Paris beginning in 1910, received his first solo show in 1914 at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, thus forming a link with both Die Brücke and Blue Rider artists and exposing them to his imaginative, colorful works.

The connections among these different artists were severed with the 1914 outbreak of World War I. Nonetheless, the postwar period saw the reunion of Kandinsky, Klee, and Jawlensky, who together with Lyonel Feininger, formed the Blue Four group in the United States. It was then that these artists were able to pursue their color theories with renewed vigor.


Anish Kapoor: Memory (October 21, 2009 - March 28, 2010)
Memory (2008) is a site-specific work that was conceived to engage two different exhibition locations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin and New York. Utilizing Cor-Ten steel for the first time, the sculpture represents a milestone in Kapoor’s career. Memory's thin steel skin, only eight millimeters thick, suggests a form that is ephemeral and unmonumental. The sculpture appears to defy gravity as it gently glances against the periphery of the gallery walls and ceiling. However, as a 24-ton volume, Memory is also raw, industrial, and foreboding. Positioned tightly within the gallery, Memory is never fully visible; instead the work fractures and divides the gallery into several distinct viewing areas. The division compels visitors to navigate the museum, searching for vantage points that offer only glimpses of the sculpture. This processional method of viewing Memory is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Visitors are asked to contemplate the ensuing fragmentation by attempting to piece together images retained in their minds, exerting effort in the act of seeing—a process Kapoor describes as creating a “mental sculpture.”

Hilla Rebay: Art Educator (January 29, 2009 - August 22, 2010)
This exhibition by Hilla Rebay, director of the Guggenheim Museum, features some of her remarkably progressive efforts to provide a variety of audiences—from youth and teachers to artists and museum visitors—with opportunities to learn about nonobjective art, or art without representational links to the material world. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance (Through September 6, 2010)
Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession, both collective and individual, with accessing the past. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, and to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as film, performance, and site-specific installations.



For more information, please visit the Guggenheim website.