Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — museum
Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 3.0

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

  • 2 min read
  • 40.783° N 73.959° W
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • When the commission was being planned in 1943, Hilla von Rebay assumed the 76-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright was already dead until Guggenheim's wife set her straight.
  • Wright produced more than 700 sketches and six sets of working drawings for the building, and its cost ended up roughly double the first estimate.
  • His early concept was nicknamed an inverted ziggurat, because the spiral resembled the stepped temple towers of ancient Mesopotamia turned upside down.
  • It is the only museum Wright ever designed, and because he was not licensed in New York a local firm handled dealings with the city authorities.
  • Wright wanted a marble facade, but to save money the builder sprayed it in gunite concrete; Wright and the builder share credit on a tile on the exterior.
  • Wright proposed a red exterior that was never built, and conservators later found the walls had first been painted a brownish yellow beneath layers of white.
  • By 1958 Wright and the director James Johnson Sweeney refused to speak to each other, so Harry Guggenheim had to relay every message between them.
  • On its dedication day in October 1959 the museum drew around 600 visitors an hour.
  • Curators learned to tilt sculpture plinths to fool the eye on the sloping floor, but an Alexander Calder mobile still hung stubbornly true to vertical.
  • Thomas Messer directed the museum for 27 years, the longest tenure of any head of a major New York art institution.

Why it is worth it

The Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is a museum people visit as much for the building as for the art. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it as a top-heavy spiral that widens as it rises, a shape that looks nothing like the apartment blocks around it on the Upper East Side, facing Central Park. Wright took the commission in 1943; material shortages, rising costs and years of argument meant that design and construction took fifteen years. The building opened on 21 October 1959. Wright had died that April, six months earlier, and it was his last major work.

Inside, the main gallery is a single tall space under a skylight, wrapped by a continuous ramp. The ramp climbs at a gentle 5 percent slope for a total length of about 430 m, widening as it goes up, and it works structurally like a huge arch. Wright wanted visitors to take the lift to the top and walk down, seeing the art in one unbroken sequence and glimpsing people and pictures on other levels across the void. Critics complained from the start that the curved, sloping walls and low ceilings made paintings hard to hang and to see, and the building's design was controversial when it opened; it is now widely praised, and it is one of eight Wright buildings on the World Heritage List since 2019.

The museum grew out of the collection of the mining heir Solomon R. Guggenheim, who, guided by the artist Hilla von Rebay, bought European abstract art from the 1920s on. It opened in 1939 in midtown as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and took its current name in 1952. Today the collection of about 8,000 works covers Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early modern and contemporary art and is shared with the sister museums in Bilbao and Venice. The Thannhauser Collection, with modern masterpieces from the dealer Justin Thannhauser, is shown in the smaller round "monitor" building beside the main spiral, and a ten-storey annex added in 1992 provides more gallery space.

Special exhibitions run throughout the year, so what you see on the ramp changes. Nearly 861,000 people visited in 2023. Wright, dismissing his critics, said that for the first time art would be seen through an open window, and that his building complemented the park across the street.

Getting there

The museum is at 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, on the Museum Mile in Manhattan. The nearest subway station is 86th Street on the Lexington Avenue line, and buses M1, M2, M3, M4 and M86 stop nearby. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 7 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in New York 17The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen in the United States 6The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States 7The Most Remarkable Museums in the United States 8The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings in the United States 11The Most Remarkable Modern Museums 14The Most Remarkable Museums Seen on Screen 19The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Museums 22The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United States 24The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Buildings 35The Most Beautiful Buildings Seen on Screen 47The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings 50The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Film Locations 221The Most Beautiful Buildings 286The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

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.

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