“The insistence of philanthropist Solomon Guggenheim and artist-adviser Hilla Rebay on a wholly new kind of art seen in a wholly new kind of space set the institution on its unique path. The first permanent home for the museum was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. He envisioned a building that not only broke the rectilinear grid of Manhattan but also shattered existing notions of what a museum could be. He conceived of its curving, continuous space as a “temple of spirit” where viewers could foster a new way of looking. Named the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in honor of its founder, the building opened in 1959, drawing huge crowds and stirring considerable controversy. It has never lost its power to excite and provoke, standing today as one of the great works of architecture produced in the twentieth century.”

Tips: Weekends are the most crowded for any museum in the city. To avoid waiting on line for tickets, buy them online, here. The Guggenheim is laid out in a spiral, don’t work against gravity, take the elevator to the top floor and work your way down.

Getting there: The Guggenheim is located at 5th Avenue and 89th St. 4, 5, or 6 train to 86th Street. Walk west on 86th Street, turn right at 5th Avenue and proceed north to 88th Street.

See below for current exhibits, hours and admission prices.

Russia!
September 16, 2005 - January 11, 2006
RUSSIA! is the most comprehensive and significant exhibition of Russian art outside Russia since the end of the Cold War. Including more than 250 artworks, many of which have rarely or never traveled abroad, this innovative presentation features the greatest masterpieces of Russian art from the 13th century to the present, as well as a selection of first-class Western European paintings and sculptures from the imperial art collections assembled by Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas I in the 18th and 19th centuries, and later in the early 20th century by the Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.

Marc Chagall
August 27, 2005 – January 23, 2006
From its inception, the Guggenheim Museum has been committed to representing and promoting the art of Marc Chagall. Paris Through the Window, Chagall’s 1913 masterpiece, was among the first works to enter Solomon R. Guggenheim’s modern art collection when it was selected by Guggenheim’s influential advisor Hilla Rebay (later the museum’s first director) in 1929. Although Rebay was a passionate, lifelong proponent of “non-objectivity”—fully abstract painting without any origin in the visible world, as epitomized by the work of Vasily Kandinsky—she nevertheless greatly admired Chagall’s resolutely “objective” paintings, with their recognizable, if fantastic, figures and settings. The enthusiasm she and Guggenheim shared for Chagall’s work resulted in a number of further acquisitions in the 1930s and ’40s, including The Green Violinist (1923–24), purchased from the artist in 1931, at a time when Chagall was experiencing the brunt of the global Depression and in need of support; and The Flying Carriage (1913), acquired in 1949. By the end of the 1940s, Guggenheim and Rebay had assembled what was then the most significant collection of Chagall in New York. Guggenheim and Rebay also helped the Russian-Jewish artist and his family to escape Nazi-occupied France in 1941 by providing them with affidavits for entry into the United States.

Kandinsky
Ongoing
Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century painter, Vasily Kandinsky has been closely linked to the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Hilla von Rebay, artist, art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, and the museum’s first director, introduced Guggenheim to Kandinsky at his studio at the Dessau Bauhaus in the summer of 1929. This was the start of a period of continuous acquisition of Kandinsky’s oils and watercolors, beginning with his masterpiece Composition 8 (1923) and growing to encompass over 150 works in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Permanent Collection.

Thannhauser Collection
Ongoing
Justin K. Thannhauser was the son of renowned art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser, who founded the Galerie Moderne in Munich in 1909. From an early age, Thannhauser worked with his father, building an impressive program of exhibitions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and the art of the contemporary French and German avant-gardes. Their early commitment to such artists as Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc paralleled the collecting interests of Solomon R. Guggenheim.

Museum Hours
Saturday–Wednesday 10 AM–5:45 PM
Friday 10 AM–8 PM
Closed Thursdays and Christmas Day, open all other holidays

Admission during RUSSIA!
(September 16, 2005 -January 11, 2006)

Adults with audio tour $24
Adults without audio tour $18

Students and Seniors (65 years +) with audio tour $21
Students and Seniors without audio tour $15

Children under 12 with audio tour $6
Children under 12 without audio tour Free

Members without audio tour Free
Members with audio tour $5