In January I went to my first museum in New York: the Guggenheim Museum.
Initially conceived by Solomon R. Guggenheim, he was a member of a wealthy family that had collected works by early artists since the 1890s. In the 1920s, he was introduced to abstract art. As his collection grew, he decided to found the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 to further his appreciation of modern art. In 1939, he founded the museum under the name “Museum of Non-Objective Painting”. Later the collection was expanded through purchase from an art dealer, notably composed by German expressionist paintings. The museum’s name was changed in 1952, a few years after Guggenheim’s death, but maintaining the concept of housing collections of modern and contemporary impressionist and post-impressionist art.
Altogether, there are currently Guggenheim museum buildings spread across 7 cities around the world: New York (USA), Nevada (USA), Guadalaraja (Mexico), Bilbao (Spain), Venice (Italy), Berlin (Germany) and Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates).
When I went to the museum, unfortunately there was no temporary exhibition taking place, with only the museum’s permanent works. In terms of the number of works, it is smaller than I imagined, and honestly, modern art is not something that captivated me very much. However, for me the most interesting point of this museum is its internal architecture. The exhibitions are arranged in a building internally built of a spiral ramp that circles a large span, and is topped by a large skylight. In addition to being aesthetically very interesting and quite different from anything I have ever seen, as you enter the wings along the spiral to access each exposition and then return back to the spiral, you can see through the ramp how many floors you have already walked and how far is left for you to reach the top of the museum.
