The Guggenheim: Where art and architecture meet

Controversy has always surrounded every great form of art. This is no different when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, when it was met with criticisms from the very same sphere that it was meant to accommodate – the arts. For New Yorker and student of contemporary art Cash Myricks , such tensions, years later, proved to be crucial in merging art and architecture.

In 1937, philanthropist and art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim and his longtime friend, artist Hilla von Rebay, established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to promote art and its varied forms, as well as architecture. Cash Myricks explains, that in order to do this, the foundation then, built the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, somewhere in mid-Manhattan, to house a collection of the most important works by Rudolf Bauer, Rebay, Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.

Plans for the establishment of the present-day museum, dubbed simply as The Guggenheim, began in 1943, says Cash Myricks. This is when Rebay and Guggenheim wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, who found an opportunity to test his organic architecture in an urban setting, and took the foremost American architect 15 years to create the museum.

The spiraling ramp, which is the most recognizable feature of the building, was a response to a concept of space by Rebay - to be a “Temple of the Spirit” that would influence a new way of looking at the art collection. At that time Frank Lloyd Wright had experimented with the ramp design in previous projects. And his original concept of the “inverted ziggurat” enabled the way the spiraling ramp appear on the exterior, adds Cash Myricks.

21 artists have signed a letter of protest before the opening of the Guggenheim in 1959. They complained about the way their works will be displayed, says Cash Myricks. The interior walls were intended to have the paintings tilted backward “as on the artist’s easel,” which proved to be unsuccessful due to the concavity of the walls. Critics even argued that the design of the building competes with the artworks on display. Some, although mundane, have called the building a hot cross bun, an inverted oatmeal dish, and, as quoted by Frank Lloyd Wright, “looked like a washing machine.”