Guggenheim, Solomon R.

Guggenheim, Solomon R. (b Philadelphia, 2 Feb. 1861; d Sands Point, Long Island, NY, 3 Nov. 1949). American industrialist, collector, and philanthropist, a member of a famous family of financiers whose fortunes were based on the mining and smelting of metals. Like other members of his family, he devoted much of his vast wealth to philanthropy and in 1937 he founded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation ‘for the promotion and encouragement of art and education in art’. In 1943 he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a museum in New York to house his collection, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was opened in 1959, a decade after his death. It is renowned not only for the outstanding collection of late 19th-century and 20th-century art it contains, but also for the radical nature of the architecture, which marks a complete departure from traditional museum design; the exhibition space is a continuous spiral ramp, six ‘storeys’ high, encircling an open central space. It is architecturally exhilarating, but its suitability for displaying paintings and sculptures has been much questioned.

Guggenheim's niece Peggy Guggenheim (b New York, 26 Aug. 1898; d Venice, 23 Dec. 1979) was a noted patron, collector, and dealer, who played an important role in promoting avant-garde art, in particular by helping to introduce Surrealism to the USA and by furthering the career of many leading Abstract Expressionists. She spent much of her life in Europe, but during its brief existence (1942–6) her Art of This Century gallery in New York was the main showcase for Abstract Expressionism in its formative period. Notorious for her loose living, she had affairs with several artists and in 1941 married and divorced Max Ernst. Her own superb collection is open to the public in Venice under the administration of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

In 1997 a new Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain. Designed by the American architect Frank Gehry, it is one of the most spectacular buildings of the age—huge, eccentrically shaped, and clad largely in titanium. It is intended particularly for the display of works that are too large to be shown in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.