Tooling around in your brand new 1961 Oldsmobile may have offered a bit of uniqueness but it was pale in comparison to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The Upper East Side landmark on Fifth Avenue, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was initially controversial to some traditionalists for its unusual shape and display arrangement. Their lack of vision for the building has long since been forgotten. Not completely forgotten is the classic Oldsmobile.
Mr. Guggenheim, a member of a wealthy mining family, began collecting works of the old masters in the 1890s. He met artist Hilla von Rebay, the museum's first director. In 1926, she introduced him to European avant-garde art. She envisioned a space that would facilitate a new way of seeing modern art. Fast forward to 1943, they wrote a letter to Frank Lloyd Wright asking him to design a structure to house and display the collections. Rebay thought the seventy-six-year-old Wright was dead, but Guggenheim's wife knew otherwise. It took Wright fifteen years, over 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings to create and complete the museum, after a series of difficulties and delays during the 1940s and subsequent personality conflicts with its new museum director during the early fifties. Wright's design for the Guggenheim incorporated geometric motifs, such as squares, circles, rectangles, triangles and lozenges. The building was completed in 1959 with an added annex and renovation in the last thirty years. It was Wright's last major work. He died six months before its opening, at ninety-one.
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