Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Swiss comes from a humble family in the mid-nineteenth century emigrated to the United States. His father had to get ahead of him and his six brothers working as a traveling salesman until his entrepreneurial spirit made him owner of an empire of copper and silver mines.

Solomon already owned one of the largest fortunes in the country, where in 1927 he meets the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen who would spread his passion for abstract art. Advised by the Baroness, Guggenheim acquired works by artists in different parts of the world to get the country's largest collection of Non-Objective Painting was named as. In 1937 he creates the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and two years later the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in the premises of 54th Street.

The exhibition hall was small and in 1943 Hilla Rebay commissioned the design of a museum architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The architect showed his famous rebellion in the project by going against their clients, governments, the world of art and the public. Wright did not hide his disagreement with the choice of New York for the museum who saw it as a city without merit, but was convinced by arguments as to be located in the natural surroundings of Central Park. The design of the building, in inverted conch angered neighbors on the Upper East Side who saw it as an aberration among his select homes. The interior had a novelty in the art exhibition galleries separate lacking and that will be a single ascending spiral along the entire building, a fact that was loudly criticized by artists.

When the new museum on Fifth Avenue, and its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim or the architect Frank Lloyd Wright could attend was inaugurated in 1959. Solomon died in 1949 leaving the foundation in his son Harry and his niece, the famous and controversial art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Wright died six months before seeing culminated the most important work of his career.

In order to relieve the exhibition of works in the early 90s, the museum has been expanded to an adjacent building designed by architects Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, and in 1992 inaugurated the Soho Guggenheim Museum designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozake, a museum of short-lived and that lack of funding closed in 2001.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has grown over the years by different cities. A mid-70s, Peggy Guggenheim Foundation donates his art collection and his home in Venice, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. In 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a masterpiece of architect Frank Gehry, and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin is inaugurated. The last branch, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, opened in October 2001 and is framed within the complex Venetian Resort Hotel Casino

Over 800 meters of galleries that spirals up by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and illuminated by a large central dome on the roof, abstract and impressionist works of art by artists such as Robert Delaunay, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti are exposed, Alexander Calder, Rene Magritte, Vasily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí.