The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his long-time art advisor, artist Hilla von Rebay. The foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preservation, and research of modern and contemporary art and operates several museums around the world. The first museum established by the foundation was The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in New York City. This became The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952, and the foundation moved the collection into its first permanent museum building, in New York City, in 1959. The foundation next opened the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, in 1980. Its international network of museums expanded in 1997 to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, and it expects to open a new museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, in 2017.
The mission of the foundation is "to promote the understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, and other manifestations of visual culture, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, and to collect, conserve, and study" modern and contemporary art. The Foundation seeks, in its constituent museums, to unite distinguished architecture and artworks. The foundation's first permanent museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is housed in a modern spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Guggenheim Bilbao was designed by Frank Gehry. Both of these innovative designs received wide press and critical attention. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in an 18th century Italian palace on the Grand Canal.
The permanent collection of the foundation is based primarily on nine private collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection of non-objective paintings; Karl Nierendorf’s collection of German expressionism and early abstract expressionism; Katherine S. Dreier's gift of paintings and sculptures; Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, concentrating on abstraction and surrealism; Justin K. and Hilde Thannhauser’s collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern masterpieces; part of Hilla von Rebay's collection; Giuseppe Panza di Biumo's holdings of American minimalist, post-minimalist, environmental and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s; a collection of photographs and mixed media from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; and the Bohen Foundation's collection of film, video, photography and new media. The foundation's collections have expanded greatly through eight decades and include every major movement of 20th and 21st century art. Its directors and curators have attempted to form a single collection that is not encyclopedic, but rather based on their unique visions. The collection has grown in scope to include new media and performance art, and the foundation has entered into collaborations with YouTube and BMW.
Read more about Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation: Architecture, Collaborations
Famous quotes containing the words solomon and/or foundation:
“The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.”
—Oscar Solomon Straus (1850–1926)
“The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.”
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan (20th century)