340 ‘43,‘44,‘45,‘46,‘47,‘48,‘49,‘50,‘51,‘52,‘53,‘54,‘55,‘56,‘57,‘58,‘59 An Epistolary Courtship,The Evolution of a Masterpiece,Searching for a Site,Wright Takes on the City,Sweeney vs. Wright courtship,evolution,site,city,sweeney New York Post, July 28, 1953. © NYP Holdings, Inc.]]>
In 1945, only two years after he had taken the commission, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, the museum’s first director and the prime mover behind the building, expressed her discouragement that construction was not yet underway. Wright urged her to persevere: “After all is it not finer to keep faith with an idea than it is to keep faith with one’s sense of oneself.” In this time line, we follow the intricate story that culminated in the building of the museum.

For an expanded portrayal of these events, including parallel developments in Wright’s life and work, see “Keeping Faith with an Idea” as it appears in the book The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum. ]]> The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum. © 2009 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Text by Angela Starita

Web site design adapted from The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum. Original catalogue design by Abbott Miller and Susan Brzozowski, Pentagram.

All Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, cover designs, and correspondence are © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Interior and exterior building images of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum are trademarks of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Videos featured with entries for January 1944; March 1954; October 5, 1955; September 1956; and May 18, 1957 are from Art, Architecture, and Innovation: Celebrating the Guggenheim Museum © 2009 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

All audio from The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Architecture Tour © 2009 Antenna Audio, Inc. and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Unless otherwise noted, all correspondence, reproduced or quoted, is from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York. All correspondence from Hilla Rebay, reproduced or quoted, is from the Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York.

SOURCES
Image sources are provided in captions. Sources of quotations in individual entry texts are in most cases indicated in an entry and its header. When source information is not given in full, it may be found here, as follows:

July 1943: Frank Lloyd Wright to Solomon R. Guggenheim, July 14, 1943. April–July 1944: Hilla Rebay to Wright, Apr. 5, 1944. July 27, 1944: Solomon R. Guggenheim to Wright, July 28, 1944. April 1945: Wright to Rebay, Aug. 2, 1945. July–September 1945: “Museum Building to Rise as Spiral,” New York Times, July 10, 1945. July 1946: Wright to Solomon R. Guggenheim, June 29, 1946. September 1947: Wright to Solomon R. Guggenheim, Sept. 11, 1947. February 10, 1951: Talbot Hamlin, “Frank Lloyd Wright in Philadelphia,” The Nation, Feb. 10, 1951. March 9, 1951: Wright to Harry F. Guggenheim, Aug. 8, 1951. April 22, 1951: Aline B. Louchheim, “Museum in Query,” New York Times, Apr. 22, 1951. August 4, 1951: Louchheim, “Museum Changing Exhibition Policy,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 1953. March 1952 (a): Louchheim, “Museum Will File Plans for Building,” New York Times, 1952. March 1952 (b): Wright, “Concerning the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,” Mar. 14, 1952, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York. February 14, 1953: Wright to Harry F. Guggenheim, Mar. 3, 1953. July 27, 1953: “The Hanging Ramp: Frank Lloyd Wright Backs Down on Building Plans,” Oakland Tribune, July 29, 1953. October 22–December 13, 1953 (a): “Throngs Inspect Wright’s Exhibit,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 1959. October 22–December 13, 1953 (b): “Usonian House of ’06 Awes Crowds at Wright’s Exhibit,” Metropolitan Builder, Nov. 1953; “Frank Lloyd Wright Builds in the Middle of Manhattan,” House & Home, Nov. 1953, p. 118. October 22–December 13, 1953 (c): “Editorial: Mr. Wright’s Architecture,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1953. October 22–December 13, 1953 (c), clickthrough: Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line: A Phoenix Too Infrequent,” New Yorker, Nov. 28, 1953; New Yorker “Mr. Wrong,” Talk of the Town, New Yorker, Nov. 7, 1953; “Frank Lloyd Wright Exhibits 60 Years’ Work,” Architectural Forum, Oct. 1953, 45. January 12, 1954: Wright to Rebay, Dec. 22, 1953; Rebay to Wright, Jan. 12, 1954. August 1954: Wright, unreleased press release, ca. Aug. 1954. May 21, 1955: Wright, “The Future of the City,” Saturday Review, May 21, 1955, p. 10. October 1955: Harry F. Guggenheim to Robert Moses, Oct. 5, 1955. October 5, 1955: Wright to James Johnson Sweeney, Oct. 5, 1955. March 9, 1956: Wright to Sweeney, Mar. 9, 1956. December 12, 1956: Sanka Knox, “21 Artists Assail Museum Interior,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 1956. September 22, 1957: Wright quoted in Aline B. Saarinen, “Tour with Mr. Wright,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 22, 1957, pp. 22–23, 69–70. May 8, 1958: Harry F. Guggenheim to Sweeney, May 8, 1958; Sweeney to Harry F. Guggenheim, May 10, 1958. October 1958: Herbert Mitgang, “Sidewalk Views of That Museum,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 12, 1958, p. 14. No date, 1959 (a): “Text of Moses Remarks,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 1959. No date, 1959 (b), clickthrough: John Canaday, “Wright Vs. Painting,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 1959; Robert Alden, “Art Experts Laud Wright’s Design,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 1959; William Lescaze, letter to the editor, New York Times, Oct. 26, 1959; JJC, “Editorial: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,” Architectural Engineering News, Nov. 1959, p. 34; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Triple Legacy of Mr. Wright,” New York Times, Nov. 15, 1959. November 28, 1959: Alan Dunn, “The Guggenheim,” New Yorker, Nov. 28, 1959.]]> 1943 ‘43 1943 1943 courtship 1943 1943
]]> evolution courtship 1943 courtship evolution 1943 courtship evolution 1943 evolution 1944 ‘44 1944
Wright soon flips the Guggenheim’s structure, however, so that it grows progressively wider as it travels upward. He writes to Rebay, “I find that the antique Ziggurat has great possibilities for our building. You will see. We can use it either top side down or down side top.” ]]> courtship evolution 1944 evolution courtship 1944 site 1944 March–April 1944
First purchase of land on Fifth Avenue]]> courtship 1944 got to study them, you just got to let me ponder and think and feel our actual needs into what is to be done.”]]> courtship evolution 1944 evolution 1945 ‘45 1945 evolution courtship 1945 courtship 1945 evolution 1945 courtship evolution 1945 Time observes: “To some of the newsmen, impressed by Architect Wright but irreverent by nature, the model looked something like a big, white ice cream freezer.”]]> evolution 1945 site 1945 September 20
Museum model unveiled in New York]]> courtship 1946 ‘46 1946 Architectural Forum counters the criticisms that have been leveled at the museum design: “If this building is ‘strange,‘ so is the chambered nautilus, the structure of a leaf, the wing of a bird.” The article includes a description of Wright’s use of glass tubing for the central skylight as well as his plans to keep motorized wheelchairs available for visitors who want to sit through their visit. In the same article, Wright predicts his design’s longevity: “When the first atomic bomb lands on New York [the museum] will not be destroyed. It may be blown a few miles up into the air, but when it comes down it will bounce!”]]> evolution 1946 Andante, from Tetraptychon: Symphony in Four Movements (1926–30), ca. 1937]]> 1946 courtship evolution 1946 site 1946 courtship 1947 ‘47 1947 courtship 1947 evolution 1947 1947 1947 1948 ‘48 1948 Painting with White Border, 1913; Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8, 1923; Vasily Kandinsky, Blue Circle, 1922 (above); Vasily Kandinsky, Dominant Curve, 1936 (below). In passageway: Rudolf Bauer, Light Fugue, 1937]]> 1949 ‘49 1949 evolution 1949 courtship 1949 evolution 1949 courtship 1949 1949 November 3
Guggenheim dies, leaving the project’s future uncertain]]> courtship 1950 ‘50 1950 1950 1950 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 1920, Castle Stewart had married Eleanor Guggenheim, a daughter of Solomon. Harry F. Guggenheim, Solomon’s nephew, becomes chairman of the board of trustees.]]> 1950 1950 1950 site 1950 courtship 1951 ‘51 1951 Sixty Years of Living Architecture opens in Philadelphia. The show consists of original drawings, models, photographs, and furniture as well as a life-size mock-up of one of Wright’s Usonian houses. His Guggenheim model is also on display. The show travels to Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Mexico before coming to New York in 1953.]]> 1951 Nation: “It is good to know that in these days when hate is considered a virtue and destruction an admirable way of life, in these days of McCarran acts and McCarthyism and hysteria in the newspapers, America is at last to be represented abroad by such an eloquent voice to tell Europe that American exports are not limited to cannon. For the Wright show is the record of a life devoted to art and love, not to killing and hate.”]]> 1951 site 1951 evolution site 1951 New York Times, argues that the Museum of Non-Objective Painting has no right to tax-exempt status as an educational institution since it gives full artistic control to its director. Louchheim says Rebay has a “doctrinaire attitude” and traffics in “mystic-double-talk” when discussing the superiority of nonobjective art. The critic also objects to the exclusion of paintings that include recognizable figures: “Though these ‘paintings with an object’ are of far greater importance than most of those now on view, they are at present in storage. Presumably they cannot be shown together lest the representational art contaminate the other!”]]> 1951 1952 ‘52 1952 1952 city 1952 1952 1952 city 1952 1952 1953 ‘53 1953 Under pressure from the foundation, Rebay resigns. James Johnson Sweeney takes her place. courtship 1953 evolution city 1953 courtship 1953 evolution city 1953 evolution 1953 Sixty Years of Living Architecture, the exhibition of Wright’s work that has been touring the world. The show will be housed in a temporary pavilion designed by Wright on the future site of the museum. Though the architect is preoccupied with his appearance before the Board of Standards and Appeals in just a few days, Harry Guggenheim is anxious for Sixty Years to be mounted.]]> 1953 New York World-Telegram and Sun runs a particularly critical article, comparing Wright’s design for the Guggenheim to “a horrible Hollywood avacadoburger [sic] stand.” In a letter to the newspaper, however, one reader argues that the editors “succeeded in showing only [their] complete unfamiliarity with Mr. Wright’s work. . . . Why not give Mr. Wright a fair chance to show what he can do?”]]> city Flint (Mich.) Journal, July 26, 1953. © 1953 The Flint Journal. All rights reserved]]> New York Post, July 28, 1953. © NYP Holdings, Inc.]]> Rocky Mountain (Denver, Colo.) News, July 28, 1953. Courtesy the Rocky Mountain News]]> Brooklyn Daily Eagle (excerpt), July 28, 1953. Courtesy the Brooklyn Daily Eagle]]> 1953 Harris H. Murdock, informs Wright that he is not embarrassed “one particle.” Besides adjusting the building overhang, Wright must add fire stairs and change the material of the dome.]]> city evolution 1953 Sixty Years of Living Architecture opens in New York on Fifth Avenue on the site where the museum will eventually be built. The temporary exhibition structure, the first Wright building in New York City, is made of glass, fiberboard, and pipe columns. Visitors may also enter a life-size model of a Usonian house that is demolished after the exhibition closes. The New York Times notes the popularity of the model house: “In the large and gracious living room, visitors made themselves at home on comfortable furniture, looking like guests at a housewarming.”

]]> Wright Pavilion Construction, 1952. Films on the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, A0005, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 22–December 13, 1953. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture Exhibition Building (demolished), New York, 1953. Perspective (presentation drawing). Graphite and ink on tracing paper, 91 x 196 cm. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, Arizona 5314.001]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
October 22–December 13, 1953. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York]]> 1953
Museumgoers show particular interest in the Usonian house, which they enter through a garden on the north end of the site that is landscaped with potted shrubs, yews, and hemlocks. Wright tells a journalist that the Usonian “is characteristic of the so-called ‘Prairie House‘ of sixty years ago with its modern, human scale, its open-plan and flowing space, its corner windows and sense of indoors and outdoors.” One critic singles out for praise the open kitchen, which frees “the housewife from the isolated drudgery of the kitchen and permit[s] her to be a gracious hostess instead of a kitchen mechanic.”]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 22–December 13, 1953. AP Image]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 22–December 13, 1953. AP Image]]> 1953 Sixty Years proves to be a very popular exhibition, the New York Times advocates that the city buildings department make exceptions for his unconventional design for the Guggenheim. “Will New York continue to be rigid in its refusal to give [Wright] a chance to demonstrate his genius in our town?” the article asks.]]> city Sixty Years of Living Architecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1953. © 2008 Pedro E. Guerrero]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, October–November 1953]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, October–November 1953]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, October–November 1953]]> Sixty Years of Living Architecture, October–November 1953]]> 1953 evolution city 1954 ‘54 1954 non-objective art. “Semantics is not a negligible science,” he wrote. “Non is negative. God is positive or he does not exist for humanity.” In response, Rebay writes a twenty-five-page letter defending the term: “In this world everything is based on the principle of duality: in and out, day and night, male and female, mortality and immortality, static and rhythmic, weak and strong, light and dark, finite and infinite. But there is only one God, and this God is spirit, and this spirit is the ‘non.’ It is the climax of all—invisible, intangible, unreachable—found in evidence by the deepest thinkers, and contained in everything and all.”]]> courtship 1954 evolution city 1954 David.]]> 1954 1954 sweeney 1954 1955 ‘55 1955 Saturday Review, Frank Lloyd Wright calls for decentralization of cities, saying they are unnecessary, degenerate, and unsafe in the age of the atomic bomb, when large concentrations of people could be annihilated in moments. Glass skyscrapers like Lever House (1951–52), which Wright refers to as a “very dangerous mirror used as a poster for soap,” represent sterility and a deadening equalitarianism.]]> 1955 1955 1955 evolution sweeney 1956 ‘56 1956 sweeney 1956 1956 1956 1956 1956 New York Times reports that a group of twenty-one artists has written to Sweeney and the museum’s trustees to ask that Wright’s design not be executed. The letter, signed by Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, and others, argues that a nautilus-shaped museum will detract from the artworks.]]> sweeney 1956 sweeney 1957 ‘57 1957 1957 New Yorker, “The concrete becomes the finished structure. That’s unusual. Most public buildings have facades of marble, limestone, or aluminum. Here’s a fine, old-fashioned homely material—
concrete—that Mr. Wright is putting on Fifth Avenue and making beautiful.”

Cohen, whose company also worked on the Tappan Zee Bridge and parts of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway in New York, says, “There’s nothing I like better than a reinforced-concrete job of an unusual nature, and that’s certainly what this is.”]]> 1957 New Yorker’s Talk of the Town asks the construction workers their views on the building. One man says: “The way I figure it is that this is the screwiest project I ever got tied up in. The whole joint goes round and round and round and where it comes out nobody knows.” Another says that his co-workers “talk about [Wright] as much as they do about women. How many buildings do you think I‘ve been on without ever knowing who the hell the architect was? Hundreds, I‘ll bet. But this joker has the knack of attracting attention.”]]> 1957 evolution 1957
General Discussion of Colors: Mr. Wright at this meeting stated he wanted a light buff color for the building and he wanted the terrazzo floors to be the same color. The total impression being one of smooth continuous space. (This is in conflict to ideas he has had before about the floor color. WHS has heard him state that he wants grey or gold, on the floor, on different occasions.)

Round Skylights: WWP and WHS decided to OK this themselves.

Design of Sidewalk: Mr. Wright would like to have the Module lines carried out to the curb as a sidewalk pattern. The joints should be “V” shaped in section as shown for those at the entrance loggia. He does not want trees along the sidewalk.

Message of Utzon: Mr. Wright was not impressed with Mr. Utzon’s message.]]> 1957 1958 ‘58 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 courtship 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Horizon Press, 1960)]]> 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 New York Times notes that “among the laborers and craftsmen working [on the site], comradeship and respect for the ‘old boy’ who created the museum abound. On a recent Sunday, when all was quiet, the Italian-speaking watchman walked around with his grandchildren, explaining Mr. Wright’s building in proud but broken English. What he said could not be heard, but the watchman’s married son remarked, ‘Pop worries about this building as if it was his own.’”]]> Guggenheim Museum Construction, 1956–1959. Films on the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, A0005, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York]]> 1958 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 sweeney 1958 1959 ‘59 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 1959 Buildings & Crowd, Beth Shalom Synagogue, 1959, 1961. Films on the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, A0005, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York]]> 1959 Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), January 8, 1960]]> 1960 New Yorker runs four pages of cartoons by Alan Dunn that imagines museumgoers’ responses to the building, marking the museum’s entree into the general culture. The building will continue to figure prominently in the popular imagination, with mentions in movies, appearances in comic books and advertisements, and commemoration on postage stamps.]]>