Visiting the Guggenheim

One of my favorite activities is to 'look at pictures' which is shorthand for "I never met a museum I didn't like".  This obsession started really late in my life since the only decent museum in the town I grew up in was Gilcrease   This small Tulsa museum was ahead of its time since it specialized in collecting Western and particularly Western Indian art.  I was a teenager before I even found out about it.  Art was not a big interest in my working class household.  Gilcrease was the first museum I took my 18 month old daughter to see.  (My mother thought that was crazy.)  

I really got turned on by 'pictures' when I was in my late 20's.  We went to Washington D.C. in January, no less, and toured the virtually empty Smithsonian Museums.  In the 1970's the big deal was the new air and space museum which was breathtaking.  They actually had a moon rock!  As exciting as that was, it couldn't hold a candle to the National Gallery of Art.  For the first time I understood that art book pictures, cards, and other reproductions of famous works of art were like candles are to 100 watt electric light bulbs.  The originals were electrifying!

Seeing is learning.  Wanting to see more 'pictures' was a major reason behind our massive month long trip to Europe in the early 1980's.  And, yes, I thought all I wanted to see were the originals of all those famous Impressionist paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Hassam, Cassatt, and Van Gogh.  Instead, the trip turned out to be a crash course in Art History, and suddenly I liked that awful Modern Art!

The Guggenheim Art Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was to display Solomon Guggenheim's modern art collection.

Guggenheim and his daughter, Peggy, were the first people in the United States to seriously collect this 'new art'.   He began collecting about the turn of the century, and she continued collecting even smuggling her collected painting out from under the noses of the Nazi's in the late 1930's.  Wright's building is certainly striking both inside and out.  It's a widening spiral which can be climbed either on stairways or by going up a continuous ramp.  The building is also an acknowledged piece of art.  It opened in 1939.

When we plan a trip to New York, one of the first things I do is figure out what exhibits I want to see at the museums.  The current exhibit at the Guggenheim was my #1 thing to see this time.  It was a display of 170 works of Solomon/Peggy Guggenheim's collection - and specifically several Kandinsky paintings (my most favorite modern artist).  This exhibition was a who's who of modern art.  It was dazzling.  See what you think.

https://goo.gl/photos/WTMQVMSvLMVCAg2B9