Thursday, June 16, 2011

Solomon R Guggenheim Museum

By Mark Robert


The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, is an iconic museum devoted to a wide variety of forms of art. The most most notable are the works falling under the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modern styles, as well as a variety of contemporary pieces. The building itself, designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is also seen by many art observers andenthusiasts to be part and parcel of the museum. Designed to mimic the appearance of a seashell, visitors are meant to take an elevator to the top and slowly wind their way down, like walking through the chambers of a spiral conch. There are five Guggenheim museums all over the world, but the New York City collection is considered the most influential.

Sitting along the famous Museum Mile east of Central Park along Fifth Avenue, the Guggenheim has the proud distinction of being an icon in of one of the densest areas for culture and artifacts in the world. This area along Fifth Avenue between 82nd St. and 110th St. is home to eleven full-size museums, each with its own focus, collection, and scope. The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum is located at 88th St., near such luminaries as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Neue Galerie New York, and the Jewish Museum. Visitors traveling to this New York museum by public transportation can take the subway train to the 86th St. station.

A wide variety of artists are showcased at the Solomon R Guggenheim museum, from Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Paul Czanne, and Pierre August Renoir to early Modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay and Piet Mondrian, among others. The Solomon Guggenheim museum is far from being a stale location, as its collection is constantly being molded and shaped by new work produced in the vein of the existing works within. For this reason, the art on the walls of this New York museum isn't arranged by when it was created or what art history movement it fell under. Instead, all the work is taken as a coherent whole, in communication with the artwork produced by contemporary artists as well as with all the other pieces within. Furthermore, because there are five Guggenheim locations around the world, art can easily be transferred between them, making each location a fluid collection of work.

In addition to a large and ever increasing permanent collection, the Guggenheim houses rotating exhibitions of different topics, artists and themes from within the art world. These may include works by contemporary artists, studies of particular luminaries from the past, or a re-envisioning of a specific time period in European art. Unlike many of the other other famous art museums in New York, the Guggenheim collection tends to only hold works of art by Western artists, either from Europe or from the United States. Many of the exhibitions focus more on contemporary new artists than on the masters of old.

Visitors to the Guggenheim museum should feel free to post pictures, responses and videos up on NYC Museums regarding their time at this iconic location or at any other NY museums. Accounts and reviews are more than welcome, as are any reactions you might have had to the architecture and great artwork within. User content is what makes the NYC Museums community great. Whether it's a description of your favorite painting, a set of photographs of the seashell building, or the story of your day out, we eagerly await what you have to share.




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