1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th St.) 212-423-3500 www.guggenheim.org Founded in 1937, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a modern art museum located on the Upper East Side in New York City. It is the best-known of several museums founded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and is often called simply The Guggenheim. It is one of the best-known museums in New York City. Originally called "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting", the Guggenheim was founded to showcase avant-garde art by early modernists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. It moved to its present location, at the corners of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue (overlooking Central Park), in 1959, when Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the site was completed. Solomon R. Guggenheim did not really know who to choose as architect for the museum, and asked his friend Baroness Hilla von Rebay to pick someone. She chose Wright, because he was the most famous at the time. The Guggenheim is open Saturdays through Wednesdays, 10 to 5:45, and Fridays, 10 to 8
Current Exhibitions: "Thannhauser Collection"Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) was the son of art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser (1859–1935), who founded the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909. From an early age, Justin K. Thannhauser worked alongside his father in the flourishing gallery and helped to build an impressive and versatile exhibition program that included the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Italian Futurists, and regularly featured contemporary German artists. The Moderne Galerie presented the premier exhibitions of the New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), both of which included Vasily Kandinsky, in 1901 and 1911, respectively. Kandinsky later described the gallery’s rooms as “perhaps the most beautiful exhibition spaces in all of Munich.” The Moderne Galerie also mounted the first major Pablo Picasso retrospective in 1913, thus initiating the close relationship between Justin K. Thannhauser and Picasso that lasted until the artist’s death in 1973.
An ambitious businessman, Thannhauser opened a second gallery in Lucerne in 1919 with his cousin Siegfried Rosengart (1894–1985). Eight years later, the highly successful Galleries Thannhauser—as the Munich and Lucerne branches were collectively called—tested the waters in Berlin with a major special exhibition before permanently relocating its Munich gallery to this thriving art center. Business operations were nonetheless hindered throughout the next decade due to increasing anti-Semitism in Germany and a National Socialist (Nazi) government bent on purging the “degenerate art” of the avant-garde. The Galleries Thannhauser officially closed in 1937, shortly after Thannhauser and his family immigrated to Paris. Thannhauser eventually settled in New York in 1940 and, together with his second wife, Hilde (1919–1991), established himself as a private art dealer. the show is ongoing. "Catherine Opie American Photographer" Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, creating series of images that explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures to her expansive urban landscapes, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in lush and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects. Catherine Opie: American Photographer brings together nearly 200 of the artist's photographs in a major mid-career survey, offering the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date. Including works from the series Being and Having (1991); Portraits (1993-97); Freeways (1994-95); Houses (1995-96); Domestic (1995-98); Mini-malls (1997-98); Large-Format Polaroids (2000); Wall Street (2001); Icehouses (2001); Surfers (2003); Chicago (2004); and In and Around Home (2004-05), the exhibition will provide audiences with an unprecedented opportunity to examine the many interconnections between Opie's diverse bodies of work. September 26-January 7 "Theanyspacewhatever" During the 1990s a number of artists claimed the exhibition as their medium. Working independently or in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters. Using the museum as a springboard for work that reaches beyond the visual arts, their work often commingles with other disciplines such as architecture, design, and theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer subtle moments of transformation. This loose affiliation of artists, each of whom now boasts strong, independent careers, periodically and randomly joins forces to create a variety of projects. The Guggenheim Museum has extended an invitation to a core group of these artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition, one that will reflect and articulate the unique nature of their practices. Organized by the museum’s Chief Curator, Nancy Spector, in close collaboration with the artists, the exhibition will present a genealogy of their shared history through site-specific installations of new, often self-reflexive works created on the occasion of this project. October24-January 7
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