The original “starchitect,” who was born on this day in 1867, didn’t get to see the completion of his spiralling design for the Guggenheim, but the museum honored “its maddening, egotistical, duplicitous creator” a half century later.
The museum, which opened in the fall of 1959, six months after Wright’s death, represents the culmination of his achievement.In 1959, when the Guggenheim Museum opened, traffic on Fifth Avenue moved in both directions. As you drove northward, the bulbous form emerged from behind flat-fronted apartment buildings like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Notably absent from that picture was the museum’s director, James Johnson Sweeney, who fought with Wright over almost every aspect of the building. Once the architect was gone, Sweeney painted the interior white, instead of the ivory that Wright had wanted; rather than hang the paintings directly on the backward-sloping walls, where Wright wanted them to appear as if they were on artists’ easels, he installed them upright, on metal rods projecting from the walls.
Wright’s career spanned more than seven decades; he was born two years after the Civil War and died at the dawn of the space age. The exhibition is therefore a journey from architecture that, on the swirling ramp of the Guggenheim, can seem almost old-fashioned to work that closely resembles the museum. The strong horizontals, open interior spaces, and overhanging roofs of Wright’s early Prairie House style combine nineteenth-century sumptuousness with potent modern thrust.
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