Solomon R. Guggenheim

Guggenheim was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son of Meyer and Barbara Guggenheim and brother of Simon, Benjamin, Daniel, and five other siblings.[1] He was of Swiss and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

Following studies in Switzerland at the Concordia Institute in Zürich, he returned to the United States to work in the family mining business, later founding the Yukon Gold Company in Alaska. In 1891, he turned around the Compañia de la Gran Fundición Nacional Mexicana.[1] He married Irene Rothschild, daughter of Victor Henry Rothschild, in 1895.[2] His children were Eleanor May (1896–1992; later Lady Castle Stewart after her marriage to Arthur Stuart, 7th Earl Castle Stewart), Gertrude (1898–1966) and Barbara Guggenheim (1904–1985).[1]

He began collecting works of the old masters in the 1890s. He retired from his business in 1919 to devote more time to art collecting and in 1926, met Baroness Hilla von Rebay.[3] In 1930, they visited Wassily Kandinsky’s studio in Dessau, Germany, and Guggenheim began to purchase Kandinsky's work. The same year, Guggenheim began to display the collection to the public at his apartment in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Guggenheim's purchases continued with the works of Rudolf Bauer, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and László Moholy-Nagy.[3]

In 1937, Guggenheim established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to foster the appreciation of modern art, and in 1939, he and his art advisor, Baroness Rebay, opened a venue for the display of his collection, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, at 24 East 54th Street.[1][4] Under Rebay's guidance, Guggenheim sought to include in the collection the most important examples of non-objective art available at the time, such as Kandinsky's Composition 8 (1923), Léger's Contrast of Forms (1913) and Robert Delaunay's Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (1912).[5]

By the early 1940s, the museum had accumulated such a large collection of avant-garde paintings that the need for a permanent building to house the art collection had become apparent.[6] In 1943, Guggenheim and Rebay commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new museum building.[3][7] In 1948, the collection was greatly expanded through the purchase of art dealer Karl Nierendorf's estate of some 730 objects, notably German expressionist paintings.[5] By that time, the museum's collection included a broad spectrum of expressionist and surrealist works, including paintings by Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Joan Miró.[5]

Guggenheim died in 1949 on Long Island, New York, and the museum was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952. The museum opened in New York City on October 21, 1959.[1]