Solomon R. Guggenheim records

Collection Overview

In 1937, Solomon Robert Guggenheim (SRG), scion of a wealthy American family, had high hopes for the vast collection of art pieces he possessed. In order to preserve his private collection of European and American abstract paintings, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF) was established by SRG, and chartered by the Board of Regents of the State of New York. As a result of his desire to make his possessions available for public viewing, SRG set out to "provide for the promotion of art for the mental and moral improvement of men and women, by furthering their education, enlightenment, and aesthetic taste." Characterized as a firm advocate of non-objective art, SRG associated SRGF with names such as Rudolf Bauer, Kandinsky, Frank Lloyd Wright and Hilla Rebay, who would maintain a close personal and professional relationship with SRG.

Born on February 2, 1861 in Philadelphia, SRG was the fourth of eight sons and eleven children of Meyer and Barbara Guggenheim. As a teenager, SRG received his high school education at the Concordia Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. At the age of twenty, SRG returned to work, along with his brothers, as a partner in M. Guggenheim's Sons, an importing and embroidery manufacturing company financed by his father. Later, SRG would be responsible for the sale of the embroidery business factories. In 1889, SRG spent a year in Leadville, Colorado, where he worked in the mining industry and became very familiar with it. SRG worked on various projects in Mexico with copper smelters, often times providing the service to remote and developing areas of the country. In 1901, the Guggenheims won control of the reorganized American Smelting and Refining Company and became one of the foremost refiners of metals in the world. SRG was president of the Braden Copper Company in Chile and director of the Chile Copper Company, Utah Copper Company, and the Guggenheim Exploration Company. In 1919, SRG retired from full-time business activity.

On April 3, 1895, SRG married Irene Rothschild, who spurred his interest in collecting paintings in fields such as the Barbizon School, American landscapes, Italian landscapes and German, Italian and Dutch primitives. 1928 would change the course of his career when he met the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Erhenweisen, an artist of 36 years of age with whom a long and enduring friendship lasted. SRG then began to collect modernist paintings on a large scale, filling his suite in the Plaza Hotel annually with new and innovative non-objective art from all around the world.

The SRGF, founded in 1937, set up a temporary museum, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, with several hundred pieces from SRG's collection. Baroness Rebay served as its curator. In 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design and build a permanent museum on the upper east side of Manhattan. This structure would eventually house more than three thousand Modern paintings and sculptures. The Museum was opened in 1959, ten years after the death of SRG. His legacy included leaving $8 million to the SRGF, which he helped to create.

SRG had three daughters, Eleanor May, Gertrude Renee, and Barbara Josephine with his wife Irene. SRG died of cancer and was buried in the Guggenheim mausoleum in the Temple Emanu-El's Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Despite quite a number of obstacles, due primarily to SRG's lack of experience establishing arts organizations, the passionate fervor and love for the art he so dearly valued transformed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum into a world-renowned institution. The results of SRG's pursuits were nationally acclaimed not only in terms of museum development, but in exposure to non-objective art which was almost non-existent in the United States at the time. SRG was always a firm believer in the benefits of exposing children to the arts and was an advocate of art education programs. He believed in the creative powers of artists and the grandeur that was beneath the surface of a canvas. The "permanent, silent and powerful influence" of painting was endorsed highly by SRG, whose Foundation embodied his ideologies to the core.

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