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‘art & soul With all his great reputation behind him, Frank Lloyd Wright had to fight hard to get his vision off the ground. But he went on, sustained by the dream of building a museum that was unlike any other, writes
B. N. Goswamy
Even the most casual of visitors to New York runs into it while taking the sights of that great city in. I speak here of the Guggenheim Museum, that stunning architectural landmark which Frank Lloyd Wright worked on for more than 15 years but did not live to see the final opening of, for he died just a few months before in 1959. But there is a story to the museum. In fact there are at least two Guggenheim stories: one about the building, and the other about a collector, another Guggenheim. But the museum first. There is barely a book in the world on great
architecture that you can open without running into the Guggenheim. The structure has its critics, of course – which great work does not? – but encomia have not stopped piling over the last 50 years or so that it has been around. It has been seen as “the manifestation of the search for an expression of liberty” , “an architectural idea, where the lyric and poetic transcend space and form”, “a challenge to the architecture of its time”, something absolute and transcendental.” It is, as another writer said, “a gift of pure architecture – or rather of sculpture”, “a seamless construct” that Wright had conceived as a ‘quiet unbroken wave’”. Even if one knows nothing about the history of architecture, or the enormous technical skills which a structure like this requires to raise, one cannot but be moved by the sheer sight of it. There it rises, in the midst of straight-lined, vertically soaring skyscrapers that almost define New York City, something like a defiant statement: a nautilus shell as it were, a spiral floating in space, light and airy, like a hot air balloon that might take off any minute. As museums went, the Guggenheim defied almost every notion associated with them. Wright’s inverted ziggurat (a stepped or winding pyramidal temple of Babylonian origin) dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and forced them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, here visitors are first whisked to the top of the building via elevator, then invited to proceed downward at a leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The galleries are divided “like the membranes in a citrus fruit”, with self-contained yet interdependent sections. When Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned for the job by Baroness Hilla Rebay, consultant to the New York millionaire, Solomon R. Guggenheim who had built up a large art collection of contemporary art, she said to him that “I need a fighter, a lover of space, an agitator, a tester and a wise man . . . I want a temple of spirit, a monument!” This is exactly what she got in the end: both a fight and an agitation, and a temple of the spirit. With all his great reputation behind him, Wright had to fight hard to get his vision off the ground. The usual peccadilloes, rivalries, bitternesses, surfaced; the City of New York kept raising objections; differences with the clients stood in the way of smooth functioning. But he went on, for 15 long years, sustained by the dream of building a museum that was unlike any other. The other Guggenheim story is less edifying perhaps, but is certainly colourful. For it concerns Peggy Guggenheim, Solomon Guggeheim’s niece. Heiress to a small fortune of her own, this uncommon woman emerged eventually not only as one of the great and most passionate collectors of art, but also a patron who helped establish American art as a force in the world then dominated almost completely by Europe. But to enter the world of art was an effort, for she had to ‘pick herself up from the trials of luxury’ before doing that, as she wrote herself. But once she did, she threw herself wholeheartedly into wild Bohemian life most of which she spent in Europe and England. There is hardly an artist whom she did not know – wags would be more inclined to say, “whom she did not bed” – all the while “going through husbands and lovers as though lots more were waiting in the wings”. And there are tales of her picking up, shrewdly and ruthlessly, works by the most famous of Europeans – Picasso, Chagall, Dali, Braque, de Chirico, and Max Ernst –in the years when the Second World War had just broken out, and there was so much uncertainty and insecurity among everyone around, especially the artists. Her motto? “Buy a picture a day”. But not pay much for it. Returning to the security of America when war was raging in Europe, Peggy brought her entire collection with her; set up a gallery called the Art of this Century; and soon became a force to reckon with in the world of art in New York. Some of the greatest names one knows from America of the mid-twentieth century were part of her circle: Max Ernst who migrated to the US and whom she married; Jackson Pollock, who started off as a carpenter but whom she supported for two full years in return for his art; people like Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, who were to emerge as icons of the new art. It was heady times. But this buccaneer of a woman longed to return to Europe where her heart was. And she did, finding for herself an old palazzo in her beloved city: Venice. There she set herself up, the “last of the great duchesses” as she was described, living the kind of life she had always longed for, surrounded by her art till her death in 1979. But her last gesture was to gift her entire collection to the Guggenheim Museum, which she saucily described as “my uncle’s garage, that Frank Lloyd Wright thing on Fifth Avenue”. On one condition, however: the collection will belong to the Guggenheim, but remain in Venice. There is more, much more, to the Guggenheim story. For there is a spanking new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao in Spain, one in Berlin, one in Las Vegas, and soon going to be one in Abu Dhabi. But of these, another time perhaps.
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