Solomon R. Guggenheim

Solomon Guggenheim was the fourth of seven sons Meyer Guggenheim raised in Philadelphia on a fortune still being built — Swiss immigrants who moved from embroidery into mining and smelting and, within a generation, into one of the largest metals businesses in the world. Solomon studied in Zurich, then went into the family firm, turning around a failing Mexican foundry in 1891, presiding over Chile's Braden Copper Company, and founding the Yukon Gold Company in Alaska in 1906. He married Irene Rothschild in 1895, and it was Irene, not Solomon, who pushed him toward collecting art in the first place — Old Masters, bought the conventional way a wealthy man was expected to buy them.

He retired from mining in 1919 at 58, and seven years later met Hilla von Rebay, a German baroness who moved in Paris and Berlin avant-garde circles. Rebay redirected him completely, away from Rembrandt and toward Wassily Kandinsky, toward what she called non-objective painting — abstraction with no recognizable object left in it at all. He chartered the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 and opened the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939 on East 54th Street, with Rebay as director. By 1948 he had bought the dealer Karl Nierendorf's entire 730-piece estate outright. In 1943 he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a permanent building for it all, one neither man would live to see finished.

The contradiction was total commitment to one uncompromising taste. Rebay's museum admitted nothing that depicted a recognizable object — no Cubism, no representational work of any kind, only paintings she judged spiritually non-objective, principally Kandinsky's and her own circle's. Visitors and critics found it baffling — one later assessment of those years called the museum an esoteric, occult place where a mystic language was spoken. Guggenheim, who had spent decades running smelters and foundries and answering to shareholders and partners, answered to none of that here. He never publicly second-guessed Rebay's judgment, never diversified the collection on his own authority, and never lived to find out whether betting an entire museum on one advisor's conviction would hold up without him.

His family moved fast. Solomon's niece Peggy Guggenheim had never gotten along with Rebay, and within months of his death the foundation's board pushed her off — she was not invited when the museum finally opened a decade later and, by her own account, never once set foot in the building she had spent 20 years building the collection for. That building took Frank Lloyd Wright 15 years and more than 700 sketches — he died in April 1959, six months before the opening. The foundation reversed Rebay's rule against representational art within years of Solomon's death. The Guggenheim name now covers museums in Venice, Bilbao and Abu Dhabi, and the bet on pure abstraction looks less eccentric with each decade.

Solomon R. Guggenheim's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Yukon Gold Company company
  His last major business founding, an Alaska mining venture 1906
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation company
  Chartered to promote appreciation of modern art 1937
• Museum of Non-Objective Painting building
  Opened at 24 East 54th Street with Hilla von Rebay as director 1939
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum building
  Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral, commissioned in 1943 and opened a decade after his death 1959

• February 2, 1861 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia
• 1891 aged ~30 Turns around a failing Mexican foundry for the family firm
• 1895 aged ~34 Marries Irene Rothschild
• 1906 aged ~45 Founds the Yukon Gold Company in Alaska
• 1919 aged ~58 Retires from the mining business at 58
• 1926 aged ~65 Meets Hilla von Rebay, who redirects his collecting toward abstraction
• 1937 aged ~76 Establishes the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
• 1939 aged ~78 Opens the Museum of Non-Objective Painting
• November 3, 1949 aged 88 Dies at Trillora Court, his Long Island estate

• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. commissioned
• Alfred Stieglitz 1864–1946
  Photographer and gallerist who established photography as fine art and promoted American modernists. competing champion of modern art in New York
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. fellow industrialist turned patron
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. rival collector of an older generation