A Museum Makeover : New Guggenheim: Big Time, Big Business and Blue Chip

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that opens to the public on June 28 is in virtually every way a different museum from the Guggenheim that closed for renovation two years ago. During those two years, the art of the deal made all the headlines, and controversy over how the museum was funding its plans rose to a fever pitch. Not surprisingly, director Thomas Krens, who arrived three years ago to mastermind the transformation, has grown a little surly on the subject.

“Frankly, I think all this investigation into what we’re doing is a little bit backward,” he explodes. “If you want to do the great investigative story, do one about how difficult it is for culture to operate in New York City.”

Indeed. The costs for all museums have catapulted, while audiences, earnings, private support and government funding have dropped off. But the Guggenheim has pressed forward, with far-reaching, dramatic changes to the tune of $67 million that make it either an inspirational model of ‘80s daring or a cautionary tale of ‘80s excess.

The old Guggenheim, under director Thomas Messer, was just a little drab and gone-to-seed on the outside, wonderfully odd, intimate and idiosyncratic on the inside. By the end of his 27-year tenure, it was barely making financial ends meet, though it had painstakingly accumulated a stellar modern collection and introduced Americans to influential European artists.

The new Guggenheim is big time, big business, blue chip and up to speed in innovations.

Its signature Frank Lloyd Wright spiral has been streamlined and given a face lift to a glory unknown even in the year of its birth, 1959.

The spiral has been joined at the hip to a 10-story tower, designed by architects Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. Its floors meet Wright’s ramp in a manner that emphasizes the spiral’s bulging shapes, as well as doubling the museum’s gallery space and making it more versatile.

The museum has spawned a downtown branch, the 64,592-square-foot Guggenheim SoHo, with an interior designed by Arata Isozaki.

It has trailblazed a multinational strategy that thus far has resulted in an agreement for the Basque administration to build a Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, with other European satellites in the planning stages.

It has come up with a way to capitalize on its much-loved collection to raise revenues, charging a heavy load of expenses--up to $3 million apiece--to museums that hosted the paintings while the museum was closed.

It has significantly changed the emphasis of its classical modern collection by adding more than 360 works from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

At a moment when other cultural institutions have sagged, it was certainly a fantastic accomplishment to renovate the museum, to get the controversial tower built and exhibition space added and to finance it with a $54.6-million bond issue when the museum’s endowment hovered around $30 million and its resources looked a little thin for such a heavy debt load.

But at what cost? Critics fear that the ambitious agenda raises questions about the lengths to which the Guggenheim will go to raise money, the risks it is willing to take with its permanent collection, and whether its commitment is to art or to grandiosity.

“That’s a stupid question,” Krens sounds off. “We’re not going to give information that’s not in our financial statement.”

The “stupid” question is about paintings that have been put up as collateral--in this case nine of the 360 conceptual and minimal works from the Count Panza di Biumo collection. Panza is retaining the nine works until the Guggenheim pays off the remaining $8 million--at no interest--of $32 million it owes.

However, critics are still upset that in order to finance the Panza acquisition, the Guggenheim auctioned three great works by Modigliani, Chagall and Kandinsky--especially since the sale realized $47 million, an excess that might indicate not all three needed to be sold. Moreover, instead of paying off the total Panza debt, the museum says it is using nearly half to pay for other acquisitions, including works by Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys.

The Guggenheim believes it can make its payments largely through income from day-to-day operations. And if it hits its targets for revenues, the museum should squeak through. Membership is indeed up, from 2,000 in 1989 to 7,000 today--still far less than the 50,000 at the Museum of Modern Art. (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has 90,000 members and the Museum of Contemporary Art has 13,000.) Then there are the “naming opportunities,” where donors give millions to have their names in brass on a gallery.

But essential for the financial and artistic equation to work are the museum’s plans for expansion in Europe. When Krens came aboard, the museum had already acquired the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Taking the Venice venue as a model, Krens and his team have either sought or been approached by groups in other nations. A museum designed by Hans Hollein in Austria is currently mired in Austrian politics, and there has been talk of a museum in Japan, but the Guggenheim has remained vague about it. The first new foreign Guggenheim that has actually reached the contract stage is the one to be designed by Frank Gehry for Bilbao.

The Basque administration has agreed to come up with $54 million to build the museum and will provide close to $50 million to spend on acquisitions. The Guggenheim Foundation will collect art for Bilbao, organize special exhibitions and lend portions of its own collection. In return for this, the Guggenheim Bilbao will give the foundation a lump sum of close to $20 million (half has already been received) and help pay the salaries of the New York staff when they spend time on Bilbao’s behalf.

So the real question becomes: What will the expansionist plans mean for the Guggenheim’s collections? Museum Deputy Director Michael Govan says that a pertinent reason for adding outlets in SoHo and Europe is to gain space for new gifts of art.

But the more contemporary art the museum collects, the less space it has for its collection of classic modernism. The Krens administration has lamented that already only 2% of it’s collection of 6,000 works can be on display at one time (though critics call this an exaggeration, since the figure includes hundreds of unimportant works painted by original director Hilla Rebay and some of the lesser artists she favored). At present, Krens plans to make the classic core a floating collection. Portions of it will float among tower, spiral and downtown space, depending on where the current temporary exhibition looks best. And when something is in none of those spaces, it will be in a European branch.

Ironically, Messer’s major point in initiating the tower project was to find a permanent home for the collection. Once again, this is a battle between the old, careful ways and new schemes for treating the collection like a special exhibition. Will the art suffer in the process?

The museum reopens with an installation of Dan Flavin fluorescent light sculptures that more than ever turns the Wright building itself into a sculptural object. And that, too, is what Gwathmey’s tower has done to the exterior, emphasizing the sculptural properties of this museum that a great many people, starting with Rebay, believed overwhelmed the art meant to be shown there.

“While I have no doubt that your building will be a great monument to yourself, I cannot visualize how much (or how little) it will do for the paintings,” she wrote Wright in the ‘40s.

The Guggenheim of the ‘90s has taken some unusual and controversial steps to arrive intact at its great moment of unveiling. It virtually rented out its collection for the years it was closed--”like a commodity, like licensing the name Givenchy,” storms one New York museum director. It has loaded itself with debt. It is spreading itself downtown and abroad.

Now the moment has come for the art. Messer says he chose Krens as his successor because he was a gifted administrator who could solve the museum’s financial problems. But Krens’ view of himself is as “artistic director.” The exhibition that opens the new space--”The Guggenheim Museum and the Art of This Century”--is his, he says, with the assistance of curator Lisa Dennison.

The only show of his we’ve seen so far was the German Expressionist painting exhibition that was savaged by the press three years back. If he can bring off this one, he really will have inaugurated the Guggenheim’s new moment. That’s what it will take for New York to get its Guggenheim back.