ART REVIEW : The Guggenheim’s Grand Reopening

Ten years after the firm of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects was engaged to study the possibility of expansion for the landmark Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Manhattan’s upper Fifth Avenue, the fully restored and enlarged building will finally reopen to the public Sunday. It is an occasion of unusual interest.

The Guggenheim has long occupied a special place in the art life of New York. Its closure more than two years ago to renovate and restore the 1959 Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, as well as to build a controversial, 10-story tower in a narrow lot behind the museum’s great, spiraling rotundas, left a void that has been keenly felt.

Adding to the interest has been the controversial tenure of Thomas Krens, director of the museum’s parent organization, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and guiding light of the project. Krens’ global expansion program--with existing, planned or contemplated Guggenheim outlets in Spain, Italy, Austria and Massachusetts, which would share the museum’s formidable collection of European and American modern art--has led some to complain of an inappropriate “corporate franchising” of the museum. For these observers, the creation of a “McGuggenheim” chain represents a loss for the special character of the venerable institution--and, not coincidentally, a loss for the concentrated artistic primacy of New York.

So, the widely watched reopening of the Fifth Avenue building--call it Guggenheim HQ--as well as the simultaneous debut of a nearly 65,000-square-foot satellite facility five miles away in Manhattan’s SoHo, on three floors of a landmark building at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, represents a first big test of Krens’ ambitious vision. How has the delicate project been handled, and how wise has been the expenditure of nearly $61 million?

In one crucial respect, the result is nothing short of a triumph. However, as might befit the complex and controversial situation, in others it is certainly less than happy.

The triumph is one of architectural restoration. The interior of Wright’s extraordinary building, which is commonly regarded as an incomparable achievement of modern architecture, has not just been brought back to life from its previously sorry state of shabby disrepair. It has also been renewed in ways that will likely reform conventional wisdom about Wright’s design.

During its relatively brief life span, and even before it opened, the Wright building had been many times altered. In the restoration, Guggenheim officials sought to conform to Wright’s original scheme, restoring the building, in Krens’ words, to “pre-original condition.”

That has meant the opening of previously closed skylights and upper exhibition ramps in the central, corkscrew galleries; the dismantling of a rabbit-warren of offices in the small rotunda (the so-called Monitor Building), and its conversion into public gallery space ringed with lacy, glass walls; the completion of a Wright-designed restaurant facing Fifth Avenue, with its own separate entrance; the relocation of the museum shop; the spectacular renovation of the main rotunda’s great, glass ceiling--a modernist “dome of heaven” for a 20th-Century cathedral of culture--and much more.

More important than individual details, though, the overall restoration has resulted in an airy, light-filled building whose orientation to the outdoors--to the sky and to Central Park across the street--was plainly the guiding principle of the original design. In ways it never has before, the Guggenheim now feels oddly transparent. The spiraling main rotunda, which in part owes its form to ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats, is today less a powerfully enclosed volume of space than a poetic essay in modernist transcendence.

For this reason, it may have seemed perfect to invite American sculptor Dan Flavin to inaugurate the space with an expanded version of a fluorescent-light installation he had proposed for the museum in 1971. Along the spiral ramp he’s lined the short walls separating the gallery bays with green, blue, yellow and pink vertical tubes, accented above and below by short, white horizontals. From the third level up, similar arrangements of multicolored fluorescents lean away from the ramp at a 45-degree angle, while a fat cylinder constructed from pink tubes rises from the center of the rotunda floor to the glass dome nine stories up.

It may have looked good on paper, but during the day natural light washes out the fluorescent installation, transforming it into what seems a pale and redundant afterthought. At night, the garish glow of a nightclub is inevitably conjured.

Flavin’s sculpture is also combative. It’s no mere homage to Wright’s architecture, nor a visual exegesis on it. The most egregious element is the central pink column, a visual spindle whose phallic thrust aggressively demands that the spiral building revolve around it. Unwittingly, the spindle’s main effect is to recall Hollywood’s cheerfully kitschy Capitol Records building.

Flavin’s installation has an arrogant edge, perhaps as arrogant as Frank Lloyd Wright notoriously was. Were he alive today the great architect might smile in knowing acknowledgment of a fellow artist’s audacity--just before he took a sledgehammer to the offending tubes of glass.

The installation is only temporary, but the most dismaying feature of the Guggenheim reopening is bluntly permanent. No sledgehammer will soon dislodge the mostly awful 10-story addition Gwathmey Siegel has erected behind the museum. The graceless annex deals a double blow to the Guggenheim.

From the outside, its sheer, Indiana-limestone wall hangs like a beige, gridded backdrop behind and above the theatrical, eccentric forms of the museum. Visually, it merges with the powerful spiral of the stuccoed rotunda and the glassy, space-age lightness of the Monitor Building, flattening them out. Wright’s dramatic forms lose a lot of their buoyant energy.

Inside, the museum has gained nearly 20,000 square feet of much-needed exhibition space for its great collection, which ranges from Camille Pissarro in the 1860s to Andy Warhol in the 1960s. The only drawback is that most of the new galleries are terrible. Especially on the upper floors, the galleries are tall, narrow, stubby corridors that lead to visual dead ends. Paintings are lined up like soldiers along the sides. Wright’s original spiral ramp is notorious for being largely inhospitable to the display of art, but it’s hard to see how the construction of new, equally inhospitable galleries solves the problem.

The Gwathmey Siegel annex has plainly grown from a formal understanding of the Guggenheim’s complex geometry, but the extrapolation is just a pedantic compilation of mathematical facts. Whether overawed by the site or cowed by the successive controversies over its construction, the architects betray no evidence of a conceptual grasp of Wright’s masterpiece.

The annex just feels like an accountant’s design. Wright’s transparent, light-filled building is about the power of space, evoked through the paradoxically material construction of a void. For all its seeming hostility to individual works of art, it became a brilliant symbol for the Guggenheim because it made concrete a Modernist faith in the transcendent power of non-objective art, which was always the centerpiece of the museum’s great collection.

Still, poorly served by the new galleries or not, it’s great to have significant portions of that collection back on view. How it will look in the Arata Isozaki-designed spaces of the refurbished satellite building in SoHo is difficult to say; way behind schedule, with crews working furiously around the clock, it will open Sunday in only makeshift form. In-depth if rather peculiar pairings of work by artists living and dead are planned for the SoHo debut: Robert Ryman paired with Constantin Brancusi; Louise Bourgeois with Joseph Beuys; and, most bizarrely, Carl Andre with Vasily Kandinsky.

Notably, the precedent for a spacious, dual-location museum is L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Including Wright’s own masterpiece in the mix, Krens declared at a preview, “The permanent collection is what we built the buildings for.” The sentiment is fine. Would that the rest of the Manhattan project was, too.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave., New York, (212) 423-3500; inaugural exhibition through Aug. 27.