Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Housed in a UNESCO-protected building by Frank Lloyd Wright on Manhattan’s Museum Mile, the Guggenheim houses a stellar permanent collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, modern and contemporary art, and hosts important special exhibitions. Its first incarnation was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which opened in 1939 in New York to display the somewhat eccentric art collection of Solomon Guggenheim, a businessman and member of a wealthy mining family. The museum took its founder’s name in 1952 and the current spiral-design building opened in 1959. Several other founding collectors contributed to the permanent holdings: Guggenheim’s niece Peggy Guggenheim, the art dealer Justin K. Thannhauser and the Italian businessman Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Now 8,000 works, which date from the 19th century to today, include favorites such as Vasily Kandinsky’s “Composition 8 (Komposition 8)” (1923), Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” (March 1962) and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s “Can’t Help Myself” (2016). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is part of an international constellation of museums that includes the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.