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In 1926, during an economic crisis that severely impacted the mining industry, Guggenheim Brothers, the Guggenheim family business, implemented a new technological system to extract saltpeter from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Known as the Guggenheim system, this cutting-edge technological innovation had a significant impact on regional society and facilitated the introduction of Chilean saltpeter into the global fertilizer market. For this system to succeed, however, it had to incorporate a sociopolitical strategy based on a highly hierarchical and well-controlled labor force. Through their political and cultural influence in the region, the Guggenheim family's industry transformed a remote area into a state periphery, creating new ways of inhabiting the desert within a strict framework in which workers' lives were regulated by company-imposed labor discipline. With more political power than the state, the Guggenheim family sought to suppress any social agency deemed dangerous to the production of saltpeter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Music is mass and it builds things', esperanza spalding said she dreamt one night as she struggled with the libretto for ...(Iphigenia), the phrase forming the turning point for the work. The oneiric formulation extends the material nature of music, granting sonic vibrations architectural abilities. This paradox approaches a paradoxical aim at the heart of Frank Gehry's building practice: to imbue solid matter with motion. His free-form sculptural designs, instanced most famously in the spectacular designs for the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, have granted him global auteur status. However, the set design for ...(Iphigenia) offered and continues to offer him an attractive state of unknowing, one in which emerges the possibility of non-directed constructive form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1969 and 1970, the first international retrospective devoted to Constantin Brancusi was hosted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Gemeentemuseum den Haag. In 1970 the first retrospective of Brancusi's work in his native Romania was held at Muzeul de Artă R.S.R., Bucharest. This article establishes for the first time that these exhibitions were part of a single project, facilitated by an unprecedented exchange of loans between American museums and the institutions of a socialist republic. Based on extensive archival research, the article details the conflicting interests of the scholars, curators and state officials involved in the project, the geopolitical moment that made it possible, and the ideological contest over the meanings and values represented by Brancusi's sculpture that lay at its very core. In particular, it brings to light the compromised position occupied by the exhibition's curator, the American Brancusi scholar Sidney Geist, and the research he conducted in Romania in the mid-1960s; the diplomatic efforts of the Guggenheim's director Thomas M. Messer, working in concert with members of the US State Department; and the peculiar status of Brancusi as a cultural figure under Nicolae Ceauşescu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in early 2020, were felt across all industries and public institutions, including art museums. Shuttered art museums sought to maintain public interest in their collections and exhibitions by promoting existing online tools, such as the virtual art museum tours hosted by Google Arts & Culture. This article analyses these tours from the perspective of museology and architecture and argues that, rather than a form of virtual reality, these tours are a peculiar kind of image database. As such, they are part of Google's growing efforts towards mass digitization and data accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to provide a brief summary of the most controversial restoration realized on four cases out of the eight Frank Lloyd Wright's works listed as Unesco World Heritage (the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Unity Temple, the Robie House, Taliesin West), in a comparative view between the recurrent methods of the American approach to architectural restoration and the shared values of the Italian theory of conservation. In this way, the principles laid down by Unesco to list this valuable heritage (Integrity, Authenticity, Protection) are looked under a critical perspective, showing how liable they are in within the selected cases. Furthermore, the text will focus on the complex implications deriving from the design intent, the authorship, the architectural history and the use of photography in the restoration process, opposed to the principle of time and authenticity deriving from the Venice Charter and the Nara Document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Thannhauser Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, represents an important survey of European avant-garde art production during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the works included in this collection are three paintings by Vincent van Gogh, namely Roadway with Underpass (1887), Landscape with Snow (1888), and Mountains at Saint-Rémy (1889). These examples each exhibit some degree of surface alteration, including fading of specific pigments and, in one case, a non-original, discolored varnish, resulting in obscured color and spatial relationships, as well as being the subject of questions regarding authenticity in the case of the two earlier pictures. Initial examination involved documentation of the brushwork, paint quality, and distribution of colors under magnification. Infrared (IR) and ultraviolet (UV) photography, as well as X-radiography, provided additional information on the surface coatings, the structure of the works, and their supports. Subsequently, an in-depth scientific investigation of the ground and paint layers, with a special focus on fading colors and altered surfaces, was carried out non-invasively with point and macro-X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, visible reflection spectroscopy, and multi-channel visible spectrum four-light imaging, followed by the analysis of cross sections and dispersed pigment samples by means of optical microscopy, transmission Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopies, and scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDS), as well as high-performance liquid chromatography with photodiode array detection (HPLC-PDA) and pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS). Results indicated that both the brushwork and artist's palette of all three paintings are consistent with data previously reported for other Van Gogh works and with pigments described in the artist's letters to his friends and his brother Theo. Most notably, evidence of biodeterioration and paint alteration phenomena was found on Roadway with Underpass, while specific pigments such as eosin red—historically sold as geranium lake—were detected in areas of Landscape with Snow and Mountains at Saint-Rémy that display severe fading. In addition to assisting the development of a suitable plan for the conservation of the 1887 painting, this study traces the progression of Van Gogh's practice over three years critical to his artistic development, discusses the historical context in which each masterpiece was created, identifies the range of materials and techniques used, and addresses authenticity questions by providing a comparison with results of scientific analysis from other similar works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a transportable architecture has been present throughout history. Different architects have experimented with this concept, managing to materialize it in typologies such as the pavilion at international exhibitions. Along the same lines, the museum, as a typology that seeks to get closer to the masses, has found a useful variant in the portable building. If temporary exhibitions acquire their value in their constant contact with the public, the idea of bringing the exhibition together with the architecture becomes relevant. Thus, this paper analyses the paradigmatic experience of the Guggenheim Foundation, a leading museum institution in the competition for a temporary museum in Tokyo. Through the analysis of the proposals of Ban, Nouvel, and Hadid, it will be observed how architects use the full force of their representational styles whilst facing a typological innovation, aiming to appeal and to communicate the original architectural content that will be the main object of the exhibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]