I’d been meaning to visit the Guggenheim for ages and finally made it today. It was pretty busy even at 11am, I think because the Met is closed on a Monday, it pushes arty traffic up 5th Avenue. It’s an amazing building, so different to everything around it, and it proudly looks out at Central Park. It is the youngest building to be landmarked in the US and when it was built in the 1950s, with its modern design by Frank Lloyd Wright, its stuffy Upper East Side neighbours campaigned against it. Ironically, 40 odd years later when the Guggenheim authorities decided that they’d run out of space and need to expand it, its neighbours campaigned for the frontage to remain untouched and for the extension to be developed at the back, unseen by 5th Avenue. They were the ones that got the landmark status.

It is lovely, so curvy and simple, it’s a great place to display art. At the moment, it has a fabulous installation called ‘Water’ by the Japanese artist, Motonaga Sadamasa. There are many polyethylene tubes of varying widths filled with brightly-colored water, weighing down at different points in the tubes which are suspended across the rotunda.

The first photo below is taken from the top floor, looking down, which is quite a long way up and no good for anyone who doesn’t like heights. The second photo is taken about half way down and shows more clearly the tubes and their criss cross effect. It is beautiful.

Find out more at:

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/gutai-splendid-playground