This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Solomon Guggenheim spent the first six decades of his working life in metals and mining, not art. He came up through the international businesses his father Meyer Guggenheim had built, restructured a Mexican foundry company in 1891, ran Chile's Braden Copper Company, and founded the Yukon Gold Company in 1906, before retiring from business altogether in 1919. None of that would have made him a name museumgoers still recognize. What did was a series of encounters that happened almost by accident, over the following decade. He married Irene Rothschild in 1895, and it was Irene, by most accounts, who first drew him toward collecting, steering him early on toward old master paintings, the safe, established taste of a wealthy American of his generation. That changed in the late 1920s, when Guggenheim met the artist and adviser Baroness Hilla von Rebay. Rebay redirected his eye entirely, away from old masters and toward the avant-garde, non-objective painting that had almost no market or audience in the United States at the time. A 1930 studio visit to Wassily Kandinsky in Dessau turned that redirection into a program: Guggenheim began systematically acquiring the kind of abstract, non-representational work that would eventually become the core of the museum's holdings. He founded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 and opened its first public face, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, on East 54th Street in Manhattan in 1939, a modest gallery space rather than the building most people now associate with his name. The collection kept growing even as Guggenheim's own life wound down: in 1948, the year before his death, the Foundation acquired the art dealer Karl Nierendorf's estate of roughly seven hundred thirty works, a single purchase that substantially deepened its German Expressionist holdings. Guggenheim's partnership with Rebay was close enough, and public enough, that it provoked rumors of a romantic affair, fed in part by Irene's own visible resentment of how much time her husband spent with his adviser. Historians who have gone back through the surviving correspondence have found no documentary evidence of an affair, and describe instead an unusually intense professional and intellectual collaboration between a patron who trusted his adviser's eye almost completely and an adviser who used that trust to build one of the twentieth century's defining collections of abstract art, gallery by gallery, out of an American businessman who had spent most of his career in copper and gold.