The Guggenheim Bilbao

The Guggenheim Bilbao

If Picasso's Guernica was the 20th century's most famous and embattled painting, Bilbao's Guggenheim may be the most celebrated building of all time. Described by Spanish novelist Manuel Vazquez Montalban as a "meteorite," this eruption of light and titanium paradoxically stationed in Bilbao's muscular industrial context has reinvented this city.

Perennially chided as the barrio industrial (industrial quarter) in contrast to San Sebastián's barrio jardín (garden quarter), Bilbao has long been perceived as a polluted steel and shipbuilding center by the foul-smelling Nervión estuary.

The Guggenheim has changed all that. Frank Gehry's gleaming brainchild, alternately hailed as "the greatest building of our time" (architect Philip Johnson), "the best building of the 20th century" (Spain's King Juan Carlos), and "a miracle" (Herbert Muschamp, New York Times), has sparked a renaissance in the Basque country. In its first year, the Guggenheim attracted 1.4 million visitors, three times the number expected and more than what both Guggenheim museums in New York received together in the same period. Revenue in the first year alone exceeded the original investment. Incredibly, the Guggenheim already holds the Spanish record for single-day visits to a museum (9,300), and the crowds are not diminishing.

The museum itself is as superlative as the hoopla suggests. Gehry's quasi-mechanical tour de force provides an ideal context for the postmodern and futuristic artworks it contains. The smoothly rounded, asymmetrical, ship's-prow-like amalgam of limestone, glass, and titanium ingeniously recalls Bilbao's shipbuilding and steel-manufacturing past while using transparency and reflective materials to create a shimmering, futuristic luminosity. The final section of the Nervión's La Salve bridge is almost part of the structure, rendering the Guggenheim the virtual doorway to Bilbao.

The collection, described by director Thomas Krens as "a daring history of the art of the 20th century," consists of 242 works, 186 from New York's Guggenheim and 50 acquired by the Basque government. Artists whose names are synonymous with the 20th century (Kandinsky, Picasso, Ernst, Braque, Miró, Calder, Malevich) and particularly artists of the '50s and '60s (Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning, Chillida, Tàpies, Iglesias) are joined by contemporary figures (Nauman, Muñoz, Schnabel, Badiola, Barceló, Basquiat). The ground floor is dedicated to large-format and installation work, some of which -- like Richard Serra's Serpent -- was created specifically for the space it occupies. Claes Oldenburg's Knife Ship, Robert Morris's walk-in Labyrinth, and pieces by Beuys, Boltansky, Long, Holzer, and others round out the heavyweight division in and around what is now the largest gallery in the world.