Glitzy Guggenheim

Glitzy Guggenheim

Described by Spanish novelist Manuel Vazquez Montalban as a "meteorite," Bilbao's Guggenheim may be the most celebrated building of all time. This eruption of light and titanium 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.

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 that 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. 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 huge ground-floor gallery is the largest in the world.