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The Guggenheim Museum

Situated at 5th Avenue and 89th Street in New York City, the Guggenheim Museum is operated by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which operates an international network of museums. This famous New York City landmark is named after its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim. The goal of the museum is to collect and preserve art objects and to make them accessible to visitors through exhibitions and programs. The first Guggenheim museum was built in 1939 and was called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Later an idea came about to build a permanent home for the museum in Manhattan. With the combined effort of Solomon Guggenheim and artist Hilla Rebay, the building was opened in 1959. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The building is a symphony of triangles, ovals, arcs, circles, and squares, which attract the attention of passersby. In 1992 the museum was renovated by adding considerable overall exhibition space. In the meantime, Guggenheim Museum SoHo was opened in downtown Manhattan. The museum presents Russia-the most comprehensive exhibition of Russian art in America. It features the greatest masterpieces of Russian art from the 13th century to the present. First-class Western European paintings; sculptures from the imperial art collections assembled by Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas I in the 18th and 19th centuries; and collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov are the highlights of the exhibition. The rotunda and galleries of the museum are devoted to the age of the icon (13th-17th centuries) and royal art collections of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The iconostasis, a wall of painted images, visually dominates Eastern Orthodox churches. Multiple panels of the Deesis tier from the famous 1497 iconostasis of the Kirillo-Belozersk Monastery's Dormition Cathedral are noteworthy. Artworks on display at the museum include art by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and other famous artists. Paintings of Marc Chagall, collections of Justin K. Thannhauser, and more than 150 works of Kandinsky, are counted among the permanent holdings. Books, posters, artworks of famous artists, creative toys, and whimsical objects are available at the museum store.