Guggenheim's purchases continued with the works of Rudolf Bauer, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and great artists who were not of the non-objective school, such as Marc Chagall, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Pablo Picasso and László Moholy-Nagy.

[6] Under Rebay's guidance, Guggenheim sought to include in the collection the most important examples of non-objective art available at the time, such as Kandinsky's Composition 8 (1923), Léger's Contrast of Forms (1913) and Delaunay's Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (1912).

[13] Nevertheless, she left a portion of her personal collection to the foundation in her will, including works by Kandinsky, Klee, Alexander Calder, Gleizes, Piet Mondrian and Kurt Schwitters.

Sweeney rejected Rebay's dismissal of "objective" painting and sculpture, and he soon acquired Constantin Brâncuși's Adam and Eve (1921), followed by works of other modernist sculptors, including Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti and David Smith.

[9] In 1953, the foundation received a gift of 28 important works from the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, a founder of America's first collection to be called a modern art museum, the Société Anonyme.

The works included Little French Girl (1914–18) by Brâncuși, an untitled still life (1916) by Juan Gris, a bronze sculpture (1919) by Alexander Archipenko and three collages (1919–21) by German Hanoverian Dadaist Schwitters.

[20] Some of the criticism focused on the idea that the building overshadows the artworks displayed inside,[10] and that it is difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow, windowless, concave exhibition niches that surround the central spiral.

[17] Upon opening, the museum received a largely favorable response from the public, despite the early misgivings: "overall Wright's design was, and still is, admired for being highly personal and inviting".

[23] Three-dimensional sculpture, in particular, raised "the problem of installing such a show in a museum bearing so close a resemblance to the circular geography of hell", where any vertical object appears tilted in a "drunken lurch" because the slope of the floor and the curvature of the walls could combine to produce vexing optical illusions.

"[23] Messer had the foresight to prepare by staging a smaller sculpture exhibition the previous year, in which he discovered how to compensate for the space's weird geometry by constructing special plinths at a particular angle, so the pieces were not at a true vertical yet appeared to be so.

[24] In the earlier sculpture show, this trick proved impossible for one piece, an Alexander Calder mobile whose wire inevitably hung at a true plumb vertical, "suggesting hallucination" in the disorienting context of the tilted floor.

[36] To finance these moves, controversially, the foundation sold works by Kandinsky, Chagall and Modigliani to raise $47 million, drawing considerable criticism for trading masters for "trendy" latecomers.

[43] Under Krens, the foundation mounted some of its most popular exhibitions: "Africa: The Art of a Continent" in 1996; "China: 5,000 Years" in 1998, "Brazil: Body & Soul" in 2001; and "The Aztec Empire" in 2004.

[53] Other projects were considered but not completed in Rio de Janeiro, Vilnius, Salzburg, Taichung[54] and Guadalajara[55] On January 19, 2005, the philanthropist Peter B. Lewis resigned from his position as chairman of the foundation, expressing his opposition to Krens' plans for further global expansion of the Guggenheim museums.

[74][75] In 2007, the heirs of Berlin banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy requested the restitution of the Picasso painting "Le Moulin de la Galette" (1900), which they claimed he had sold under duress by the Nazis.

"[90] The resultant achievement, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York City, testifies not only to Wright's architectural genius, but also to the adventurous spirit that characterized its founders.

[91] The critic Paul Goldberger later wrote that, before Wright's modernist building, "there were only two common models for museum design: Beaux-arts Palace ... and the International Style Pavilion.

"[92] Goldberger thought the building a catalyst for change, making it "socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum.

He explained, "these geometric forms suggest certain human ideas, moods, sentiments – as for instance: the circle, infinity; the triangle, structural unity; the spiral, organic progress; the square, integrity.

The museum's website describes its "long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.

By 1985, "all of the rooms on the main floor had been converted into galleries ... the white Istrian stone facade and the unique canal terrace had been restored", and a protruding arcade wing, called the barchessa, had been rebuilt by architect Giorgio Bellavitis.

[119] Architect Philip Johnson described it as "the greatest building of our time",[120] while critic Calvin Tomkins, in The New Yorker, characterized it as "a fantastic dream ship of undulating form in a cloak of titanium", its brilliantly reflective panels also reminiscent of fish scales.

[115][121] Eleven thousand square meters of exhibition space are distributed over nineteen galleries, ten of which follow a classic orthogonal plan that can be identified from the exterior by their stone finishes.

[124] Designed by American architect Richard Gluckman in a minimalist style, the modest Berlin gallery occupied a corner of the ground floor of the sandstone Deutsche Bank building, in the Unter der Linden boulevard, constructed in 1920.

[66] In March 2011, over 130 artists announced a plan to boycott the Abu Dhabi museum, citing reports of abuses of foreign workers, including the arbitrary withholding of wages, unsafe working conditions and failure of companies to pay recruitment fees to laborers.

[135] The design chosen for a proposed €130 million Guggenheim museum in Helsinki, Finland, envisioned "an indistinct jumble of pavilions faced in charred wood" and glass.

Osku Pajamaki, vice chairman of the city's executive board, said: "The symbol of the lighthouse is arrogant in the middle of the historical center ... [like] a Guggenheim museum next to Notre Dame in Paris.

[138][139] Foundation curators selected a short list of 125 videos from which a jury, including artists Laurie Anderson and Takashi Murakami and the musical group Animal Collective, picked a playlist of 25 works.

[145] The Lab's Advisory Committee members were: Daniel Barenboim, Elizabeth Diller, Nicholas Humphrey, Muchadeyi Masunda, Enrique Peñalosa, Juliet Schor, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Wang Shi.

[152][153] The Foundation acquired these artworks for its permanent collection and included them as the focus of exhibitions at the museum in New York and subsequently traveled to two other cultural institutions or other venues around the world.