New York City's Guggenheim Museum opened to the public in 1959.
The museum officially opened on October 21, 1959, on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Its opening followed more than a decade of planning, design changes, fundraising, and construction. Frank Lloyd Wright had prepared the building's distinctive spiral concept, but he died several months before the opening ceremony.
The museum was created to house Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection of nonobjective art, which had previously been shown in a smaller gallery known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. The new building gave the collection an internationally prominent permanent home.
The opening date is sometimes confused with the dates of later Guggenheim institutions, especially the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997. New York's museum remains the original Guggenheim museum building and is one of Wright's best-known completed works.