What was the first building to house the Guggenheim Museum in New York?

The first building to house the Guggenheim Museum in New York was an automobile showroom.

Before the permanent Fifth Avenue museum opened, the Guggenheim collection was displayed in a former automobile showroom at 24 East 54th Street. The space hosted the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the institution’s early public form, beginning in 1939.

The temporary location reflected the collection’s rapid development and the need to show works before a purpose-built museum could be completed. The museum later moved to Frank Lloyd Wright’s distinctive building on Fifth Avenue, which opened in 1959.

This early venue is easy to confuse with other temporary exhibition spaces used by Guggenheim-related institutions. It was not the later Wright building, nor was it the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, which houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.