Man v. Building

In spite of the crowds that wait to get in. Director James Johnson Sweeney of Manhattan's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has never gotten along with his spiraling new building on upper Fifth Avenue. He took a dislike to the place the moment he first saw Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's plans, and though he seemed for a while to have made a kind of peace with it, he was never really satisfied. Last week the museum announced that Sweeney had quit his job.

At 60, James Sweeney is an esteemed figure in the art world, but he is also a man who likes to have things pretty much his own way. In 1946 he quit after only one year as head of the Museum of Modern Art's department of painting and sculpture because he felt that he no longer had as much authority as he wanted. In 1952 he took over the Guggenheim, which had been called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, and which had a reputation for being not only too narrow but often second-rate. Sweeney seemed in his element in trying to build up the collection--until he collided with the towering figure of Frank Lloyd Wright.

When Wright's building opened, some critics--and a good many artists--moaned that art had been sacrificed to architecture (TIME. Nov. 2). Sweeney made no secret of the fact that he agreed.

Wright had hoped that the main light in the huge round gallery would come from the glass dome roof. Sweeney installed bright fluorescent lighting. He painted the walls a dazzling white ("Sweeney white--the color of death!" protested Wright), and to overcome the artists' lament that their paintings would look askew because of Wright's sloping "continuous floor." Sweeney devised an ingenious way of displaying his unframed canvases on rods projected from the walls. But for all his innovations, he could never get over the feeling that he was running not a museum but a monument to Wright.

To Harry F. Guggenheim, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, Sweeney's actions seemed plain disloyalty to what Guggenheim regarded as a great building. But there was another and unexpected problem--the building's extraordinary popularity. In nine months, more than 750,000 people have swarmed through it, and as the queues outside got longer and longer. Guggenheim began to wonder whether the museum should not offer more to the public in the form of more popular lectures, art courses, films and concerts. To such a purist as Sweeney, this was the last straw: Guggenheim's program, he felt, would only result in the museum's squandering its resources at the expense of its primary obligation, the acquisition and display of great art.

In his eight years as director, Sweeney added some 250 works to the collection, but it would have taken him a lifetime to bring the museum up to his own standard. The collection could claim to have more Kandinskys. Franz Marcs, Robert Delau-nays and Albert Gleizes than any other institution in the U.S., yet this was really a part of the lopsided and undiscriminating legacy of its pre-Sweeney days. Cezanne's Clockmaker--the public's favorite--is the Guggenheim's one major gesture towards the impressionists. Even the top nonobjective and semi-abstract names are erratically represented. There is only one Pollock, one De Kooning, one Henry Moore. And for all of Sweeney's objections, the fact remained that had it not been for Wright's building, there would be no crowds queuing up to see the Guggenheim collection.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.