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What first visitors saw, as they walked through the newly opened doors, was a huge, sudden space that swirled breathtakingly to the high dome. This, they recognized, was a building whose closed outer face deliberately belied the soaring drama of its interior. "It's like the Vati can," exclaimed one painter, staring up at the great dome. "You would need a piece of sculpture the size of the old Athena in the Parthenon for this place," worried Sculptor William Zorach. "Even when he made a mistake, he made a big one," opined Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. But, looking across the well at the opening show of 134 paintings and sculptures selected from the 2,500-odd works in the Guggenheim collection, most were forced to concede that the great curved ramps provided the most dramatic setting abstract art has ever had.
Three-Level Chess. Credit for the installation goes to Guggenheim Museum Director James Johnson Sweeney, who discovered that laying out pictures in a spiral museum is like playing three-dimensional chess at a distance of 80 ft. (the inner diameter of the core). Pointing and counterpointing pictures on three different levels at once, Sweeney was able to orchestrate modern art in a way that no horizontal museum can hope to.
To fit the museum to his tastes, Ultra-modernist Sweeney had used flat white paint and light to cancel out a good many Wright concepts. Canvases were mounted unframed on rods projecting from the dazzling white wall. Bright, fluorescent lights were installed in the side skylights, canceling out Wright's sunlight but creating a brilliant background wall of light. As a result, the paintings seem to hover weightlessly in luminous space. "We are not trying to show nature effects in sunlight, but paintings," Sweeney stated. "This is the most spectacular museum interior architecturally in this country. But my job is to show off a magnificent collection to its fullest." Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, on hand for the opening, doubted that her husband would have shown up, even if he had been alive. "He was too great an artist," she stated firmly, "to forgive the slightest transgression in a creative work."
But in the city he marked for destruction, Frank Lloyd Wright has built a final monument to his own idiosyncratic genius. It could be criticized and quipped about, but it could not be ignored. Just before he died, Wright predicted it could survive even an atomic bomb: "It would just bounce up and down in the blast, like a mighty spring."