"Bilbao's Guggenheim: New Colossus," The Washington Post, Oct. 26, 1997, p. G2. Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao: The Museum as Art

Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao: New Colossus

by Jason Edward Kaufman

BILBAO. When historians compile the modern counterpart to the Ten Wonders of the Ancient World, architect Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will likely rank high on their list. Rising in a whorl of sculptural masses the gleaming metal-clad colossus beguiles like few buildings in recent memory.

The $100-million museum is a collaboration between the Basque government and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation of New York, paid for entirely by the Basques and managed by the Guggenheim. It opened to the public October 18.

It would be hard to overstate the visual impact of this stunning achievement. Erupting from the hard-worn fabric of the post-industrial Basque metropolis, the topsy-turvy tumble of titanium takes an anachronistic leap into the coming century, as if extra-terrestrials had set up an embassy on the banks of the Nervión River. Seen along the axis of a downtown street it beckons like a mirage, a kind of mechanical abstraction of the verdant mountains beyond. Instantly it has become the centerpiece of the city and attracted attention worldwide.

Gehry's masterpiece has been likened to a metallic flower, to the hulls of ships, and to Frank Lloyd Wright's renowned spiral rotunda of the Guggenheim's flagship on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Its overlapping forms seem inspired by Futurist sculpture, conveying a sense of centripetal motion, like an arrested implosion of the Tower of Babel. It is like nothing we have seen before.

Gehry says he had in mind the fantastic cityscapes of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," with their automobile skyways linking futuristic towers. The interior is equally exhilarating, with catwalks crisscrossing the soaring atrium, whose space slips and slides up undulating white walls and glass-covered elevator towers to a height of 165 feet. To walk through the building is to experience a constant unfolding of interesting vistas, which has led some to declare that the museum is a more compelling work of art than many of those artworks which it contains.

Should a museum be a neutral container, deferential to the art? The architect, a friend of several of the artists whose work is exhibited inside, thinks not. "Artists say they're tired of that. They want [their work] to be in an important building, an important place," he says. To be sure, he has delivered that. But, how does the structure function as a museum?

Almost half of the 250,000 square feet is devoted to galleries, but some say the free-form peculiarities of the design pose an obstacle to display. Indeed, at first glance form follows fancy rather than function. Yet, notwithstanding its radical idiosyncracies and apparent disorder, the building serves superbly as a showcase for art.

Ten of the nineteen galleries are white cubes of the sort that have become familiar in the modern museum era. These traditional spaces are ideal for easel-sized canvasses, whereas other rooms are more unorthodox, with bowing, tilting walls and high ceilings that challenge artists to devise site-specific installations. Moreover, despite the museum's apparent complexity, the plan is extraordinarily intelligible, with galleries radiating around the central atrium on each of the three levels. The visitor never feels lost.

That said, the building is so spectacular that it does outstrip much of the art inside. The inaugural show is a 245-work survey, "Twentieth-century Art: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection" (through Feb. 1998). It combines masterpieces of prewar art from the Guggenheim in New York with international postwar works acquired by the Basques for their own fledgling permanent collection, as well as loans from artists and private collectors.

Among the works commissioned are a rather disappointing cycle of paintings by Francesco Clemente, an atrocious group of three 20-foot high red Venuses by Jim Dine, and an installation of floor-to-ceiling LED signs whose moving lights beam Jenny Holzer's banal phrases -- "I bite my lip. I bite your lip," etc. -- in English, Spanish, and Euskadi. Christian Boltansky has covered the walls of a recess with grainy black-and-white photographs of people, and suspended from the ceiling lightbulbs on cords in a memorial tableau he calls simply "Humans."

The huge scale of the museum is unique in accommodating the monumental art made in recent decades. A gigantic badminton shuttlecock by Claes Oldenburg rests atop a three-story stone pillar in the atrium as if on a purpose-built pedestal. Yet, in the largest gallery, which extends nearly two football fields in length, the architect seems to have gone overboard.

Gehry had planned to divide it with internal walls, but director Thomas Krens wished to keep it empty in order to preserve the world's largest indoor space for showing art. This gaping cavern turns mural-sized paintings into postage stamps and oversized sculptures into trinkets. Colossal canvasses by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, hulking sculptures by Carl Andre and Robert Morris, even the gargantuan Swiss Army knife by Oldenburg and Gehry -- are dwarfed within this hangar. The only work which holds its own is Richard Serra's "Snake," a trio of parallel 13 x 100-foot-long "s"-shaped steel plates which wind along the center of the gallery. From an overlooking balcony the room seems cluttered.

A similarly poor installation afflicts another first-floor gallery in which abstractions by Gerhard Richter, figures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, and other works are crammed around a stone circle by Richard Long in front of a striped wall by Daniel Buren. It's all too much.

Among the most successful commissioned works is Jeff Koons's "Puppy," a huge flower-covered sculpture in the shape of a terrier that sits on the plaza in front of the museum. Basque terrorists bent on disrupting the opening ceremonies were installing a grenade launcher within the piece when they were thwarted by police, one of whom was killed just days before the museum opened its doors, a sad reminder of the unrest that continues to plague the region.

The remarkable building will likely attract many visitors. But if the museum is to succeed beyond its initial novelty phase it must present a first-rate exhibition program, one that will make it a destination for Europeans who have found little of touristic appeal in the Basque Country. Nonetheless, it is Gehry's creation that is the main event. Already it has the feeling of greatness, an impression that history will likely affirm.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©