The Guggenheim Museum began with the vision of Solomon R. Guggenheim, heir to an American mining fortune and an enthusiastic patron of the arts. In 1929, Guggenheim enlisted the guidance of German baroness Hilla Rebay, an advocate of innovative and experimental art, and was able to amass a major collection of contemporary European painting. Many of the abstract paintings in this collection became available for public view in 1939 when Guggenheim created the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, housed in a former automobile showroom in New York City. Plans for a permanent home for the collection began in 1943, and in 1959 the renamed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in the landmark Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street.

Under the leadership of museum directors James Johnson Sweeney, Thomas Messer, and Thomas Krens, the collection has broadened to encompass myriad movements of Modern and contemporary art in virtually every medium. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation now incorporates the important collections of several discerning patrons, including the 20th-century paintings and sculpture owned by Peggy Guggenheim, niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim; the Justin K. Thannhauser collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and School of Paris masterpieces; and Giuseppe Panza di Biumo's outstanding group of Minimal and Conceptual artworks. As distinctive as the art itself—indeed, works of art themselves—are the buildings designed to house it. The name Guggenheim has become synonymous with the innovative structures by Frank Lloyd Wright in New York, by Frank O. Gehry in Bilbao, and by Rem Koolhaas in Las Vegas. Now an international constellation of museums in New York, Venice, Bilbao, Berlin, and now Las Vegas, the Guggenheim Museum brings its extraordinary collections to a worldwide audience.