Background
Guggenheim was born on February 2, 1861, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fourth of the eight sons and eleven children of Meyer Guggenheim and Barbara (Myers) Guggenheim.
Businessman philanthropist art collector
Guggenheim was born on February 2, 1861, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fourth of the eight sons and eleven children of Meyer Guggenheim and Barbara (Myers) Guggenheim.
Educated at first in public schools in Philadelphia, Guggenheim was sent at fourteen, in the interest of stricter discipline, to the Concordia Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.
At twenty, Guggenheim joined his three elder brothers, Isaac, Daniel, and Murry, as a partner in M. Guggenheim's Sons, a Swiss embroidery manufacturing and importing company financed by their father. Sol, as he was called, trained at its factory in St. Gall, Switzerland, and presently set up and took charge of a branch establishment in the textile-milling town of Plauen, Saxony. In the late 1880's his father, now a power in copper and silver mines in Colorado, advised the Sons to turn to metallurgy; the embroidery business was liquidated, and the sale of its factories was handled by Sol. Back in America in 1889, he spent a year in Leadville, Colorado, familiarizing himself with the mining industry and was then sent to Monterrey, Mexico, to take charge of the building of that country's first silver-lead smelter. In 1891 he supervised the erection of a copper smelter, also Guggenheim-owned, at Aguascalientes. He continued to work in Mexico, often under primitive conditions in undeveloped regions, until 1895, when he returned to New York, now the family's headquarters. In 1901, when the Guggenheims won control of the reorganized American Smelting and Refining Company, thus becoming one of the foremost refiners of metals in the world, Sol joined the board of directors. Less dominant in the firm than his brother Daniel, he was nevertheless an eminent working Guggenheim - president of the Braden Copper Company in Chile and a director of such other family properties as the Chile Copper Company, the Utah Copper Company, and the Guggenheim Exploration Company, formed to gain control of the sources of ore supply. He founded the Yukon Gold Company in Alaska, which was succeeded by the Pacific Tin Company in Malaya. Guggenheim retired from full-time business activity in 1919. His second - and, conceivably, greater - claim to fame was now in a seminal stage. He had married Irene M. Rothschild, who interested him in collecting paintings, mostly in such established fields as the Barbizon school, American and Italian landscapes, and Italian, Dutch, and German primitives. All this began to change in 1926 when, at sixty-five, he met the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Erhenweisen, an Alsatian-born artist twenty-nine years his junior, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. A relentless champion of nonobjective art, she opened Guggenheim's eyes to the attractions of modern painting. In 1937 he established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation "for the promotion of art and education in art and the enlightenment of the public especially in the field of art. " The foundation set up a temporary museum, the Museum of Non-Objective Paintings, in rented quarters in New York with several hundred selections from Guggenheim's collection and with the Baroness as curator. The museum suffered somewhat from her idiosyncratic tastes; Guggenheim's own private collection was considered superior. In 1943 he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design and build a permanent museum on upper Fifth Avenue. A lover of property, and an active sportsman well into his eighties, he had, at various times, eight homes, or homes away from home: a suite at the Plaza Hotel, full of paintings; Trillora Court, a Sands Point, New York, estate with a private golf course; another country house at Elberon, New Jersey, and a shooting place nearby; a winter house on the Battery at Charleston, South Carolina, and a ten-thousand-acre plantation nearby; a twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch and hunting preserve in Idaho; and a shooting lodge in Scotland. Guggenheim died of cancer on November 3, 1949, in Long Island, New York and was buried in the Guggenheim mausoleum in Temple Emanu-El's Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Guggenheim was a small, elegant, tough, methodical, sociable, hospitable man with large features, a rather quizzical expression, and deep-set eyes under a high brow. He had a gourmet's taste and an earthy sense of humor. A generous donor, especially to hospitals, he was a conservative Republican in his social outlook.
Guggenheim married married Irene M. Rothschild on April 3, 1895. He and his wife had three daughters: Eleanor May, Gertrude Renée, and Barbara Josephine.