Guggenheim goes to Brazil

Guggenheim goes to Brazil

Foundation President, Thomas Krens, has negotiated a deal with the City of Rio de Janeiro that will see the construction of a $150 million underwater Guggenheim museum by Jean Nouvel. The arrangement will earn the New York organisation $25 million

By Jason Edward Kaufman and Victoria Verlichak

NEW YORK. Rio de Janeiro will be the site of a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum. After months of negotiations, the agreement will be signed in New York by Mayor Cesar Maia and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation president Thomas Krens. The date of the signing has not been announced, but Rio de Janeiro’s Secretary of Culture Ricardo Macieira said in a telephone interview earlier this week that the ceremony will take place "around 20 March." A spokesperson for the Guggenheim in New York could not confirm this.

The so-called Guggenheim Rio will be the New York-based foundation’s first outpost in South America, augmenting a global network that presently includes the Frank Lloyd Wright flagship in Manhattan, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas.

The city-run museum will be housed in a striking new building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and set within the waters of beautiful Guanabara Bay, affording sweeping views of the picturesque harbour whose entrance is marked by the famous "Sugar Loaf." Construction is to begin this summer with completion scheduled for late 2006.

The notion of a Guggenheim in the Southern Hemisphere has been in the air for several years. "It is time to have a cultural trade that runs north and south, not just east and west," Krens told the Brazilian press in late 2000.

The following year, "Brazil: Body & Soul", said to be the greatest exhibition ever exported from that country, was seen at the Guggenheim in New York. The show, which included baroque and Modern art, was visited by Brazil’s president, and is seen as having paved the way to an agreement for a new Guggenheim museum.

Three Brasilian cities—Recife, Salvador, and Curitiba—were lobbying for a Guggenheim branch, along with the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, but after feasibility studies involving architects Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, Rio emerged as the front-runner.

The seaside city is a top tourist destination in South America’s largest economy and it promised the most favourable financial deal. By late last year, the mayor was announcing that an agreement in principle had been reached. The final contract has been repeatedly delayed as the parties ironed out legal details.

In the six years since the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao put that post-industrial Basque port on the map and in the black, the Guggenheim Foundation has received requests from dozens of cities around the world to replicate the phenomenon. But in the current economy, it is difficult to understand how expansion is possible, let alone advisable.

Museums across the US are cancelling exhibitions, reducing programmes, and scaling back or postponing plans for construction. The Guggenheim has been hit especially hard by plummeting tourism following 11 September. In the past 16 months, it has shuttered its SoHo branch, closed one of its two fledgling Las Vegas satellites, withdrawn a proposal to erect a Bilbao-style Gehry building in lower Manhattan, and abandoned a scheme to run a contemporary art space on Punta della Dogana in Venice.

Since 1998 the Guggenheim has halved its budget, laid off more than half its full-time employees, reduced opening hours, and postponed a number of exhibitions. Yet, astonishingly, the Brazil deal comes just weeks after Guggenheim chairman Peter B. Lewis warned Krens that either he rein in the bloated budget or look for another job.

If this satellite is anything like the other outposts, however, it will not cost the Guggenheim a dime. On the contrary, it will enrich the museum considerably. Culture Secretary Macieira told The Art Newspaper that Rio de Janeiro will pay $25 million for the right to fly the Guggenheim flag for the next 50 years and "to have use of the Guggenheim’s patrimony."

That means access to "the whole of the Guggenheim’s collections, including those held in Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice, and the Hermitage in St Petersburg and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, with which the Guggenheim has collection-sharing agreements, and access as well to travelling shows circulated among the Guggenheim network.

It is not clear what specifically the Guggenheim is obliged to lend, but it will have to be a considerable amount of material, for at this point the Guggenheim Rio has no permanent collection. Mayor Maia has spoken of allocating funds for acquisitions to fill galleries dedicated to native art, and Secretary Macieira says, "There are many huge Brazilian private collections in Rio that will lend their pieces in exchange for showcasing and caring for the works."

The new Guggenheim Brazil will rise—or rather, be partially submerged—in the old city port at Píer da Praça Mauá where it is intended to anchor revitalisation of the declining dock district. The 42,000 square-metre complex is to include a convention centre, hotel, shopping mall, and restaurants in addition to the museum.

Mayor Maia puts the cost of construction at $150 million while the entire cost of the project has been variously estimated at $200 to $300 million, to be financed with public money. The City is hoping that the private sector will invest in businesses in the area.

The mayor’s office has not yet addressed the money needed for operations, maintenance, shipping, and insurance, nor has he projected the number of employees or the annual budget. A director and curators are yet to be named. But as far as Mayor Maia is concerned, the project has already begun to move forward. Months ago, even before he had issued the request for bids on construction, he stated that work would start in July and be finished by December 2006.

His awarding of the project to Jean Nouvel—known for the Tokyo Opera and for the Cartier Foundation and Arab World Institute, both in Paris—elicited a barrage of letters to the editors from Brazilian architects unhappy with the commission going to a foreigner. They were offended also by Nouvel’s $11-million fee, far more than any native talents command. But Nouvel’s design promises to add another distinctive piece of architecture to the Guggenheim’s collection.

The proposed museum is largely underwater, with glass structures admitting natural light into exhibition pavilions below the water line. A 50-metre cylindrical turret rises above the waves, topped by an observatory gallery and restaurant offering sweeping vistas of the bay.

Parts of the building will house a tropical forest and a water cascade, features that baffled architect Cláudio M de A Cavalcanti, who reminded Nouvel that Rio already has the largest tropical forest of any city in the world. In his spicy comments in the press, Mr Cavalcanti wondered if submersion of the building was a gesture of dramatic symbolism or a premonition of the shipwreck that awaits it.

A chorus of critics oppose the project. In a letter to the City Council, members of Rio’s business, political, and cultural community point to the Guggenheim Foundation’s ongoing financial problems and predict annual deficits for years to come.

According to their calculations, the enormous outlay to build the museum could pave 3,500 kilometres of roads or construct 6,000 schools, 7,500 day-care centres, or 4,000 health clinics. They also note that Guanabara Bay is in urgent need of a clean up. "Compared with Rio’s other social and infrastructure needs, tourism notwithstanding, the museum does not deserve to be a priority," they state.

Besides, Rio already has a Museu do Arte Moderno (MAM) on the shore of Guanabara Bay. Designed in 1954 by Affonso Eduardo Reidy with gardens by Roberto Burle Marx, it is a landmark of Brazilian modernism with one of the country’s best collections of international 20th-century art.

It is not clear what relationship it will have with the Guggenheim Rio, but MAM’s chairman, the collector Gilbert Chateaubriand, and director Maria Regina have expressed dismay that while the government inadequately supports even emergency building repairs at their museum, it extravagantly bankrolls a foreign museum. They and others in the cultural community say the money allocated for the Guggenheim franchise alone, not including construction costs, would be enough to refurbish all of Rio’s museums. Why not spend the money on existing institutions?

Mayor Maia and Culture Secretary Macieira argue that construction will stimulate the economy by generating new businesses and jobs while converting the dilapidated port into a newly thriving neighbourhood. They proudly anticipate that the Carioca Guggenheim will attract international tourists and confirm Rio not only as the centre of diffusion of Brazilian culture, but perhaps the international cultural hub of Latin America.

The implications for the Guggenheim are equally great. Director Krens has long come under fire for his expansionist vision, and when the museum’s fortunes suffered after 11 September, his critics demanded his resignation.

By engineering a deal to enrich his institution at a time when other US museums are contracting, he not only proves once again his skills as a tenacious dealmaker, capable of leveraging the Guggenheim brand worldwide. He also vindicates his vision of a multinational network of collection-sharing museums. Whether or not his ambitions succeed will depend on the stability of the Guggenheim Rio and the qualities of its programmes as a cultural institution.