First we take Bilbao - Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

ArtForum, Sept, 1997 by Robin Cembalest

The opening show will include some 300 works, mostly from the New York Guggenheim's collection; upcoming exhibits to be circulated from the 5th Avenue and SoHo venues include sculpture from the Nasher collection, art from China, and retrospectives of Robert Rauschenberg and Clemente. Eventually, Vidarte says, the museum will curate its own shows, but as of this summer that wasn't yet an option. Bilbao had not hired curators or its own artistic director. Fulfilling the latter post, Vidarte acknowledges, will not be easy: the candidate must have expertise in international, Spanish, and Basque art - and be willing to answer to the government as well as overseers in New York. That does not worry Vidarte: he, and his political colleagues, seem content to let New York make all the curatorial decisions for a while. "With this unique space and this important collection, we can be playing a role in the periphery that we could not be otherwise," he says. "To play in this league, you have to be associated with someone in it. Otherwise, it's hard to get there."

RELATED ARTICLE: Then We Take Berlin

Just a month after the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens its doors, Berliners will inaugurate yet another addition to the Guggenheim's international empire. This venue is not a government venture, as the Basque one is, but a private undertaking - it is being financed by Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, though its corporate identity is discreetly signaled in its name: Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.

The Berlin Guggenheim, located on the ground floor of the bank's headquarters in a '20s sandstone building, is being designed by Richard Gluckman, the American architect of New York's Dia Center for the Arts and Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum. "It is a white cube you will recognize from all the museums in the world," says Friedhelm Hutte, cocurator of the bank's own collection of modern and contemporary art. The gallery will house three shows a year, all of them - like those at the Bilbao Guggenheim - organized and developed by staff in New York.

Though the Guggenheim envisions the Berlin venue as a possible stopping point for exhibitions en route from its counterparts in SoHo and Venice, its shows will have to be relatively small - the gallery measures 138 by 28 feet, with 23-foot-high ceilings. And unlike the Basque Guggenheim, which becomes by default the major modern art institution in its region, the Berlin Guggenheim will exist among well-established museums and galleries. "We don't have many square meters," says Hutte, "So we have to have very specific, very interesting exhibitions. We have to convince the public that we offer quality."

The show that inaugurates the space in November will focus on three series created by Robert Delaunay between 1904 and 1915: windows, cathedrals, and the Eiffel Tower. The choice of Delaunay "makes a lot of sense" for the Berlin venue, says Hutte, since he was influential in the development of German Modernism.

For now, says Hutte, the bank's collection of German classical, modern, and contemporary art, which currently concentrates on works on paper by young artists from the German-speaking world, will be shown only in the offices, not the gallery. The Deutsche Guggenheim will, however, commission works for the new space by artists "of the highest stature."