Modern art has found a new home in a space- age museum that has risen amid the urban sprawl of a Spanish port. Robert McCrum visited the Bilbao Guggenheim
If, as a native of Bilbao, you had happened to see a balding, middle-aged American in trainers and sweatpants jogging past the Jesuit university along the banks of the Nervion early one morning in April 1991, you might, quite reasonably, have shrugged your Basque shoulders and said to yourself, “Crazy Yankee”. And you would have been half right.
We will never quantify exactly what jogging has done for Western civilisation, but one thing is certain. If Thomas Krens, the newly appointed director of the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, had not gone jogging that April morning six years ago, his brainchild the Bilbao Guggenheim – a titanium-clad, post-modern, space-age museum that has the world’s architectural community in a tizzy of excitement – would almost certainly never have been built.
In years to come this will no doubt seem a quite extraordinary thought. From the moment you leave Bilbao airport and wind, past the desolation of contemporary highway construction, through the green hills of northern Spain towards the ochre-brown 19th- century jumble of Bilbao, the museum can be glimpsed in the distance, a shiny, modern toy, half Martian space-craft, half Californian Bacofoil fantasy, surrounded by hideous urban sprawl. What on earth, you might not unreasonably ask, possessed the Guggenheim Museum to come to a place like Bilbao? The answer goes something like this.
To the European mind, the original Guggenheim collection on East 88th Street in New York City is quintessentially American, housed in a quintessentially American building, designed by a quintessentially American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, in an uptown neighbourhood of New York, a great American city. Manhattan’s Guggenheim, however, thinks of itself as European, and with some justification.
The modern art in its collection is largely European, ranging from Picasso to De Kooning, with an additional European holding in the (much smaller) Venice Guggenheim. What’s more, Thomas Krens, the fourth director in the museum’s 60-year history (it was founded in 1937), is the first American to have held the post. His predecessors included an Irishman and a Czech. None has been as eager as Krens to establish a European base for the museum, to reconnect it, so to speak, to its artistic roots. Which, unlikely as it sounds, was why he came to be in Bilbao in 1991.
Bilbao is Spain’s fourth largest city, a tough, sprawling, rust-busket of a former shipbuilding community that faces out into the Bay of Biscay. When Krens arrived, Bilbao was a sad old nautical widow, her future behind her, apparently trapped by historical determinism at the epicentre of a generation of terrible Basque separatist violence.
To understand Bilbao’s image problem in the squeaky-clean context of post-Franco Spain, you have only to merge Glasgow with Belfast. In an age of massive European tourism, you still won’t find Bilbao on anyone’s tourist itinerary. (Not yet, anyway.) Even today, some Americans find the threat of ETA violence a severe disincentive. As a recent article in the New York Times expressed it, “Oh, and by the way, you might get blown up. Basque country is not Bosnia. But it’s not Disney World either.” (Not yet, anyway.)
The Basque regional government’s determination to rescue Bilbao from the fate of Belfast was not entirely quixotic. The authorities had their problems, but they had one thing going for them: money, and oodles of it. The region has the highest GNP of any area in Spain, and is fiscally autonomous from the national government. To put it crudely, it is rich – and it can do what it likes with the loot. As the 1980s unfolded, the question became: how should we spend our money to regenerate our economy and improve our image? Their answer was somehow to marry culture and finance. But how? Enter Thomas Krens, the jogging museum director. Like most people in the world, he had no idea where exactly Bilbao was. He would soon find out, with a vengeance.
To the authorities in Bilbao, there was only one worthwhile Spanish model: Barcelona. Throughout the 1980s, the city that would triumphantly host the Olympic Games in 1992 was pioneering the post-industrial community’s way in the world with a savvy mixture of subtle international public relations and basic local infrastructure reconstruction projects: roads, sports stadia and shopping malls.
If Barcelona could do it, so could Bilbao. The city fathers would put their town on the map. And they would do it with big-ticket architecture, which has been, since classical times, the traditional route to a high international profile. Buildings are propaganda, and when they provoke awe and wonder (and column centimetres), it’s the kind of propaganda money can’t buy. Besides, the Basque region has a long, and proud, tradition of artistic endeavour; the Basque language (Euskera) is one of the oldest in the world; Guernica, memorialised by Picasso, is a nearby Basque town.
So Bilbao began handing out commissions to the best and the brightest in the international architectural world: to Norman Foster to design a new subway system; to Santiago Calatrava for a new airport terminal; to Frederico Soriano for a new congress and music hall; to the late James Stirling for a new railway station (now under the direction of Michael Wilford). The subway, a transportation system for the 21st century, with air-conditioning and Mozart muzak, was the first to be completed, in 1995. Visit Bilbao today and Foster’s is one of the faces that greets you from the tourist brochures. We are the town, say the brochures, that loves architecture.
But back in 1991, Bilbao had a problem. Never mind the subway, airport and railway, they wanted an art museum to cement the city’s burgeoning global reputation. And they didn’t have one. But they knew a man who did: Thomas Krens, the high-profile director of the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation, museum-maker extraordinary.
Krens is a tall, even imposing, figure with small round glasses, a big domed head and a casually impressive manner. At a distance, at an airport carousel, for instance, he could be the cultivated administrator of a German kunsthalle, but in conversation it’s quickly obvious that he’s a former college professor who has, by a series of accidents, somehow found himself in the heady world of international museum curation. Not that he’s out of his depth; far from it. A minute’s conversation with Krens reveals a man who has thought long and hard about the role of the museum in contemporary society.
Municipal architecture and museum curation is about many things, but the one thing they have in common is the fortuitous interplay of cultural aspiration with politics. In spring 1991, Krens had just seen a cherished plan to establish a European Guggenheim in Salzburg go up in smoke with the fall of communism and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Overnight, Austria had become faced with a refugee problem that shoved cultural projects like museums firmly on to the back- burner.
So when he came to Bilbao, as the Europhile director of a world-famous American art collection worth about $500-million, he was known, as he coyly puts it, to be “in play”, that is to say, on the look out for a partner in the peculiar mating ritual of late 20th-century global cultural exchange. And so was Bilbao.
But there was a problem. Krens could see at once that the site chosen by the city for its new art museum, a former wine-bottling warehouse in the centre of town, was a non- starter. With its low ceilings and intrusive vertical columns, the Alhondiga site could never display the art that Krens had in mind, contemporary pieces as colossal, for instance, as Richard Serra’s Snake. He bluntly told the city that, if they wanted “the greatest art museum of the century”, as he put it, they had to go back to the drawing board. And then he went running.
Bilbao, a teeming, riverside city crammed around a busy estuary, did not seem to have the space.
Good ideas have a way of catching the imagination, even the imagination of regional bureaucrats, and now things began to happen fast. The city approved the idea in a week. By mid-June, three architects – the Californian Frank O Gehry, the German Wolfgang Prix, and the Japanese Arata Isozaki – had been invited to compete for the project (Krens dismisses the traditional architectural competition as “a lottery”). In a breathless 99 days, the winner was declared to be Frank Gehry. Thus it was that a museum director of visionary ambition met with an architect of exuberant imagination. Gehry and Krens became, says the latter, “like brothers”, and Gehry returns the compliment, saying “he gave me his vision”.
Gehry is famous in architectural circles for citing a psychologist friend, Milton Wexler, as one of the most important influences on his work, and in a world of schools and rival orthodoxies, administered by teams and workshops, he is the odd one out, an architect with an approach to light and space so imaginatively distinctive that he is, literally, inimitable. For all that, Gehry is a highly intuitive architect who seems to delight in projecting that idiosyncratic, personal vision on to the larger canvas of the public building.
Gehry’s response to the Abando-Ibarra site was so intuitive it was almost visceral. He told Krens that, “To be at the bend of a working river intersected by a large bridge and connecting the urban fabric of a fairly dense city to the river’s edge with a place for modern art is my idea of heaven.” Gehry came to Bilbao, sketched and analysed, took the pulse of the city and went home to produce models, assisted by Catia, a three- dimensional computer design programme developed by the French for the aerospace industry that enabled Gehry to translate his ideas into workable geometry with maximum speed and efficiency.
There would be thousands of tiny adjustments along the way, but the sketches he produced then remain uncannily close to the architectural reality of the final structure. The Bilbao authorities did not hesitate to plump for the crazy Californian over the rectilinear German and the airy, free-flowing Japanese. It turned out to be an inspired choice.
Gehry seems to have fallen in love with the eccentric Basque city and the place Krens had found for him on which to build “the most important building of the century”. He says now, with affectionate laughter, “What is it? A dirty river and a bunch of crummy buildings.” Yet he revelled in the chaos and dirt of the post-industrial environment, and announced his determination to avoid prettifying the waterfront site. “The river,” he said, “has an industrial character to it. To build on the energy that’s already there would be wonderful, but to turn it into some kind of softy-pooh thing seems wrong.”
“Softy-pooh” it emphatically is not, though with hindsight Gehry says he “owes a lot to the green valley” which contains the Bilbao city limits. Psychoanalysis is a strange investigative conversation which places allusion and suggestiveness at the heart of a design that haunted my imagination for days after I had left the city.
The museum itself seems positively to invite free association. Walk round the outside and you see what the crew have come to call “the baseball cap”; pass through the astonishing atrium with its waterfalls of glass and there, in the flowing white plaster walls, a conscious echo of Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, are the white folds of Marilyn Monroe’s skirt in the famous subway airvent photograph. And deep within, there’s a stunning, sinuous gallery-cum-hangar that my guide referred to as “the fish”, but which Gehry calls “the boat”. Outside, there are shapes that evoke Nasa space-shuttle booster rockets. And is the titanium structure that crowns the building an artichoke heart or a rose? Colossal in many ways, at a distance the whole structure seems as light and disposable as a tinfoil toy and Gehry seems to be saying: make of it what you will.
In the design, he acknowledges the influence of no one architect, perhaps because the work he has done in Bilbao is so original, but adds, “I find a lot of inspiration in paintings. Picasso, Matisse. Man! Have I looked at Picasso!” He acknowledges that many questioned whether his design was buildable, but seems proud that it turned out to be so.
Whatever it is, the result of Gehry’s inspiration is a contemporary art museum like no other, and a building that must rank as one of the Eight Wonders of the modern world. Krens himself is not shy in drawing classical analogies, referring to the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids and the Forbidden City. Certainly, you don’t have to be an architectural critic to predict that the Bilbao Guggenheim will do for Bilbao what the opera house did for Sydney, and not least because it dominates the city at every turn. Walk down the Calle de Iparraguirre, in the heart of Bilbao, and the street’s vista seems to crash into an intriguing jumble of shiny metal. No wonder that the locals refer to the Guggenheim, simply, as the “museo”.
Amid the attention generated by the museum’s appearance, it is easy to overlook how wonderfully well it serves its function, subtly enhancing, not upstaging, the contemporary art on display here. During my visit, the Guggenheim’s art was still in the process of installation, but it is clear that beneath the bizarre Californian carapace the visitor will find a series of exceptional exhibition spaces which will allow even the most monumental artworks (Oldenburg’s Shuttlecock, for example) to be displayed to superb advantage, and with brilliant use of natural and artificial light, from dawn to dusk.
So in addition to Picasso, Braque and Lger, you will find works by Carl Andr, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol and Jim Dine, as well as recent work by Damien Hirst, among others. En route, you will pass wonderful displays of Kandinsky, Mir, Pollock and Lichtenstein. Minimalism is here, in all its cheeky fraudulence, and so is its opposite, the seductive visual profusion of Clementi. The Bilbao Guggenheim’s inaugural exhibition is, as Krens explains, nothing less than a transistorised history of 20th-century Western art. And when you come out, Gehry’s building is there to salute you once again, still dazzling, playful, monumental and exuberant. Thank God, you say, as you emerge into the sunshine, for crazy Yankees.
Is this, I wonder, the spirit of the age? Gehry says his building is a response to technology and “urban chaos”, to “a chaotic world we don’t understand properly, but want to get used to”, a pluralistic world of movement and bright lights and the puzzling collision of competing ideas. “This is not a world that will create Mykonos or Chartres,” he says. “We cannot go back to the 19th century.” In his own way, too, Thomas Krens is a pioneer for contemporary global culture who does not want to go down an old- fashioned introspective road. “Look,” he says, “it’s a celebration of human endeavour. The human race is progressive. It says: It’s there to be done. Then, we did it!”
And so they did. The Bilbao Guggenheim has come in on time and on budget, with not much change out of $150-million, a fraction, by the way, of the money the Getty Foundation is spending on its new museum in Los Angeles. What, finally, does it add up to? Whatever else, the Bilbao Guggenheim represents a remarkable departure. In the past it always used to be said that it was the local and the particular which had the potential to become universal. Here, in a stunning inversion, it is the universal that has become local and, in the process, made the local global.
No doubt it will be taken hostage by virtually every contemporary interest group you can think of. The critics will claim it for post-modernism, whatever that means; the politicians will see it as a triumph of regionalism; the cultural spin doctors have already begun to talk about “the Atlantic Axis”.
The New York Times has called the Bilbao Guggenheim “a miracle”, but the New York Times is, I think, mistaken. A miracle implies some other-worldly intervention. The Bilbao Guggenheim is not a miracle, because it is man-made. It inspires us as only a great man-made structure can, by making us look upwards and feel better about ourselves, in the way medieval cathedrals used to. More than that, it attempts to find order and serenity amid the worrying chaos of contemporary existence. So it’s more than a miracle, it’s a blazing masterpiece. Go and see it. Hurry, run.