What is old is new again.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has a fabulous exhibit on right now, Visionaries: Creating A Modern Guggenheim.

The occasion is the eightieth anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features more than 170 iconic objects from the permanent collections in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

The show explores the groundbreaking avant-garde innovations of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries and the foundation of the museum’s original collection which established the Guggenheim Foundation’s identity as a forward-looking institution.

Around the age of 68, mining industrialist Solomon Guggenheim embraced modern art.

Having collected art privately since the 1890s, he was ripe for fresh inspiration when he fatefully encountered the progressive German‑born artist, Hilla Rebay.

Guggenheim and Rebay were closely aligned from 1929, when they began assembling an art collection grounded in “non objectivity, a strand of abstraction with spiritual underpinnings” until Solomon’s death 20 years later.

The Museum of Non‑Objective Painting, the forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, debuted in New York in 1937.

The exhibit takes you on a winding, twisting stimulating journey of the original art collection which most are easily identifiable masterpieces.

Kandinsky accounts for many of the original pieces and today the Guggenheim has over 150 of his works.

Both Guggenheim  and the museum’s first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that Kandinsky was one of the most significant exponents of nonobjectivity, a mode of abstraction that aspired toward a more utopian future.

Tidbits are shared such as the suicide of Modigliani’s 21 year-old model and live in muse, Jeanne Hebuterne, days after he died of tubercular meningitis. She was eight months pregnant with their second child.

Henri Rousseau was collecting taxes on goods entering Paris before he started painting seriously in his early forties. By age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.

The Guggenheim was packed early on a Sunday morning, dominated by a huge wave of French visitors.

Take the tour:

Stimulated, we headed across Central Park to another exhibit, the 109 year-old smoked fish and deli display at the venerable institution, Barney Greengrass.

If you have an appetite for great art and architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright building) then Visionaries: Creating A Modern Guggenheim is your jam.

Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th Avenue Open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday 10am-5:45pm, Saturday until 7:45. Pay want you want on Saturday from 5:45-7:45. Closed Thursday. Visionaries: Creating A Modern Guggenheim runs February 10th-September 6th, 2017.