At intervals there are what Gehry describes as "crevice" galleries like this, often where young Basque and Spanish artists display their work. The syncopation that such spaces set up, combined with the variety of other rooms, makes this very different from the conventional gallery trudge through a succession of similar top-lit halls.
The opening show is a canter through 20th-century art as amassed in the Guggenheim's collections, with certain pieces specially commissioned. Some artists have rooms entirely to themselves Anselm Kiefer, Damien Hirst and Sol LeWitt among them. LeWitt's "painting out" of a complete gallery with vibrant geometric forms took Gehry by surprise he now says it is his favourite space. Hirst, however, is there as a makeweight. His room was originally destined to house Picasso's Guernica, then, when Madrid refused to release the work, it was to be devoted to Jeff Koons. Koons couldn't get his act together in time, so Hirst was drafted in. Maybe I have overdosed on Hirst at the Royal Academy's Sensation show, but this room seems weak, with its pseudo-advertising hoardings, a couple of small pickled sharks, a bedroom tableau with stuffed bear, and one of those so-so spin-wheel paintings.
Poignantly successful, tucked into a "crevice" space, is Christian Boltanski's Humans a composition of myriad small photos of doomed or forgotten individuals, their souls represented by dangling glowing light bulbs through which you must pass in order to examine them.
The prize for working with the architecture, however, goes to Jenny Holzer for one of her electronic sign installations. Words and phrases in Spanish, Basque and English flash from floor to ceiling, reflected eerily in the gloss-painted walls. To approach and move through these flashing signals is very nearly a hallucinogenic experience.
There are a couple of rooms full of all the early-to mid-20th-century masters from Schiele to Chagall, Modigliani to Matisse, Picasso to 1940s Pollock. All are good quality, and they all look so small
