Round & round we go: the Guggenheim reopens.

In the early part of this century, maverick exhibitions of avant-garde art, like the one the fauvists put on in Paris in 1905 or the New York Armory Show in 1913, aroused extravagant opposition and derision. The modern transformation of society was then in full swing and its motions visible to the ordinary eye. Therefore, any cultural event that provocatively captured modernity and reflected it back to itself touched Western society's self-definition in its most sensitive spot. The defining actions that express our society's nature and aspirations often have to do with money: where it comes from, where it goes, and who decides who gets it. When the issue also involves art, the most intimate and autonomous individual expression in a society that is supervigilant about the status and doings of the individual, the event in question carries a heavy tonnage of symbolic weight. Thus the recent re-opening in New York of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where art and money sizzle, is an event of high significance.

The two-year-long renovation of the Guggenheim uptown on Fifth Avenue and 89th Street, and the construction of a beautifully apportioned branch downtown in Soho (designed by Arata Isozaki), have been contemporary New York's artistic scandale. It is as if the refurbishment of a powerful and prestigious institution were on the order of the cubist revolution representing nature in the form of cubes. From the moment Gwathmey Siegel & Associates - the architects who designed the uptown museum's transformed interior and new annex - presented their plans to the public in 1985, critics started to mount the barricades of zoning laws and press campaigns. Gwathmey Siegel's first idea for an addition - a cantilevered projection looming over the Fifth Avenue spiral - appeared to many outraged architectural mavens, preservationists, and neighborhood residents to turn Frank Lloyd Wright's uncanny structure into a "giant toilet bowl." The original conception was promptly revised.

The result is a triumph of sensitivity and discretion. Seen from the outside, the rectilinear annex with its delicate tartan grid on a limestone exterior is still somewhat awkward, more an intellectual accommodation to Wright's edifice than a visual one. Inside the ten-story annex, however, Gwathmey and Siegel have constructed seven much-needed floors of soaring galleries, adorned gratefully, it seems, with larger works such as those by the abstract expressionists that had never rested comfortably on Wright's sloping walls. The architects have imaginatively joined the annex to the original structure so that the new building appeals to the old from below connecting balconies, like humble function wooing haughty form. Inside Wright's spiral, they have removed the cramped offices from the small rotunda with a surgeon's deliberateness and given that exquisite miniature of the larger shape a new lease on life as exhibition space - they have also carved out a rather disappointingly tiny sculpture garden adjoining it outside. The most important changes, though, have been made at the top of the main rotunda. The final ramp, formerly inaccessible to the public, is now open, offering the full vertiginous panorama of the museum's interior that Wright had intended to be unveiled for each visitor who attained the heights of his last creation. And Gwathmey and Siegel have replaced the skylight's translucent glass with clear glass, bathing the Guggenheim's inner space in the ethereal quality of the building's own aspirations.

Most of the early critics have been appeased. But the success of the expansion and restoration has only intensified the controversy that continues to rumble around the path the museum seems to have taken under the guidance of Thomas Krens, its present director. Since 1988, when he took the Guggenheim helm, Krens has been in the kind of perpetual metamorphosis that the artistic representation of the figure underwent at the beginning of the century.

Krens has symbolized everything to everyone. Conservative preservationists defended Wright's futuristic utopianism by attacking any notion of an expansion, no matter what it might look like. Here Krens was subversive vulgarian, avidly flaunting his power at the expense of history and form. When the renovations were completed and the Soho branch was set to reopen, a downtown group of feminist artists known as The Guerrilla Girls complained that the inaugural Soho show comprised "four white boys at the white boys' museum" and not a single woman artist. Now here was Krens as a conservative preservationist. For some concerned participants in the museum scene, Krens's decision in 1990 to sell three paintings from the permanent collection - a Chagall, a Modigliani, and a Kandinsky - to raise $30 million for the purchase of 300 minimalist and conceptualist works from an Italian collector, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, definitively proved that Krens was suffering from an impoverishment of practical intelligence. For Count Panza, the director was an enlightened connosseur, a prescient historian of art, and a gold mine. And both conservative and culturally Left critics blanched when, to finance the expansion, Krens floated a $54.9 million bond issue without mortgage or collateral, which meant that if the museum defaulted, the collection might be at risk. Krens was excoriated from all sides in particular for his plans to open up branches of the Guggenheim in Italy. Austria, and Spain, and to rent out works to the international Guggenheims from the museum's permanent collection. The Right portrayed him as a hedonist driven by a pleasure-ethos from the sixties who lacked the sober foresight of a CEO. The left saw him as a CEO driven by a greediness from the eighties who was deficient in any sense of aesthetic pleasure.

If is, in other words, a version of an old American story. In the eyes of Kren's critics, the Guggenheim is a great white whale and Krens and Ahab, self-destructively pursuing the phantoms that haunt his own ego. Some of those phantoms are: the museum as a shrine to what Krens has decided is America's most important art movement, minimalism; the museum, with its uptown and its downtown branches, its bookstores and cafes and late evening hours, as New York's most glamorous cultural conglomeration: the museum as an expanding superinstitution in a world where the concept of expanding superpowers has lost its basis in reality. For those same critics, though, it is the coincidentally pallid Krens who serves as the white whale and they are so many Ahabs: provoked by the spectacle of what they perceive as overbearing power, they see in Krens's various projects the violation of their equally various principles. In the shapeless American sea, everybody shapes their own bete blanche.

I almost forgot about the art. It is there, behind all the high-finance hoopla, this vision of European high modernism housed in the concrete fact of American modernity. To celebrate its reopening, the Guggenheim is putting on an exhibition through August 27 of the finest works in its collection. The imagined dislocations and discombobulations, jarring contrasts and splintered meanings, radical joys and terrors of Cezanne, Kandinsky, Klee, Malevich, Picasso, Braque, Schiele, Mondrian hang on walls built by a group of actual dislocating, jarring, and radical wills. For hovering over the Guggenheim's honeycomb are the spirits and labyrinthine escapades of Solomon R. Guggenheim, Jewish immigrant become American metallurgical tycoon; his wife Hilla Rebay, a theosophical Dadaist with traces of Aryan occultism become American art-matriarch; Peggy Guggenheim, the tycoon's slighted niece become zealous competitor in the art-collecting business; and, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Solomon commissioned to design the museum. Situated in the sensationally opaque American history behind the Guggenheim, the once-vanguard European paintings and sculptures inside the museum's walls are like those innocent Jamesian heroines who in a different age found themselves enmeshed in the inscrutable intrigues of old Europe.

Wright, the most colorful figure in the Guggenheim saga, hailed from the Midwest and was filled with a mischievous antipathy to the Eastern establishment, which he blamed for the disastrous end of Louis Sullivan, his mentor and America's first modern architect. He was also bent on proving the superiority of architecture to painting, and his own to everyone else's. Brilliant and fiercely egotistical, he once returned to a house he had been retained to design after it was finished and occupied, stormed in and rearranged the furniture. His approach to creating the Guggenheim was just as willful. The breathtakingly alien building is archly at war with the angular shapes of the city behind it. The curved walls inside contend with the paintings they are supposed humbly to display to their best effect. James Johnson Sweeney, the tall, tempestuous Irishman who was the museum's director at the time Wright first presented his plan, despised Wright's conception; legend has it that Wright responded by designing the administrative offices with the lowest possible ceilings. In 1959, six months before the building was finished, Wright died. Perhaps his spirit was still ascending when the first crowds climbed the winding ramp, up toward the resplendent skylight inspired by St. Peter's dome in the Vatican, unaware that they had become votaries to an apotheosis the architect had resolutely arranged for himself.

Wright ended his career in the manner of an American Faust, his personal life beset with tragedy, his ideals stubbornly intact. We can only hope that the museum's current director doesn't go down in the manner of the German version. That Fraust's final catastrophic venture was in real estate.