I finally summoned the courage to introduce myself. I asked him to put me on the Guggenheim mailing list, which he did. Soon after that he completely surprised me by telling me he had decided to make me vice president of business administration at the museum, as well as a member of the board. I later found out that he had had me thoroughly checked out to find out if I was a wastrel and what I was doing in life. And it turned out I had a reasonably good reputation in the mining business and was serving on the board of Kennecott Copper, a major mining company.

As I got to know him, my admiration was such that I spent almost as much time doing chores for him as I did running Pacific Tin. Year after year I refused to take a salary increase at my company because I didn’t want them to think they owned me full time. I made myself useful to Harry, and apparently he thought I did a reasonably good job.

But you were not terribly interested in the museum at that point.

Not at all, aside from being proud of what my grandfather had accomplished in founding the Guggenheim Museum. But I didn’t know much about it, nor did I have a great interest in being on the board. My mother and Michael were on the board, and, frankly, I thought adding another family member was overkill. The problem for Harry was that he had three daughters, none of whom had any interest in the family business. So I guess he reached out to me, his second cousin, because he had no direct heirs who were interested in championing the family legacy. Eventually he chose me to take over the entire family enterprise.

My role at the museum has always been a business one. Even as I started my tenure as vice president of business administration, my concern was, and still is to this day, the financial viability of the whole enterprise.

The Guggenheim Foundation’s art assets are substantial. Still, you wrote that “the struggle for solvency is enormous and continuous.” That seems to be a contradiction.

The admission fee that visitors pay covers only 25 percent of the museum’s operating costs. So when support from corporations and the government steadily declines, museums really have to struggle for solvency. The government does provide some support for the arts, but not to the degree that you can count on it.

The New York Times recently ran an article that criticized museums for selling works of art to get money for other purposes. Of course, this is something you can’t do in the art world. When a museum sells a work of art, the proceeds can only go toward buying another work of art; it can’t go toward salaries. But you can stretch it a little bit and put the money toward maintaining the collection, which is a huge expense.

So museums are being forced to sell art to raise money for conservancy.

Most museums don’t have big enough endowments, and they can’t keep raising admissions the way colleges can raise tuition. No one likes to dip into the art assets, but sometimes museums find they must.

You wrote that, with the exception of Peggy, few Guggenheims have had any true expertise in art. Even your grandfather, Solomon, sometimes balked at modern pieces. Yet your family is now associated with expertise in modern art.

My grandfather, Solomon, was heavily influenced by the Baroness von Ehrenwiesen, a painter he hired to do his portrait. Now, I wasn’t there, but I can just imagine her saying, “You’re a big success in the business world and you’re getting along in years. You must be thinking of paying back society for your great fortune. Have you ever considered nonrepresentational art?” I’m sure he had no idea what nonrepresentational art was at the time, but he became enraptured with both her and with the concept of what we call abstract art today.

I do believe that Peggy was the only Guggenheim who really had the expertise to judge art. And she certainly had the best advice possible because of her very intimate relationships with some of the major artists of the 20th century, including Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst, to whom she was briefly married. She had a passion for the art.

In your book you recall that your grandfather’s suite in the Plaza Hotel was filled with nonobjective art. Eventually he developed a passion for modern art.

Yes, even down to the purple fixtures in the bathroom. There was very modern equipment in the bathroom.

As a child, how did you react to it?

The first painting I remember as a little boy was a (Amedeo) Modigliani nude that stood out among all the others. There’s a reproduction of it in the book. It’s modern, but not abstract. I remember thinking it was very pleasant to look at and that’s about all.

Your children are active in the family’s art collection, so you must have nurtured their interest.

My wife and I didn’t formally involve them; rather we let the interest arise from the individual. My four children—Wendy, Tania, Peter and Mimi—are all involved in the art legacy. My oldest daughter, Wendy, has been on the Guggenheim board for 25 years and is chairman of our governance committee. I look upon her as the conscience of the Guggenheim; she would never allow the sale of any piece of art that my grandfather owned, not that we’d want to. Peter is very successful in business, and he and his partnership have contributed about $3 million to the endowment. Tania serves on the finance committee of the Harry Guggenheim Foundation. My youngest, Mimi, worked as a docent for several years at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where she learned to speak Italian and fell in love with Peggy’s art. She just recently joined the board for that museum. They all take great pride in the art part of the family legacy.

Peggy has a granddaughter named Karole Vail who curates for us at the Guggenheim in New York. She is very interested in carrying on the legacy. She recently did a show at the Berlin Guggenheim. She’s been involved in many of our exhibitions.

My mother left me a Remington—which, of course, is traditional representational art—and my kids each take it for six months. My mother had very conservative tastes and was never passionate about nonobjective art. Frankly, she wasn’t passionate about the baroness, either.

Your generation was the one that took the risk of extending the Guggenheim reach to other regions, including Bilbao in Spain.

Actually, the globalization of the Guggenheim was not a risk for us at all. In Bilbao, as in Berlin, we became partners with a city or organization and they put up the money. The great success of Bilbao is due in large part to our choice of Frank Gehry as architect. The building itself is a tremendous attraction. But when the Basque government first approached us, Tom Krens, our director, said that he knew nothing about the Basque region except jai alai and the separatist terrorists. So he and I decided to make an impossible demand, which would serve as a polite “thanks, but no thanks.” We asked for $20 million for our endowment, $100 million to build the building and $50 million to acquire art. We also wanted a guarantee of no operating loss. They said they’d think about it and surprised us by agreeing to our terms about a week later.

Today we’re looked upon as visionaries because of Bilbao’s success. But the real credit goes to the Basque government: they took the risk of spending taxpayers’ money on a museum they hoped would attract visitors to an old industrial town. It was their vision, not ours, and I hate to see us get the credit for it.

But I try to be careful with expansion. Around 9/11, we were considering a huge, new Frank Gehry–designed museum down on the East River in lower Manhattan. Quite candidly, I was never in favor of it. With an endowment that I considered inadequate, the idea of spending $900 million on another museum in New York never appealed to me. But I didn’t assert my doubts because Peter Lewis, our chairman, was willing to put up $250 million personally, and I didn’t want to discourage his interest in the Guggenheim. 9/11 pretty much killed the idea, and I think most of the board was relieved.

You wrote about recruiting board members as a means of building the endowment. Your roster looks like a powerhouse of corporate America.

Nowadays, unfortunately, an overwhelming majority of trustees have to be people of wealth because who else is going to step up to the plate with the necessary money? We require a minimum $100,000 annual fee to be a trustee at the Guggenheim; that eliminates many wonderful people. Additionally, each person on the board is expected to give $2 million to $2.5 million in a capital gift. We do, of course, have some art-oriented people on the board, who we value ever so highly because of their knowledge and reputation—but only a handful.

We’re not alone. Look at the Museum of Modern Art’s recent expansion. They raised an unbelievable amount of money through their board members, one of whom is Mr. (David) Rockefeller. That helped.

Where do you see the Guggenheim 50 years from now?

I’d like to think that our collection would be known worldwide, and that we would be organizing exhibitions for our satellite museums. And I hope we limit expansion of those satellites. We’re currently in New York, Berlin, Venice, Bilbao and Las Vegas. We may add one in South America and one in the Far East.