The museum's chief curator offered to loan the toilet, which had
been used by tens of thousands of visitors, in a Sept. 15 email
to a Trump administration official, the newspaper reported.
A Guggenheim spokeswoman declined immediate comment on the
Washington Post report and White House officials did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was not clear how the White House responded to the Guggenheim
curator's offer.
The piece, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's, is an 18-karat
gold, fully functioning toilet. It is called "America."
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It was put on display in 2016 in a single-stall bathroom at the
Guggenheim, where it was used in private luxury by more than
100,000 people, according to a Guggenheim blog post. The museum
said the object, which was on display for a year, "skewers
social complacencies" and the extravagances of the wealthy.
Trump, a real estate developer turned reality television star,
campaigned for president as a savvy businessman with the
commercial sense to succeed in the White House. His exact
personal wealth is unknown.
The offer came in response to a White House request to borrow
the painting "Landscape with Snow" by 19th century Dutch painter
Vincent Van Gogh, for installation at the president and first
lady's private living quarters, the Washington Post reported.
The request for the painting was declined.
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Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector had previously written about
the toilet in a 2017 blog post, in which she took swipes at the
president. She wrote that the "Trump reference" inherent in the gold
toilet resonated with people "during the sculpture's time at the
Guggenheim."
"When the sculpture came off view on Sept. 15, Trump had been in
office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the
deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to
climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril," Spector wrote.
Trump is known to have a taste for gold and gilded objects. On
Christmas Eve, he took calls from children while seated on a gold
chair in a tapestried room at his Florida vacation home.
(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Scott
Malone and Susan Thomas)
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