The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice turns 70 years old. Major initiatives to celebrate the anniversary

It was thefall of 1949 when collector Peggy Guggenheim (New York, 1898 - Camposampiero, 1979) purchased Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, a “splendid unfinished mansion” on the Grand Canal, to open the doors of her collection to the public with a first exhibition of contemporary art. “[...] I organized an exhibition of more or less recent sculptures in the garden, and Professor Giuseppe Marchiori, a rather well-known critic, wrote the introduction to the catalog. We exhibited an Arp, a Brancusi, a piece of furniture by Calder; three Giacomettis, a Lipchitz, a Moore, a Pevsner and a David Hare that I had in my collection, and a Mirko, a Consagra [...] there was also a Marino Marini, which I had bought in Milan directly from the artist”: so Peggy wrote in her autobiography A Life for Art published by Rizzoli in 1998. Venice thus became her city until the year of her death, 1979.

1949 and 1979 are thus two crucial dates that marked not only the history of the museum but also the history of 20th-century art. This year, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, now therefore in its 70th year since its opening, wants to commemorate these pivotal dates with an exhibition calendar that never loses sight of the figure of its founder, and with a very wide range of free activities open to the public, which will take place inside and outside the museum, aimed at actualizing Peggy Guggenheim’s courageous as well as innovative teaching. Continuity of a Vision is the title of the Public Programs program realized with the support of the Araldi Guinetti Foundation in Vaduz.

Coinciding with the opening of From Gesture to Form. Postwar European and American Art in the Schulhof Collection (Jan. 26-March 18, 2019), the special presentation of the Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Collection. Schulhof donated by the Schulhof couple to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and kept in Venice since 2012, exhibited almost in its entirety, the rooms of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni host an original rearrangement of the permanent collection. On display are most of the works acquired by Peggy Guggenheim between 1938, when she opened her first gallery Guggenheim Jeune in London, and 1947, when she settled in Venice. A display that strongly reflects her interest in Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture and Surrealism. Works that were acquired through the friendships and advice of artists and intellectuals such as Marcel Duchamp, the art historian Sir Herbert Read, and the writer Samuel Beckett, who convinced Peggy to devote herself to contemporary art because it was “living.” In the spaces of the palace’s barchessa, there is no shortage of paintings by American Abstract Expressionists, including masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, whose support Peggy Guggenheim counts as her greatest achievement as a patron and collector. And if this presentation sheds light on pre-1948 collecting, from September 21 to January 27, 2020, the long-awaited exhibition Peggy Guggenheim. The Last Dogaressa, curated by Karole P.B. Vail, with Gražina Subelytė, will celebrate post-1948 collecting: paintings, sculpture and works on paper acquired between the late 1940s and 1979. There will be no shortage of works by Italian artists active since the late 1940s, such as Edmondo Bacci, Tancredi Parmeggiani and Emilio Vedova, and the production of some artists related to Optical (Op) and Kinetic art, such as Marina Apollonio, Alberto Biasi and Franco Costalonga. An unprecedented opportunity, moreover, to recontextualize famous masterpieces such as René Magritte’s The Empire of Light (1953-54), acquired in 1954, alongside lesser-known works to the public grade by artists such as René Brô, Gwyther Irwin and Grace Hartigan, and painters of Japanese origin such as Kenzo Okada and Tomonori Toyofuku, which demonstrate how the patron’s artistic interest transcended the borders of Europe and the United States.

Sandwiched between these two major moments that will take a 360-degree look at the history of Peggy’s collecting is a valuable tribute to Jean (Hans) Arp, the first artist to join her collection with the sculpture Head and Shell (1933), acquired in 1938. From April 13 to Sept. 2, 2019, the exhibition Arp’s Nature, curated by Catherine Craft and organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, will offer an evocative and long-awaited reading of the production of the Franco-German artist, whose experimental approach to creation and radical rethinking of traditional art forms made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and the first to break through with his art into the heart of American patronage. The tribute to Peggy Guggenheim’s collecting will also continue with the first exhibition of 2020, Migrating Objects: an exhibition that will shed light on a crucial, if lesser-known, moment in her collecting history, namely her 1950s and 1960s interest in the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The exhibition will be overseen by a curatorial committee that includes scholars and curators from prestigious international museum institutions, along with Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Karole P.B. Vail.

But the event will not only be celebrated with exhibitions. In fact, corollary to the exhibition program is a long list of activities, events, lectures, workshops, and in-depth discussions in Peggy Guggenheim’s footsteps. In 1949, on the occasion of an exhibition of contemporary sculpture, the patron opened her home to the public, and would continue to do so until 1979, educating them about one of the most important art collections of the twentieth century. Public Programs Continuity of a Vision intends to carry on the lesson of its founder and the Collection’s current mission of disseminating its contents to as diverse an audience as possible in order to share the extraordinary educational power of this discipline in forming and nurturing critical thinking. Accessibility programs for the blind and visually impaired focused on the museum’s great masterpieces; the social project “Point of View,” which will give the public a voice to tell their point of view about the museum and their most beloved works; a participatory initiative apt to reconstruct the figure of Peggy Guggenheim through collective memory in the local community. Also, three conversations with three women, philanthropists and visionary collectors, who have made art their mission as a personal commitment to society: Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, president of the Turin-based Foundation of the same name, among the most prominent figures in Italian and international collecting; Lekha Poddar, of the Devi Art Foundation (Dehli, India), active in the Middle Eastern art scene; and Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza (von Habsburg), founder of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, among the largest contemporary art collections in Europe. Three women who, like Peggy Guggenheim, can be an inspiration to future generations.

“My grandmother Peggy created in Venice a space of freedom,” recalls director Karole Vail. “And such it must be today. A space of encounter and exchange so that from art education and the catalyzing force of the creative process of the avant-garde we can understand and interpret our present. As Peggy collected the art of her time, today we converse with the audience of our time. And within this commitment to educate and raise awareness of the present is also part of the collaboration, born last year, between the Collection and ASviS, the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development, which works to promote the 17 Goals of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, to address urgent contemporary issues through the lens of art.”

All information about the museum’s activities can be found on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website.

Source: release

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice turns 70 years old. Major initiatives to celebrate the anniversary

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