2007: record attendance at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with approximately 400,000 visitors. 2008: celebrations dedicated to Peggy and the 60 years of her collection in Venice, 100 years of american art, and the venetian collector Carlo Cardazzo.
2007 closed with a new record at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: in 12 months the museum received 378,613 visitors during its regular opening hours, with a daily attendance of 1,206 visitors (314 opening days). 855 groups also visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 647 of which came from Italian or foreign schools, for a total of 25,201 visitors. In addition, 8,395 students participated in educational programs, more than 500 teachers visited, and nearly 9,000 people came to the museum for 68 openings, institutional events, parties, or special visits.
The 2007 program of exhibitions, educational events, workshops for children, and tours for schools were made possible by the generous support of the Advisory Board of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, by the Veneto Region, by the Banca del Gottardo, and by the Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim—the only instance in Italy of a corporate partnership focused on the sharing and the development of cultural communication. In the course of the past year, the support of Oracle, Lancia, and San Pellegrino confirmed the value of the relationship between art and business enterprise and of the importance of the resulting innovation and creativity.
2008 will be a remarkable year for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: a full calendar of lectures, movies, events, educational workshops, temporary exhibitions, and free tours inspired by Peggy’s life is being organized to celebrate 60 years of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, together with a concert, on August 26, on the occasion of Peggy’s birthday, organized in collaboration with Umbria Jazz.
In 1948 Peggy Guggenheim was invited by Rodolfo Pallucchini, Secretary General of the Venice Biennale, to exhibit her already legendary collection at the Pavilion of Greece, which was at that time engaged in civil war. For the first time in Europe, works by artists such as Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko were exhibited. The following year, Peggy purchased Palazzo Venier dei Leoni which to this day hosts her collection, the most important in Italy of European and American art from the first half of the 20th century. During her 30 years in Venice, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani. In 1969 Peggy Guggenheim resolved to donate her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, created in 1937 by Peggy’s uncle, Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum.
The temporary exhibitions program on this 60th anniversary—Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s (June 28-October 12); Carlo Cardazzo. A New vision of Art (November 1, 2008-February 9, 2009)—highlights both the relationship between Peggy and American art and her influence on the Venetian artistic milieu between the 50s and the 60s, the two sides of a unique artistic passion that marked the life of this outstanding American patron.
The 2008 exhibition program will start late June to allow completion of the restoration of the temporary exhibition galleries of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The first exhibition to be inaugurated will be Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s. After its opening at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass., in September 2006, and its tour to the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas, and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the exhibition arrives at Peggy Guggenheim Collection. With over seventy paintings and sculptures examining American art between the years of 1850 and 1950 the exhibition reveals the complex and contradictory impulses that, in the span of a century, brought artists to define a pictorial language that can be identified as properly American. From the paintings of the Hudson River School, one passes through the works of the Ash Can School, to arrive at the first examples of American Modernism, to Realism from between the two world wars through the works of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper, to the Geometric Abstractionism of Georgia O’Keefe and Arthur Dove, to the Abstract Expressionism of
Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, all artists that definitively broke with tradition and brought American art to the center of the international scene. The exhibition has been organized by the American Federation of Arts, New York, in association with the Addison Gallery of American Art, and made possible thanks to the Crosby Kemper Foundation, Frank B. Bennett and William D. Cohan, with further support from the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation Fund, Collection-Based Exhibitions, American Federation of Arts.
For the fall the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is organizing Carlo Cardazzo. A New Vision of Art, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. This exhibition revolves around the eclectic personality of Carlo Cardazzo, a Venetian patron, collector, publisher and art dealer, and highlights the multiplicity of his interests and the extraordinary way in which he understood and promoted art through innovative cultural strategies. Undoubtedly Cardazzo was one of the main figures who foresaw the advancement of contemporary art, along with Peggy Guggenheim, his fellow collector with whom he shared a passion for many contemporary artists. For this reason, the exhibition will not only offer an artistic and historic perspective of one of the major protagonists of 20th century art, but also narrate, through documents, objects, publications, and works of art, the artists’ lives and their avant-garde adventures.