The Peggy Guggenheim Collection closes 2009 with over 360,000 visitors.
Attendance at the Futurism exhibition surpassed 326,000, while numbers at the Prendergast show were over 82,000. The year 2010 will be dedicated to the museum’s 30th anniversary.
In 2009 The Peggy Guggenheim Collection consolidated its attendance numbers, reaching the considerable total of 347,183 visitors in the 311 days it was open to the public. The daily average
was 1,116, which included 5,263 students and 622 teachers who participated in the museum’s education program “A Scuola di Guggenheim”. To this number the 14,000 guests who attended
the collection’s inaugurations, special tours, and private and company events can be added, for a comprehensive total of over 361,000 visitors.
Two exhibitions that made 2009 particularly successful closed in the first weeks of 2010. With 326,726 visitors from February 18, 2009 to January 11, 2010, Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection earned its second place ranking among the most visited exhibitions in Italy in the past twelve months; open for 284 days, the show averaged 1,150 visitors per day. The
national and international press showed extensive interest and wrote with enthusiasm about the museum’s important homage to the avant-garde movement’s centenary. The exhibition included works by “the first and the best” Futurist masters, such as Boccioni, Balla, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini.
From October 10, 2009 to January 11, 2010, the picturesque Venetian scenes of Maurice Prendergast—“the paintbrush reporter”—were admired by 82,080 visitors, averaging 1,013 per day
during its 81-day run. Tourists and Venetians alike crowded the museum to enjoy Prendergast’s sunny Italian views and to admire his “luminous tapestries, with their distinctive color patches”.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection begins the new year by celebrating its 30th Anniversary with the same spirit of openness and innovation that characterized Peggy Guggenheim. An exciting
calendar of events in 2010 will include Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus (May 1 to July 25), curated by Vivien Greene, with Pre-Raphaelite and De Stijl painting, Bauhaus design,
Russian Constructivism. This exhibition will examine the concept of utopia and analyze its evolution in modern Western artistic thought and practice through a sequence of international case
studies from the early 19th century through 1933—when the rise of Fascism and Stalinism curbed such projects. From September 4 through January 9, 2011, the museum will celebrate Adolph
Gottlieb (1903-1974) with the artist’s first retrospective in Italy, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. In 1943 Gottlieb, together with Mark Rothko, wrote a letter to the New York Times on the themes of myth and primitivism, thus laying one of the foundations for what would become the famous New York School.
From April 7-11, 2010, the museum’s exhibition spaces will host Art, Science, and School, dedicated to the work of students participating in “A Scuola di Guggenheim,” an educational program in
partnership with the Regione del Veneto and the Marino Golinelli Foundation. The current year’s theme is the binomial Art and Science and the various influences, methods, and languages of the two disciplines.