September 1990 - January 1991
The present installation at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (to be completed in October) is conceived to complement the exhibition of masterpieces from the New York and Venice Guggenheim Collections currently on view at Palazzo Grassi (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Thannhauser Collection. From Van Gogh to Picasso, From Kandinsky to Pollock. Masterpieces of Modern Art. September 9 – December 9, 1990).
While the exhibition of masterpieces at Pallazzo Grassi documents the major trends in modern art from the late nineteenth century to 1945, this installation features major works from the 1960s and 70s by American and Italian artists, juxtaposed with aome of the finest works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection from the first half of the century.
The founder of the two Guggenheim Museum – Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York and Peggy Guggenheim in Venice – patronized and collected the work of a group of avant-garde artists relatively unknown in their time that have come to be recognized as some of the most important in the century. The Guggenheim Foundation has continued this commitment to collect work by living artists, demonstrated in the present installation.
The selection of works made by Guggenheim curators Germano Celant, Lisa Dennison and Michael Govan es organized around two conceptual axes: the first being a dialogue between the historical avant-garde of the early part of the century and the work of younger generation of living artists, the second being a dialogue between contemporary American artists and Italian artists (particularly appropriate given the Guggenheim Foundation’s dual American-Italian identity).
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibited many emerging European artists, particularly Italians like Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Greek-born Jannis Kounellis, whose work is included in this installation. In the last year, the Guggenheim acquiered over 200 works, primarily by American artists of the 1960s and 70s, from the Italian collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. A few works from the Panza collection are part of the selection of works by American artists that includes Walter De Maria, Robert Ryman and Richard Serra.
The work of the contemporary Ametican and Italian artists bear in common a strong sense of simple raw material: paper, mettal, glass, neon. Italian Merz and Penone, associated with the Arte Povera movement, are well-known for their use of organic materials such as the tree branches in Penone’s Breath of Leaves (1981). Many American artists of the period favored industrial materials, such as the rubber belts and neon employed by Richard Serra in Belts (1966-67).
Each room has been installed around a particular theme or idea. For example, Jannis Kounellis’ large lead and wax relief is placed with Surrealist works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection by Miró, Tanguy and Dalí. Like the Surrealists, Kounellis summons the metaphysical from the ordinary world by bringing together in enigmatic juxtapositions images and materials that are not logically related. Kounellis relies on a sense of memory, personal and historical, that can be compared with the Surrealists’ obsession with dreams and imagination.
Robert Ryman, whose work consists almost entirely of white painting, emphasizes the ‘process’ of making a painting rather than any particular image; in Classico IV (1968), the artist deliberately leaves visible the mark from the tape that held the paper on the wall while it was being painted. The Ryman is hung with two works on paper by Mondrian, one of the most notable of the early twentieth century abstract painters, who sought to represent an underlying geometric order to the natural world with a grid structure of horizontal and vertical lines. By eliminating in their art all but the most essential components of painting – line, shape and color – Ryman and Mondrian share the intention of provoking the viewer to see an essential truth in reality.