On the occasion of the Quincentenary of the birth of the Ghetto of Venice, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and lkona Venezia - the lnternational School of Photography present the exhibition Peggy Guggenheim in Photographs (10 June - 27 November 2016), at the lkona Gallery, Ziva Kraus's historic photography gallery, in Venice's Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. With a careful selection of about twenty images, largely from the archives of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, by some of the 20th-century’s greatest photographers, the exhibition sets out to narrate who was Peggy Guggenheim. The American collector was rarely the subject of painted portraits; instead she was recorded by photographers many times. Among those who immortalized this key figure in the history of 20th- century art and whose photographs are on view in this exhibition were Rogi André, Berenice Abbott, Roloff Beny, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Gisèle Freund, Dino Jarach, Ida Kar, George Karger, André Kertész, Hermann Landshoff, Man Ray, Robert E. Mates, Nino Migliori, and Stefan Moses.
"The concept of the exhibition,” explains curator Ziva Kraus, "is tied to the 500th anniversary of the origin in 1516 of the Ghetto in Venice. The noun “ghetto” was Venetian dialect-the piace of the ghèto, a foundry on a small island-like part of Venice, was where in the 16th century the Jewish community was confined. Nowadays the word is associated above all with the Jewish diaspora and with Judaism. The history of the Guggenheim family is itself an episode of the diaspora: they were Jews, from the Swiss canton of Aargau-er Surbtal, who emigrated in 1847 to the United States, where Benjamin Guggenheim, brother of the celebrated Solomon and father of Peggy Guggenheim, was to be born. Peggy herself lived a life of constant voyaging, from America to Europe, from Paris to London, to New York and to Venice.” The 21 images in this exhibition trace some of the principal milestones of the journeying of this unique and extraordinary woman, determined in her far-sighted collecting, always open to the world, revolutionary not only in her disregard for bourgeois social conventions, a woman who through her life choices and above all through her faith in the act of creativity of others, helped to write the history books of 20th-century art.
The exhibition opens with a celebrated portrait by Man Ray (1890 - 1976) of c. 1924, in which Peggy is robed in an elegant Paul Poiret garment, gazing directly into the camera, with complicity, confidence and candor, perfectly characteristic of that time and epoch. T wo years later, in 1926, she was photographed by Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991), who captured her for us in the fullness of youth, revealing the simplicity of her lively, outgoing and considerate personality. lf Man Ray’s photo, in a spirit of Art déco, tells us whence Peggy carne, Abbott tells us who she was. Gisèle Freund (1908 - 2000) offers us Peggy as a gallerist, together with Herbert Read the critic, her advisor and friend, at the time of Peggy's London gallery Guggenheim Jeune, in 1939. At their shoulders is The Sun in lts Jewel Case by Yves T anguy, the Surrealist painter whose works Peggy collected. From London to Paris, where we find her in a "neo-Futurist" gown by Elsa Schiaparelli in a 1940 photograph by Rogi André (1905 - 1970) in the apartment of the American poet and painter Kay Sage. At the outbreak of World War Il Peggy found herself in Marseilles, where she gave financial support to Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee, which was assisting artists, many of them Jewish, to escape to America. Soon after, she herself was compelled to return to New York, travelling in July 1941 with Laurence Vail her first husband, and the man who was soon to be her second husband, Max Ernst. Emblematic of the presence of European artists in New York, many of them in the circle of Peggy's friends, are the photographs of Hermann Landshoff (1905-1986), taken in 1942 in Peggy's townhouse: among them, Leonora Carrington, the Austrian-Romanian architect Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann, Ernst, André Breton, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp. From the same period, again by Abbott, come photographs of the interiors of Art of This Century, Peggy’s museum/gallery in New York on W. 57th Street, designed by Kiesler. Here she exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, and organized temporary exhibitions both of major European artists and of several emerging Americans who would soon become exponents of American Abstract Expressionism, such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert De Niro Sr., Clyfford Stili, and Jackson Pollock, to whom she gave his first solo show in 1943. The exhibition includes a nowcelebrated photograph of Peggy and Pollock standing in the entrance of Peggy’s E. 61st Street apartment with, behind, the outsize Mural by Pollock, which Peggy had commissioned in 1943 and which she later gave to the University of Iowa Museum of Art.
And then the return to Europe, the decision to live in Venice, and her participation in 1948 in the first postwar Venice Biennale, documented by photographs of Peggy installing her art in the Greek Pavilion. The following year she acquired Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, where she transferred her collection and opened the palazzo for the first time in 1949 with an exhibition of contemporary sculpture. Numerous and memorable are the photographs of Peggy at home in the palazzo: radiant in her Fortuny dress standing on the Grand Canal steps in a photograph by Ida Kar (1908 - 1974); the subect of photo sessions by two great ltalian photographers Nino Migliori (b. 1926) and Gianni Berengo Gardin (b. 1930) in her living rooms; and again her friend Roloff Beny (1924 - 1984) who caught her examining Antoine Pevsner’s Monument Symbolizing the Liberation of the Spirit) in the French Pavilion of the 1958 Venice Biennale. During her thirty years in Venice, Peggy continued to collect art; she opened her museum to the visiting public, and supported artists such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom we see in a photograph by an unknown photographer in Peggy’s Venice garden.
Talent, courage but also feminineness were characteristics that delineated the figure of Peggy Guggenheim and which emerge clearly and vividly in the images in this exhibition: “a show,” emphasizes the curator Ziva Kraus, "intended to be both a record and a homage to the patroness whose every act was a strike in favor of 20th century art.”
Ikona Gallery
With well over thirty productive years now behind it, the lkona Photo Gallery was founded in 1979 in Venice, near the Ponte di San Moisè by artist and gallerist Ziva Kraus, stili today its director. lkona Gallery has developed projects in various places in Venice down to 2003, when the current gallery opened in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. lts exhibition rooms have witnessed over the years some of the greatest exponents of photography in the world, from Berenice Abbott to Gabriele Basilico, Antonio and Felice Beato, John Batho, Bruce Davidson, Adolphe de Meyer, Robert Doisneau, Giorgia Fiorio, Franco Fontana, Martine Franck, Chuck Freedman, Gisèle Freund, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Mario Giacomelli, Erich Hartmann, William Klein, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Paolo Monti, Barbara Morgan, Carlo Naya, Helmut Newton, Ferdinando Scianna and Rosalind Solomon. Since 1989 lkona Gallery Venice has also been an lnternational School of Photography.
Peggy Guggenheim in Photographs is supported by lntrapresae Collezione Guggenheim, by Private Bank BSI and by Regione del Veneto.