October 31, 1987 – January 10, 1988
The exhibition illustrates the profound influence of Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) on the art world of her time and will feature works she exhibited at her New York gallery, Art of This Century, from 1942 to 1947, as well as works she donated to museums and art galleries principally in America, in an effort to promote modernism.
Today Peggy Guggenheim is best known for her splendid collection of twentieth century art that is mantained in her name by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Gran Canal of Venice. However, during her lifetime, particularly in the 40s and 50s, she was better known as the owner-manager of her gallery, Art of This Century in New York. It was here that several artists of the ‘heroic’ period of the development of American modernism were given their first one-man exhibitions: Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, among others. Peggy pursued a policy of encouraging young artists while at the same time exhibiting great masterpieces of the recent European avantgarde that still today form the core of her collection. Meanwile she continued to donate works of art to museums, from Boston to San Francisco, from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv. Such donations served to spread the knowledge of a new generation of American artists as well as to provoke still-consevatively inclined museum directors to begin acquiring and exhibiting twentieth century art.
Included in the exhibition will be 56 paintings, sculptures and works on paper borrowed from pubblic and private institutions in Europe and the United States. The majority of these have never before been on public display in Italy. Fred Licht, Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Melvin P. Lader, Associate Professor of Art History, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., are the joint curators of this exhibition which was first presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, March 6 – May 3, 1987. The exhibition catalog will be printed by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan.
The extended open season of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, during which temporary exhibitions are mounted, is made possible through a grant from United Technologies Corporation. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is supported by an annual grant from the Regione Veneto.