The spiritual landscape, December 13, 2003 – February 8, 2004
On Saturday December 13, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection will open to the public the exhibition The Spiritual Landscape, curated by Vivien Greene and Susan Cross. Organized by the Guggenheim Foundation for the Galleria Gottardo in Lugano, the exhibition includes 25 masterpieces drawn exclusively from the holdings of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features leading artists of the European avant-garde: Albert Gleizes, Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, Gabriele Münter, and Emil Nolde. This diverse group of artists shared an interest in the spiritual aspects of the natural world and turned their attention to landscape in the pivotal phase that preceded the inception of abstraction in their work.
With the advent of the 20th century, artists began to employ nature as a vehicle to convey spirituality. Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, who together founded the Munich-based Blaue Reiter group in 1911, both adopted this approach. But the quest for the transcendental in landscape and animal imagery extended to other painters of the period as well, including several artists who had links to the Blaue Reiter group, such as member Gabriele Münter and the German Expressionist Emil Nolde, whose work was included in the Blaue Reiter almanac.
The focus on spirituality and the impulse to realize meditative scenes of inner visions rather than strictly representational compositions ultimately led artists of the era to create purely abstract imagery. The works in The Spiritual Landscape evidence the crucial period immediately before several of these painters began to dematerialize the object and to execute non-representational paintings, forever altering the relationship between concept and form.
The Spiritual Landscape comprises paintings, watercolors, and woodcuts from the core of the museum’s holdings and includes many purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim himself in the 1930s and ’40s when he was establishing the museum’s founding collection. This exhibition will give an international audience the opportunity to see a selection of 25 rarely exhibited masterworks from the Guggenheim Museum’s collection in New York.
A bilingual catalogue in Italian and English with texts by Susan Cross and Vivien Greene, Associate Curators at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and organizers of the exhibition, is also available.
Institutional Patrons: Banca del Gottardo, Ras, Regione Veneto
The programs of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board and Intrapresæ Collezione Guggenheim.