A record year for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with almost 400,000 visitors. 2015 brings Pollock&Pollock
In 2014 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection hosted record numbers. In the course of the year the Venice museum totaled 396,077 visitors during 316 days of opening, with a daily average of 1,253. This number included 7,000 students and more than 1,000 teachers as part of its educational program A Scuola di Guggenheim, 1,500 children in the Kids Day Sunday workshops, and more than 7,700 attendees for openings, private tours, and institutional and private events.
Preparations are well advanced for four forthcoming exhibitions in 2015. The first three will pay homage to the brothers Pollock: exhibitions dedicated to two masterpieces by American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, and a career retrospective of Charles Pollock, Jackson’s eldest brother.
Alchemy by Jackson Pollock. Discovering the Artist at Work, opening February 14 and curated by Luciano Pensabene Buemi, Conservator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and by Roberto Bellucci, Functionary Restorer-Conservator Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, will document the scientific examination and conservation of Pollock’s 1947 painting, perhaps the most important of the several works by Pollock in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. After more than a year’s absence at the conservation laboratories of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Alchemy returns to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in splendor. Its cleaning has given back to the painting its original chromatic dazzle and made vivid the complexity of Pollock’s technique. Exceptionally, the work will be displayed without protective glass, allowing the public a close inspection of its intricate and dense surface, like a bas-relief of encrusted pigment. The exhibition reveals, through video, 3D reproduction, touch-screens and other interactive technology, the explosion of color uncovered by the long process of cleaning, in a sensational re-discovery of Pollock’s painting. The show closes April 6.
From April 23, the Peggy Guggenheim Collections hosts two contemporaneous exhibitions, one dedicated to Jackson Pollock, the other to his brother Charles Pollock. Through November 9, Jackson’s immense Mural (University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City) will be the focus of the exhibition Jackson Pollock’s Mural. Energy Made Visible, the first European presentation, since its conservation and cleaning at the Getty Conservation Institute, of the outsize canvas commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943 for her New York apartment. The exhibition is curated by David Anfam, Senior Consulting Curator, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, and Director of its Research Center, leading expert on American Abstract Expressionism, and it is organized is by The University of Iowa Museum of Art. At 6 meters in length, Mural is Pollock’s largest painting, and is among the most important and influential American paintings of the 20th century.
Concurrently, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s exhibition galleries will present the first ever retrospective of the art of Charles Pollock. With around 100 paintings, works on paper, photographs and, documents (some unpublished) loaned by the Charles Pollock Archive in Paris, thanks to the Pollock family, the show, curated by the museum’s director Philip Rylands, sets out to trace the career of Jackson’s oldest brother. The exhibition illustrates the artist’s career, from his studies under Thomas Hart Benton in the late 1920s and ‘30s, shared with Jackson, to his work for the Federal Art Project of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, to his conversion to gestural abstraction in the 1940s, and his production, from 1956, of a magnificent corpus of paintings of refined color abstraction. The exhibition closes September 14.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s exhibition program in 2015 concludes with the first museum tribute to the great Indian master Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924–2001). This exhibition, currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (through February 11, 2015), presents approximately 45 paintings and works on paper from over 30 public institutions and private collections in Asia, Europe, and the United States. V.S. Gaitonde. Painting as Process, Painting as Life, curated by Sandhini Poddar, Adjunct Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, reveals a solitary genius who developed a unique non-objective style using spatulas, spools, and a rare process of “removal”. The show will be open from October 3 to January 10 2016.