2008, a good year for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with almost 350,000 ticketed visitors. Full calendar of exhibitions in 2009. ‘Carlo Cardazzo’ extended to 1 march, ‘Futurism’, ‘Themes & Variations’ and ‘Jason Martin’, sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg and ‘Maurice Prendergast in italy’. January-May the restoration of the façades of Peggy Guggenheim’s palace.
2009 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opens with the restoration of the façades of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni: cleaning and maintenance which will take four months and which, in mid-May will reveal the classical beauty of the 460sq.m. of white Istrian stone of the Grand Canal façade, of its pillars (currently concealed by ivy) and of the so-called Marino Marini terrace behind. Thanks to the generous support of Mapei, a multinational group based in Milan, and world leader in adhesives and chemical products for the building trade, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection will conclude a three-year campaign of expansion, renovation and modernization which, in 2007-2008, concerned the exhibition spaces and the museum’s office areas. Mapei’s commitment to this project also extends to the restoration of the rear façade of the museum, overlooking the rio delle Torreselle, where the land entrance to the museum is located. The removal of the existing stucco (intonaco) and the application of a new protective surface of 500 square metres will benefit from Mapei’s specialized and sophisticated products. The previous cleaning of the façade of the palace, acquired by Peggy Guggenheim in 1948, dates back to 1982. By the time of next June’s Biennale of Visual arts, it will be possible once again to admire the cleaned and consolidated 18th century façade of this uniquely unfinished Venetian palace. Notwithstanding the restoration works, the museum will remain open to the public, with its usual opening times, every day from 10am to 6pm, closed Tuesdays.
In 2008 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection consolidated its visitor numbers with 346,862 persons during the 313 days that the museum was open, with a daily average of 1,108 visitors. In total over 359,000 visitors came to the museum when one includes over 5000 students who participated free of charge in educational programmes, 400 teachers, and nearly 7,000 others who visited the Collection for exhibition openings, programs and special events.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s programme of exhibitions in 2009 kicks off on February 19 with Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, to mark the centenary year of the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s founding manifesto of Italian Futurism. This consists of a special installation, curated by Philip Rylands, of a part of the permanent galleries of the museum, focusing on the Futurist masterpieces of the Gianni Mattioli Collection, with additional paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and other private collections. This small but mighty presentation includes iconic paintings by each of the five artists who signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting in 1910, Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini, and by other artists related to the movement (Rosai, Sironi, Soffici). A preliminary section alludes to related contemporary avant-gardes (Divisionism, Cubism, Orphism, Vorticism).
The exhibition Themes and Variations: From the Mark to Zero opens March 21 through May 17. This draws on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s holdings of post war painting and sculpture, adding to this loans from other collections. The curator Luca Massimo Barbero explores variations on the theme of the mark: as code, grid, referent, citation, alphabet and expression, arriving eventually at the condition of zeroing: the monochrome, the blank and the void. The British artist Jason Martin, among the most interesting painters of the generation of the Young British Artists, interprets the theme in a small solo exhibition: creating a zero point of painting in a vibrant space in which an infinity of pictorial possibilities co-exist.
Rauschenberg: Gluts will open the summer season and run from May 30 through September 20. The exhibition is curated by Susan Davidson, Senior Curator Collections and Exhibitions of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and David White, Curator for the Rauschenberg Estate. It exhibits for the first time in Italy a selected group of approximately forty sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg from the series of the Gluts, drawn from the holdings of institutions and private collections in the United States and abroad. After breaking boundaries with his celebrated Combines, in the late 1950s, his explorations of technologybased art that made viewers active participants in the 1960s, and his focus on natural-fiber materials of paper, cardboard, and fabric throughout the 1970s, Rauschenberg’s artistic attention in the 1980s turned toward an exploration of the visual properties of metal. Assembling found metal objects such as gasstation signs, deteriorated automotive and industrial parts littering the landscape, he transformed the scrap-metal detritus into wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures that recalled his earlier Combines. Thus he created the Gluts, sculptural works begun in 1986 and continued intermittently until 1995.
From October 10 through January 3 2010, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection will host the exhibition Maurice Prendergast in Italy, curated by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugenie Prendergast Senior Curator of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art, at the Williams College Museum of Art. This exhibition assembles for the first time the major works by American artist Maurice Prendergast created during two trips to Italy (1898-99 and 1911-12): a body of work that is one of the most attractive and revealing in the story of American art. The exhibition brings together approximately seventy-five of his Italian watercolors, oils, and monotypes as well as photographs, films, guidebooks, and travel advertisements that situate the work within the new visual culture that Americans had embraced by 1900. The presentation of Prendergast’s works in Italy, where they were created, offers a new point of interest and contributes to the comprehension of what characterized Modernism in the early 20th century and of the role Prendergast played in the development of Modern art in America. The exhibition is organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in partnership with The Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois.
The exhibition Carlo Cardazzo: A New Vision for Art curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, which has already been visited by over 50,000 people, has been extended by popular demand until March 1, 2009. This is an opportunity to discover the explosive character of the Venetian collector and the detailed reconstruction of career as collector, publisher and gallerist.