From Cubism to Abstraction: Mapping Peggy Guggenheim’s Modernism

A course that, through the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, explores the major transformations of twentieth-century art, focusing on abstraction and Surrealism as the two key guiding poles for understanding international modernism.

This first lecture will trace the tendency towards geometric abstraction in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, moving from Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s Cubism, Futurist and Suprematist painting and sculpture, and a focus on the work of Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian as bridging figures towards the United States. This lecture will focus on specific works of art that tell a story not only of the shifts in modern art but in the changing shape of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection.