Venue:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Curator:
Erasmus Weddigen.

Artists:
Umberto Boccioni, Georges Braque, Fortunato Depero, Marcel Duchamp, Louis Marcoussis, Jean Metzinger, Gino Severini, Mario Sironi, and Paul Wiedmer.

Exhibition description:
This exhibition focuses on a painting acquired by Peggy Guggenheim in 1945. One hundred years after At the Cycle-Race-Track (1912) was painted, it reveals how Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) adapted the avant-garde pictorial language of Cubism to subject matter combining the popular sport of cycle-racing with attempts to depict speed and to define in paint the 4th dimension—alluded to in the number ‘4’ in the stadium grandstand. Metzinger, though less celebrated today than contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, figured prominently among the Cubists that exhibited together in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indépendants in Paris—the event at which the Cubist movement crystallized in the perception of Parisian art and art critical circles.

Catalogue:
Weddigen, Erasmus. Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the Fourth Dimension. Jean Metzinger’s “At the Cycle-Race Track”. Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2012.

Two catalogues, in English and Italian, with preface and acknowledgements by Richard Armstrong (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum) and Philip Rylands (Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), sponsor’s statement by Giorgio Squinzi (President and CEO, Mapei Spa), and essays by Erasmus Weddigen, Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, André Blum, Wolfgang Drechsler, Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs and Nina Aydt, Božena Nikiel, Hanns Ruder, Paul Schwartzbaum and Ferruccio Petrucci. An interview with the cyclist Fabian Cancellara is also featured, as well as catalogue entries by Gražina Subelyte.

Library Location: GUGG PGC 2012.04 (English), UFFICIO 2012 (Italian).