Venue:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Curator:
Philip Rylands.

Artists:
Carla Accardi, Josef Albers, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Kenneth Armitage, Edmondo Bacci, Francis Bacon, Enrico Baj, Agostino Bonalumi, Martha Boto, Tony Caro, Eduardo Chillida, William Congdon, Franco Costalonga, Alan Davie, Piero Dorazio, Jean Dubuffet, Barry Flanagan, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Alberto Guzman, Jenny Holzer, Bryan Hunt, Gwyther Irwin, Asger Jorn, Zoltan Kemeny, Bice Lazzari, Heinz Mack, Marino Marini, Manfredo Massironi, Mirko, Ben Nicholson, Gastone Novelli, Armando Pizzinato, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Marion R. Taylor, Germaine Richier, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Santomaso, Toti Scialoja, Francesco Sobrino, Graham Sutherland, Günther Uecker, Victor Vasarely, and Emilio Vedova.

Exhibition description:
This exhibition presents a collection of works from the Peggy Guggenheim’s collection of postwar European painting and sculpture largely from the period 1949-79. It documents how Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect even after her withdrawal from New York, center of the artistic avant-garde, in 1947, the year she closed her museum-gallery Art of This Century. This exhibition is therefore a celebration of Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian life and her residence in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. It is also however an opportunity to exhibit donations, works that have entered the Venetian Foundation since Peggy Guggenheim’s death in 1979.

Opening with a sculpture and a painting by Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini respectively, the first three galleries focus on Venetian and Italian art, with particular emphasis on Peggy Guggenheim’s circle in the 1950s—Edmondo Bacci, Pizzinato, Santomaso, Tancredi, and Vedova. To these are added paintings by Accardi, Afro, Enrico Baj, Piero Dorazio and William Congdon. Rooms 4 to 6 are predominantly non-Italian, with a room dedicated to British masters in the 1950s (Kenneth Armitage, Francis Bacon, Alan Davie, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland), and another dedicated to the CoBrA movement in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, with paintings by Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn, as well as Jean Dubuffet. Informel works by Lazzari and Scialoja are joined by rarely seen sculptures by Arman, Alberto Guzman, and Zoltan Kemeny, as well as decoupages by Gwyther Irwin and Rotella. Room 7 focuses on ‘visual research’ (with optical works by Franco Costalonga, Victor Vasarely, Manfredo Massironi, Martha Boto, Lazzari and Francesco Sobrino). Room 8 closes the presentation with monochromes by Albers, Fontana and Bonalumi, wall sculptures by Mack and Gunther Uecker, a Sphere by Arnaldo Pomodoro, embossed prints by Eduardo Chillida, and a major 1960 painting by Novelli, recently donated by the Fondazione Araldi Guinetti.

The exhibition closes with a tribute to Marion Richardson Taylor (d. 2010), a versatile American artist.
Her eclectic path encompassed abstract expressionist murals, Cubist still lifes, non-figurative portraits and intimately sized drawings. Constantly in search of a new vocabulary to represent the people and the places that impressed her, Taylor had the courage to rethink her art continually. Places as different as Barcelona, Egypt, Japan, and Saint-Rémy in Provence all had a strong impact on her. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection dedicates to the artist her first solo exhibition, with works donated in 1998 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Catalogue:
Frigeri, Flavia. Marion R. Taylor Paintings, 1966-2001. Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2012.
Bilingual catalogue, in English and Italian. Catalogue includes a preface by Richard Armstrong (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum) and Philip Rylands (Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), and an essay by Flavia Frigeri.

Library location: GUGG PGC 2012.02, UFFICIO 2012.