Venues:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Williamstown, Massachusetts: Williams College Museum of Art, July 18–September 20, 2009;
Houston, Texas: Museum of Fine Arts, February 14–May 9, 2010.

Curators:
Nancy Mowll Mathews and Elizabeth Kennedy.

Artist:
Maurice Prendergast.

Exhibition description:
This exhibition assembled for the first time paintings by American artist, Maurice Prendergast (St. John’s, Canada, 1858–New York, USA, 1924), created during two trips to Italy (1898–99 and 1911–12). It presented more than seventy 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. In June 1898 Prendergast travelled to Italy remaining for 18 months, visiting Venice (the main focus of his trip), Padua, Florence, Siena, Assisi, Orvieto, Rome, Naples, and Capri, before returning in late 1899. He returned to Italy in August 1911-January 1912 and once again visited Venice. The exhibition featured a corpus of unique works dedicated to Venice, represented by the artist with evocative views of its modern, daily life. While Whistler’s etchings of Venice focus on the picturesque decay of the city, and Sargent with few exceptions painted its monuments, its interiors and its poorer inhabitants, Prendergast instead was attracted to its modernity—to wealthy visitors in fashionable dress, to processions and feste which were in part the expression of historic tradition and in part a response to international tourism. Prendergast chronicles la Serenissima with Impressionist, picturesque views crowded by colorful pedestrians walking through calli, campi and bridges.

Partnerships:
Organized by Williams College Museum of Art in partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Catalogue:
Mowll Mathews, Nancy and Kennedy, Elizabeth. Prendergast in Italy. London; New York: Merrell Publishers; Williamstown: Williams College Museum of Art; Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2009.

Two catalogues, in English and Italian. Catalogues include forewords by Richard Armstrong (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum) and Philip Rylands (Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), Lisa G. Corrin (Director, Williams College Museum of Art), and Elizabeth Glassman (President and Chief Executive Officer, Terra Foundation for American Art), and essays by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Elizabeth Kennedy and Kimberly J. Nichols, Olga Płaszczewska, Alessandro Del Puppo, Jan Andreas May and Carol Clark. Catalogues contain a checklist of Italian works and a chronology.

Library location: GUGG PGC 2009 .03 (English), GUGG PGC 2009 .04 (Italian), and UFFICIO 28 0016 (Italian).