Venues:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Lugano: Galleria Gottardo, September 13–Novembre 30, 2003.

Curators:
Susan Cross and Vivien Greene.

Artists:
Albert Gleizes, Vasily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, Gabriele Münter and Emil Nolde.

Exhibition description:
This exhibition presented a crucial period in modern art in which a diverse group of artists shared an interest in the spiritual aspects of the natural world and turned their attention to landscape. At the advent of the 20th century, artists began to employ nature as a vehicle to convey spirituality. Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc adopted this approach in the pivotal phase that preceded the inception of abstraction in their work. Yet the quest for the transcendental in landscape and animal imagery extended to other painters of the period as well, including Albert Gleizes, Gabriele Münter, Emil Nolde and Piet Mondrian. The focus on spirituality and the impulse to realize meditative scenes of inner visions rather than strictly representational compositions ultimately led artists of the era to create purely abstract imagery. The Spiritual Landscape therefore evidenced the period immediately before several of these artists began to dematerialize the object and to execute non-representational paintings, forever altering the relationship between concept and form. The exhibition comprised twenty-five paintings and works on paper from the core of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, including some purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim himself in the 1930s and 1940s when he was establishing the museum’s founding collection.

Partnerships:
Exhibition organized in partnership with the Galleria Gottardo, Lugano.

Catalogue:
Cross, Susan and Vivien Greene. The Spiritual Landscape. Il paesaggio spirituale. Lugano: Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Fondazione Galleria Gottardo, 2003.

Bilingual catalogue, in English and Italian. Catalogue includes prefaces by Luca Patocchi (Director, galleria Gottardo) and Thomas Krens (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation), an essay by Susan Cross and Vivien Greene, a detailed exhibition checklist with catalogue entries, and a selected bibliography.

Library location: GUGG PGC 2003 .02, GUGG PGC 2003 .03, ESPO LUGANO 2003 .02.