Venue:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Curator:
Michael Preble.

Artist:
William Baziotes.

Exhibition description:
This major retrospective of William Baziotes was the first ever to be presented in Europe. Baziotes was a leading protagonist of what is now recognized as one of the most original and creative struggles for a modern artistic expression. While many artists of the 1930s and 1940s shared a regionalist viewpoint, Baziotes and a small number of artists, mostly centered in New York City, looked instead to European sources. As with many of his contemporaries, Baziotes first experimented with Cubist and Surrealist styles, absorbing the formal lessons and psychological sensibilities in the work of a wide range of artists from Old Masters to avant-garde painters such as Jean Arp, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Sebastian Matta. In 1943, Baziotes participated in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. The following year he was the second of almost a dozen artists—including Jackson Pollock, David Hare, Clyfford Still, and his good friend Robert Motherwell—to be given a debut exhibition at the gallery. Clement Greenberg’s review started: “All credit is due to Peggy Guggenheim for her enterprise in presenting young and unrecognized artists at her Art of This Century gallery. But even more to her credit is her acumen. Two of the abstract painters she has recently introduced—Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes—reveal more than promise: on the strength of their first one-man shows they have already placed themselves among the six or seven best painters we possess.” This exhibition brought together thirty-seven paintings and twenty watercolors, and was organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate and his widow, Ethel Baziotes.

Catalogue:
Preble, Michael. William Baziotes. Paintings and drawings, 1934–1962. Milan: Skira, 2004.

Two catalogues, in English and Italian. Catalogues include prefaces by Thomas Krens (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) and Michael Preble (curator), and essays by Michael Preble, Jasper Sharp, Ethel Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst and Charles Seliger. Catalogues also contain the exhibition checklist, a biography prepared by Tatiana Cuevas Guevara, and a bibliography.

Library location: GUGG PGC 2004 .07 (English) ; GUGG PGC 2004 .08 (Italian).