Modern Art Collected
A rainy weekend day in a city like Venice. Best to spend some hours in a gallery, a museum – surrounded by an atmosphere of creativity and aesthetics.
Located in her former home, in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Canale Grande, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection represents and surprises as one of the most elevated galleries of European and American Art of the 20th century.
Peggy Guggenheim
Born in New York in 1898, Peggy Guggenheim’s mother belonged to one of the leading bank dynasities of that time, whereas her father’s family had created a fortune from metal mining and smelting. When she worked in a bookstore for avant-garde as one of her first jobs, she came into contact with the type of art which should determine her life.
With 1921 Peggy Guggenheim went to live in Paris where she found herself at the heart of Paris’ bohème such as the American expatriate society. In 1922 she got to know and later on married the French painter and sculptor Laurence Vail, and from this connection came her two children, Pegeen and Sindbad.
In 1938 she left for London. Thanks to her inheritance and following an advice of her close friend Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, as she herself described it, decided to dedicate herself to art and made her collection her life’s work. So that year she opened her gallery ‘Guggenheim Jeune’, showing from then on contemporary, postwar art.
She returned to Paris in 1939, wanting to found there her first museum. But the outbreak of World War II thwarted her plans, nevertheless Peggy Guggenheim intended to fulfill her that-time-motto of purchasing ‘one picture a day’.
Mid-1941 she fled from France and returned to New York. There in 1942 she opened her museum ‘Art of this Century’ which became known as a center for avant-garde art movements, for Cubist Art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
In 1947 Peggy Guggenheim decided to return to Europe, invited to exhibit her collection 1948 at the Biennale in Venice. There she acquired the Palazzo Vernier the Leoni where she lived from then on.
From 1951 she started to open her house and art to the public. Her collection then traveled to museums worldwide.
Peggy Guggenheim died in 1979. Her work still lives.
The collection
Many artists Peggy Guggenheim met and whose works she collected and exhibited became her friend, for some of them she was a valuable mentor. Herewith I may only give a very short but elusive overview of the paintings presented in Venice which fascinated me the most.
The early work of Marc Chagall is assigned to the neo-primitive style. In his painting The Rain he combined motifs of Russian folk life, deeply rooted in his nostalgia for his homeland, with techniques from current French art. Thus intense colors as the play with shades remember a marvelous poetic dream.
First painting Cézannesque landscapes, the Romanian painter Victor Brauner, after passing the expressionist style, from his years in Paris on became one of the most impressive representatives of Surrealism. His postwar paintings as Untitled shown by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection incorporate forms and symbols based on Tarot cards, Egyptian hieroglyphes and antique Mexican codes.
Joan Mitchell at her time was one of only a few American female avant-gardists who achieved international reputation.
As a member of New York’s Abstract Expressionist school she was recognized for her bold colors and gestural brushstrokes. With her Composition Joan Mitchell mainly intended, as in her own words, to ‘catch a feeling’.
Each style the Spanish painter and graphic artist Pablo Picasso became known for, the Blue Period, the Rose Period, shows exceptional strength.
With his work The Poet he represents a new development in Analytical Cubism where the figure first has been dissected and fragmented. Then it got reconstructed as a new architecture of rectilinear and curvilinear elements, means of lines and planes, as well as of different shades.
The American Jackson Pollock belonged to those artists who Peggy Guggenheim supported and promoted through and with her exhibitions.
Eyes in the Heat as part of his canvas’ series ‘Sounds in the Grass’ was created during Jackson Pollock’s stay on Long Island, showing its light, flora and fauna. He no longer painted with a brush but applied pigments directly from the tube, smearing them with a blunt instrument and thus giving the picture its depth.
An oeuvre with which I have not been familiar so far and impressed me even more, are the paintings and sculptures of Peggy Guggenheim’s beloved daughter Pegeen Vail, her art described as a combination of her unique naive style and elements from Surrealism.
It was said that Pegeen Vail often struggled with depressions, nevertheless or exactly because of this reason she created scenes of happy, affectionately attached people in cheerful, radiant colors. So does the painting At the Seaside, as does the series of twelve poured-glass sculptures in vitrine, Clementine.
