MY MAGICAL ATTIC: June 2019

June 30, 2019

THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION: ARTS, ARTISTS & COLLECTOR

II. CUBISM, FUTURISM, AND ETHER PHYSICS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

BY LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON

Returning to the question of Cubism and science leads us to another key moment in the history of modernism’s engagement with the invisible and imperceptible, which forms a leitmotif within this issue of Science in Context. In order to determine the parameters of “what it was possible to imagine” (Harrison 1993) for an artist like Picasso in the pre-World War I era, we need to investigate the visual evidence of his Cubist works (e.g., the Portrait of Kahnweiler of 1910 [fig. 2]) within the cultural field of avant-garde art writing, popular scientific literature, and even occult sources in this period. Unfortunately, Picasso himself remains an elusive subject, a painter’s painter who wrote no statements of his artistic ideas in this period – in contrast to the Salon Cubists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Duchamp, or the Italian Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni (see his 1913 drawing Muscular Dynamism on the cover of this issue).49 Like Duchamp, whose extensive notes for the Large Glass provide a useful guide to science as popularly known in prewar Paris, Boccioni was actively engaged with contemporary science. As he queried in a diary entry of 1907, “How,

where, when can I study all that chemistry and physics?” (Coen 1988, 257).50 Thus,

chronicling Boccioni’s visual and verbal responses to contemporary science serves as

a useful counterpoint to an examination of Picasso’s Cubism, given the considerable

artistic and literary exchange between Paris and Milan.51

For Picasso the case will necessarily be more circumstantial. Yet an artist hardly needed to have had the specific interest in science of Boccioni or Duchamp, since the exhilarating new ideas issuing from contemporary science were readily available in popular journals, newspapers, and books as well as responses to these phenomena in avant-garde literature.52 In addition, the presence of the erudite poet Guillaume Apollinaire in Picasso’s circle and the record of his library provide important clues to ideas that may have been present within Picasso’s milieu, which also included the poet Max Jacob, the poet and critic Andre Salmon, and the salon of Gertrude Stein. Before investigating Picasso, we need to de-familiarize his Analytical Cubist works such as the Portrait of Kahnweiler, which have come to look so natural to us in the last fifty years, hanging on the walls of collections of modern art. Since mid-century we have tended to see Cubist painting through the formalist art historical explanations of its evolution as a logical, internal stylistic development, resulting from the lessons Picasso and his collaborator Georges Braque learned from the art of Paul C´ezanne and African art.53 Hence, from C´ezanne came the initial geometrical orientation and denial of one point perspective and from African art, the powerfully simplified forms and, ultimately, the conceptual sign language that enabled Picasso to communicate information about a sitter in the same way a caricaturist distills a subject’s key characteristics. Yet, while the stylistic explanation is convincing for early Cubist painting, by later 1909 or 1910, such radical changes occur that artistic sources alone are no longer adequate. More recent scholarship has gone a considerable way toward recovering Cubism’s larger cultural context, including the fourth dimension, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and contemporary politics, but there are still basic questions posed by paintings such as the Portrait of Kahnweiler. Why would Picasso and Braque so stubbornly deny the solidity and boundaries of forms, causing their sitters to dissolve into the surrounding space? The two painters always considered themselves realist painters, with Picasso explaining later, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them” (Gomez de la Serna 1929, 100). What can Picasso have been thinking or imagining about the nature of reality?

Over two decades before the public in France first heard of Einstein and Relativity Theory, the decade of the 1890s witnessed a series of scientific discoveries that successively challenged conventional notions of matter and space. These widely discussed developments included Wilhelm Conrad R¨ontgen’s discovery of the X-ray in 1895, Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896 (extended by the subsequent work of Marie and Pierre Curie as well as Ernest Rutherford), J. J. Thomson’s identification of the electron in 1897, and the subsequent establishment of wireless telegraphy based on the electro magnetic waves Heinrich Hertz had identified in 1888.54

The existence of invisible realms just beyond the reach of the human eye was no longer a matter of mystical or philosophical speculation; it had been established empirically by science. Madame Curie asserted in regard to radioactivity in 1904, “Once more we

are forced to recognize how limited is our direct perception of the world around us”

(Curie 1904, 461).

Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray caused the greatest popular scientific sensation

before the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 (Badash 1979, 9). Rendering matter

transparent, X-rays made previously invisible forms visible. Even more importantly, however, the X-ray definitively demonstrated the inadequacy of the human eye, which detects only a small fraction (i.e., visible light) of the much larger spectrum of vibrating electromagnetic waves then being defined.55 As the astronomer Flammarion argued of X-rays in his 1900 book L’Inconnu, “[I]t is unscientific to assert that realities are stopped by the limits of our knowledge and observation” (Flammarion 1901, 14). On a practical level, X-rays were quickly adopted in medical practice, and photography journals touted X-ray photography as the natural extension of the amateur photographer’s activity. And the massive amount of popular literature on the subject – including articles, books, songs, cartoons, poems, and cinema – kept X-rays and their subsequent development in the news well into the first decade of the new century (see Glasser 1934, chap. 6; Knight 1986; Henderson 1988).

X-rays offered a radically new way of seeing, breaking down the barrier that the skin had always represented between outer and inner. That same transparency and fluidity are evident in Picasso’s portrait of his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a shift the sitter himself described around 1915 as “pierc[ing] the closed form” or “skin” (Kahnweiler 1949, 10). Here was a new kind of light that allowed a painter to go beyond the preoccupation of earlier artists with surface appearances. Kahnweiler also noted that Picasso considered traditional modeling with visible light and shade to be a dishonest “illusion” (Kahnweiler 1949, 11; Karmel 2003, 12). Beyond the ubiquity of the X-ray in popular culture, Picasso was an amateur photographer and would have encountered the advocacy of the new X-rays as “photography of the invisible” in photography journals. Further, as John Richardson has documented, Picasso’s companion, Fernande Olivier, was X-rayed in a hospital in January 1910. And in 1917 Picasso queried in one of his sketchbooks, “Has anyone put a prism in front of X-ray light?” (Richardson 1996, 158). All of this is not to suggest that Picasso’s images derive from X-ray photographs, but rather that Cubist painting employs the general model of penetrating vision as well as the characteristics of transparency and fluidity suggested in X-ray images.56

Although, in contrast to Picasso’s static sitter, Boccioni’s Muscular Dynamism depicts a figure in motion, the Futurist’s drawings and paintings of this period exhibit a similar fluid relationship of figure and space. It was Boccioni who had made the first published mention of X-rays in relation to avant-garde painting, declaring in the 1910 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting”: “Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies . . . ? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to the X-rays?” (Boccioni 1973, 28). Subsequently, he asserted in 1911, “What needs to be painted is not the visible but what has heretofore been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees” (Coen 1988, 239). Given the Futurists’ connections to activities in Paris, Boccioni’s comments testify to the international currency of the new focus on the invisible as well as occultism, in which Boccioni was deeply interested.57

The interpenetration of matter and space in the works of both Picasso and Boccioni would have been encouraged equally in this period by popular fascination with radioactivity. With the Curies’ isolation of two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium, in l898 and Ernest Rutherford’s subsequent formulation of the theory of radioactive decay in 1902–3, radioactivity captured the attention of the general public (Badash 1979). Radioactive substances produced yet another kind of invisible emissions – alpha, beta, and gamma “rays” (actually particles in the case of the alpha and beta emissions) – and, in the process, actually changed their chemical composition, releasing energy. In contrast to the traditional image of matter as stable and constant, the continuous emission of particles by radioactive substances suggested a vibrating realm of atomic matter in the process of transformation. In his best-selling books, such as L’Evolution de la mati`ere (1905), scientific popularizer Gustave Le Bon argued that all substances were radioactive and that matter was only “a stable form of intra-atomic energy” in the gradual process of decaying back into the ether of space around it (Le Bon 1905, 9; see also Le Bon 1906).58 Le Bon was a friend of the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose import for the Cubists and Boccioni has been well established.

Also, certain of Bergson’s views stand as counterparts to Le Bon’s popularization of universal radioactivity (see, e.g., Antliff 1993; Antliff and Leighten 2001, 80–93; Petrie 1974). In books such as Matter and Memory of 1896 and Creative Evolution of 1907, Bergson argued that the essence of reality was flux and that “all division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division” (Bergson 1988, 196).

Anyone could observe the phenomena of radioactivity at home in the popular parlor toy, the spinthariscope, invented by Sir William Crookes in 1903. Holding this tiny cylindrical instrument fitted with a magnifying lens to the eye, a viewer could see the flashes of light produced when alpha particles from a speck of radium struck the zinc-sulphide screen within. In Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler figure and ground are unified by a shimmering, vibratory texture of brick-like Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes that likewise suggests atoms of matter disassociating into the surrounding space, itself already filled with such particulate emissions. Such images likewise deny the “independent bodies” Bergson had rejected in favor of reality as continuity and flux. Boccioni’s paintings of this period, such as his depiction of his mother entitled Matter of 1912 (Giovanni Mattioli Collection, Milan), are likewise executed in a tapestry of discrete brushstrokes with which he deliberately sought to convey the dematerialization of matter.59 In his writings Boccioni spoke of “the electric theory of matter, according to which matter is only energy,” a contemporary theory closely associated with the ether of space, which was also central to Boccioni’s aesthetic (Boccioni 1975, 105).

Picasso need not have read Le Bon’s best-selling books himself. His close compatriot Apollinaire owned a 1908 imprint of Le Bon’s L’Evolution de la mati`ere as well

as Commandant Darget’s book on how to photograph “fluido-magnetic” bodily emanations, such as the “Rayons V (Vitaux),” one of the numerous varieties of emissions and rays thought to have been discovered in the wake of X-rays.60 In the context of contemporary views of photography as a revealer of the invisible, Picasso seems to have been fascinated by the intrusion into his own photographs of “noise” suggestive of invisible phenomena.61 Like Boccioni, Apollinaire was deeply interested in occultism, and he owned a number of books dedicated personally to him by occultist Gaston Danville, including the latter’s 1908 Magn´etisme et spiritisme (Boudar and D´ecaudin 1983, 52). In fact, occult sources served in this period as an important means for the popularization of the new physics, with texts on the practice of Magnetism or on other sort of emissions often drawing on the latest developments in the physics of electromagnetism.62 Given the Curies’ prominence as French cultural luminaries and with Apollinaire close at hand, Picasso could hardly have been unaware of radioactivity’s fundamental reorientation of basic conceptions of matter as well as its occult interpretations.

Along with radioactivity and Le Bon’s talk of matter dematerializing into the ether, the recently discovered Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy (as well as X-rays) focused popular attention on the invisible, impalpable ether of space. Space was not thought of as empty in this period, and the terms space and ether of space are often synonymous in the written record. The longstanding concept of a world-filling “aether” had returned to physics in the 1820s with Augustin Jean Fresnel’s positing of a “luminiferous ether” as the necessary medium for the propagation of light waves. By the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) had concluded that a material ether must also be the source of and vehicle for electromagnetic fields.63 Early conceptions of the imponderable ether ranged from a thin elastic jelly to a swirling fluid, and Kelvin suggested that atoms might well be whirling vortices in the ether, akin to smoke rings.

In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, additional new functions were proposed for the ether, including its possible role as the source of all matter, as in the “electric theory of matter” propounded by Joseph Larmor and Sir Oliver Lodge and embraced in the writings of Boccioni and inWassily Kandinsky’s 1911 U¨ ber das Geistige in der Kunst (see, e.g., Lodge 1904; Kandinsky 1973, 40).

In order to transmit vibrating electromagnetic waves, including light, the mysterious ether required the rigidity of an elastic solid; at the same time, it must allow the free motion of bodies through it and be rarefied enough to flow through the interstices of even the densest matter. Le Bon noted the difficulty of discussing this “phenomena without analogy” (Le Bon 1905, 88); not surprisingly, the writing on the ether by both scientists and popularizers is filled with metaphor. The passage of the immaterial ether through matter was compared to water flowing through a sieve (Houston 1892, 489;

Houston 1909, 232); yet the ether as the very source of matter made this relationship more complex. As science writer Robert Kennedy Duncan declared of this “vast circumambient medium” in 1905: “Not only through interstellar spaces, but through the world also, in all its manifold complexity, through our own bodies; all lie not only encompassed in it but soaking in it as a sponge lies soaked in water.” Raising a basic question repeatedly encountered in popular literature in this period, Duncan declared, “How much we ourselves are matter and how much ether is, in these days, a very moot question” (Duncan 1905, 5; see also, e.g., De Launay 1908). The same year Le Bon in L’Evolution de la mati`ere emphasized the ether’s elemental role in nature: The greater part of physical phenomena – light, heat, radiant electricity, etc., are considered to have their seat in the ether. . . . All the theoretical researches formulated on the constitution of atoms lead to the supposition that it forms the material from which they are made. Although the inmost nature of the ether is hardly suspected, its existence has forced itself upon us long since, and appears to be more assured than that of matter itself. . . . Its role has become of capital importance, and has not ceased to increase with the progress of physics. The majority of phenomena would be inexplicable without it.

(Le Bon 1905, 88–89)64

Historians of culture regularly treat Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity (if not the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment’s failure to detect an “ether wind” resulting from the earth’s motion) as the death knell of the ether. However, not only did the general public not hear of Einstein’s theories until 1919, the question of the existence of the ether was hotly debated among scientists skeptical of Einstein’s theories during the 1910s and 1920s, with passionate defenses of the ether being made in scientific and popular literature, including in France.65 Reflecting the mood of the ether’s adherents, Sir J. J. Thomson declared in his Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1909, “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe. . . . The study of this all-pervading substance is perhaps the most fascinating duty of the physicist” (Thomson 1910, 15). Lodge certainly took that position, and his own BAAS Presidential Address, published as Continuity in 1913, along with his 1909 The Ether of Space and countless popular articles, kept the ether in the spotlight in England and the United States, as well as in France. In Einstein’s Germany the ether also continued to be championed in the 1910s by scientists such as Gustav Mie, for whose electromagnetic theory of matter it was central.66 Even with the ultimate scientific triumph of Relativity Theory sans ether, the concept possessed such a powerful grip on the cultural imagination that it lasted well into the 1920s and beyond.67

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the ether was the ultimate sign of continuity and signified a realm of continuous cohesion and diffusion, materialization and dematerialization, coursed through by forces and vibrating waves. Two later statements by Picassso are remarkably suggestive of this insubstantial realm. Speaking of his paintings of the period 1910–1912 he told curator William Rubin, “It’s not a reality you can take in your hand. It’s more like perfume – in front of you, behind you, to the sides. The scent is everywhere, but you don’t quite know where it comes from”

(Rubin 1972, 72). Some years earlier he had described his portrait of Kahnweiler to Francoise Gilot in similar terms: “In its original form it looked to me as though it were about to go up in smoke. But when I paint smoke, I want you to be able to drive a nail into it. So I added the attributes – a suggestion of the eyes, the wave in the hair, an ear lobe, the clasped hands – and now you can” (Gilot and Lake 1964, 73). Did Picasso resort to such language because the ether was no longer in common parlance as it had been? Significantly, the association of the ether with smells such as perfume appears in a contemporary text, Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life of 1912. In discussing the powers of collective representations to take on “properties that do not exist in them,” Durkheim concedes that sensations of smell, taste, and sight “do express the properties of particular material or movements of the ether that really do have their origin in the bodies we perceive as being fragrant, tasty, or colorful” (Durkheim 1995, 229).

The ether is probably the major lacuna in scholars’ understanding of the early twentieth century worldview – both scientific and occult – and, hence, its importance for modernism in general. We need to be alert to its presence in writing of the period, although as in the Durkheim example, it may simply appear as a commonplace reference. Seen as both an ancient and a modern concept, the ether figured prominently in occultism, and there achieved another kind of ubiquity. Apollinaire himself responded to Theosophist Madame Blavatsky’s writing on the subject, echoing her in a 1915 letter: “Is not every part of the material universe – including the immaterial ether – a microcosm?” (quoted in Henderson 1986, 228). The ether, along with Bergson’s philosophy, figures in Apollinaire’s fellow poet Jules Romains’s theory of collective consciousness, which he termed Unanimism (see, e.g., Martin 1969; Antliff and Leighten 2001, 93–95). In his 1908 prose poem La Vie Unanime Romains celebrated the experience of immersion in a vibrating, energyfilled ether on a Paris street. The section of the poem titled “Dynamism,” which also speaks of “rays that cannot be seen to vibrate,” begins with the epigram “The present vibrates” and includes this passage: “The current/crowd, which struggles to pass through/And gets hooked on the hedges of molecules, bleeds. The ripples of ether part, [vibrating] with excitement” (Romains [1913], 79). The Salon Cubists circle was close to Romains, and it has been argued that the presence of smoke in their paintings was an allusion to Unanimism’s celebration of urban experience, an idea that takes on new significance in relation to the ether (Sund 1984).

The ether was also at the heart of Boccioni’s artistic theory. At the conclusion of his 1914 treatise Pittura scultura futuriste Boccioni reveals the formative role of the ether as ultimate sign of continuity in his conception of the 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 3), for which Muscular Dynamism is a study (Henderson 2002, 133–38). Believing that “solid bodies are only atmosphere condensed,” Boccioni here creates a remarkable image of successive muscular displacements that deny the boundaries of the body and leave traces or imprints on the surrounding ether, suggesting “ether drag.” In his treatise Boccioni specifically equates the “materialization of the ethereal fluid, the imponderable” with “the unique form of continuity in space” (Boccioni 1975, 104). In the end, Muscular Dynamism, with its continuous interpenetration of figure and space, may be even more successful as a representation of the fluid continuity suggested by the ether (cover illustration).

Boccioni also related Unique Forms of Continuity in Space to the spatial fourth dimension. He appears to have thought of the sculpture alternatively as a four dimensional entity passing through three-dimensional space and registering a succession of different appearances – “a continuous projection of forces and forms intuited in their infinite unfolding” (Boccioni 1975, 73). In defining a dynamic fourth dimension for Futurism in his 1914 treatise, Boccioni was claiming the fourth dimension for Futurism and reacting to the prominent role the spatial fourth dimension played in Cubist theory.

In contrast to later interpretations that attempted to tie Picasso’s Cubism and Apollinaire’s criticism to the temporal fourth dimension of Einstein’s space-time world, Cubism’s fourth dimension basically signified a suprasensible spatial dimension that might hold a truth higher than that of visible reality.68 With its roots in n-dimensional geometry and with significations ranging from geometry and science to philosophy, mysticism, and occultism, the fourth dimension generated a huge amount of popular literature in Europe and the United States. In tandem with the scientific issues discussed above, the possible existence of an additional dimension of space would certainly have encouraged Picasso’s bold pictorial invention. In the Portrait of Kahnweiler, for example, the geometrical faceting of objects suggests a more complex reality beyond immediate perception. Picasso’s painting, in fact, shares with contemporary geometrical diagrams of four-dimensional figures differently shaded angular components in ambiguous spatial relationships as well as a sense of shifting views of an object fused into one (fig. 4).

Ultimately, the interpenetration of form and space – derived in large part from contemporary scientific ideas – denies the possibility of reading the painting’s space as

three-dimensional.69

Discussions of Picasso and the fourth dimension have hinged on the presence in his circle of the insurance actuary Maurice Princet as well as Apollinaire’s declaration in his Les Peintres Cubistes that the fourth dimension was part of the “language of the modern studios” (Apollinaire 1944, 12). According to Apollinaire’s text, the fourth dimension offered artists a rationale for distorting or deforming objects according to a higher law and for rejecting three-dimensional, one-point perspective, which now seemed quite irrelevant (Apollinaire 1944, 12; Henderson 1983, 75–89). In their 1912 book Du Cubisme Metzinger and Gleizes also discussed Cubism’s new mobile perspectives in relation to Henri Poincar´e’s advocacy of perception using senses other than vision, i.e., tactile and motor sensations, and his idea that “motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles” (Poincar´e 1902, 72–73).70

Poincar´e and Princet are crucial figures for Arthur Miller in his recent book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. In contrast to the numerous authors who have attempted to find direct links or correlations between Picasso and Einstein, Miller explores the “parallel biographies” of the two, arguing for their common sources in the figure of Henri Poincar´e and the field of four dimensional geometry (via Minkowski and Poincar´e for Einstein, via Princet for Picasso).71 Nonetheless, Miller’s title still evokes for the potential reader the myth that some historical link existed between these cultural icons. As Duchamp observed in a 1967 interview, “The public always needs a banner; whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other” (Cabanne [1967] 1971, 26). From the vantage point of the 1960s, Duchamp was summing up a phenomenon he had observed developing since the

1920s: the emergence of the perception of Picasso as the modern artist and Einstein as

the scientist of the twentieth century.72 Duchamp was an especially sensitive witness to

this, since he knew personally that the art world of prewar Paris – including Cubism –

had involved a variety of artists, including himself, and that the science in question had

not been Einstein’s.

Along with Giedion’s 1941 Space, Time, and Architecture, Apollinaire’s Les Peintres Cubistes text on the fourth dimension played a definitive role in the emergence of the Cubism-Relativity myth in New York in the 1940s. Giedion had cited Apollinaire’s discussion of the fourth dimension and identified it as time, even though the poet repeatedly referred to space (Giedion 1941, 357; Apollinaire 1944, 12). When The Cubist Painters was published in George Wittenborn’s “Documents of Modern Art” series in 1944, its readers could easily have drawn a similar conclusion. Reflecting the goal of Wittenborn and series editor Robert Motherwell to establish modern art’s legitimacy, the books of the series bore on the back cover a text emphasizing that modern art “assimilat[ed] the ideas and morphology of the twentieth century” and was “the expression of our own historical epoch” (Apollinaire 1944, back cover; italics mine). Here the stage was set for what became the classic confusion between Cubism then and science now. Kepes’ references to space-time in his Language of Vision of the same year – along with Moholy-Nagy’s even more influential celebration of Einstein and space-time as basic to understanding of modern life and art in his 1947 Vision in Motion – only exacerbated the situation.

By the 1940s both the spatial fourth dimension and ether physics had faded from popular consciousness, occluded by Einstein and Relativity Theory. Largely forgotten were the scientific heroes of the pre-World War I era in France: the Curies, Poincar´e, and science popularizer Gustave Le Bon, as well as R¨ontgen, Rutherford, Lodge, and Crookes. Lodge and Crookes, along with Flammarion – with their openness to the occult and involvement in the Society for Psychical Research – are pointed reminders of the wider range of activities that were often classed as “science” in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Occultists regularly drew on the latest science to support their causes, particularly in the linkages regularly made between X-rays and spirit photography, radioactivity and alchemy, telegraphy and telepathy, and, as noted earlier, electromagnetism and Magnetism.73 Such analogies were also drawn from the side of science, as in Crookes’ prominent declaration in his 1898 Presidential Address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science that “ether vibrations have powers and attributes equal to any demand – even to the transmission of thought” (Crookes 1899, 31).

That capability of vibratory thought transfer attributed to the ether was vital to the art theory of the painters Kandinsky and Frantiˇsek Kupka, who conceived their abstract canvases as the source of vibrations meant to resonate in a viewer (see, e.g.,

Henderson 2002).74 Similarly, the poet Ezra Pound responded to the theme of ethereal telegraphy/telepathy, comparing artists and poets to antennae “on the watch for new emotions, new vibrations sensible to faculties as yet ill understood” (Pound 1912, 500). As in the case of these modernists – along with the writings of Cubists, Futurists, and

Duchamp – the operative words that emerge from analyzing early twentieth-century cultural discourse are not space-time and relativity, but rather terms such as invisible, energy, ether, vibration, and fourth dimension. Late classical ether physics – not relativity theory – was the armature of the cultural matrix that stimulated the imaginations of modern artists and writers before the later 1910s and 1920s. Scholars of early modernism in general will surely benefit by turning their attention to this long-eclipsed, but vitally important, moment in the history of science and culture. “Sifted science will do your arts good,” James Joyce declared in Finnegans Wake ( Joyce 1959, 440), and, as this issue of Science in Context demonstrates, many modern artists clearly agreed.75

JOSEF ALBERS
HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE R III A-I, 1970

Oil on Masonite

Dimensions: 81.3 x 81.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Gift, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation,
In Honor of Philip Rylands For his Continued Commitment
to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection 97.4556
© Josef Albers, by SIAE 2008

HENRI LAURENS (1885 – 1954)

HEAD OF YOUNG GIRL 1920, CAST 1959

Terracotta

Dimensions:13 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches (34.2 x 16.5 cm)

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Cubism

Henri Laurens, who associated closely with the avant-garde painters of his native Paris, worked in a Cubist idiom from 1915. In about 1920 he turned from the production of bas-reliefs and frontalized constructions to the execution of more classically ordered, freestanding sculptures. Head of a Young Girl may have appeared originally as a drawing. However, in this bust Laurens expresses Cubist painting principles in essentially sculptural terms. The tilted surfaces and geometric volumes of the sculpture interpenetrate to constitute a compact whole. Circling the piece, the viewer perceives dramatically different aspects of the head, which provide a variety of visual experiences unexpected in a form so schematically reduced.

The structuring planes of one side of the head are broad and unadorned; its edges and planar junctures form strong, uninterrupted curves and straight lines. The other side is articulated with detail; its jagged, hewn contour describing hair contrasts rhythmically with the sweeping curve of the opposite cheek. Laurens slices into the polyhedron that determines the facial planes to describe nose, upper lip, and chin at one stroke. The subtle modeling, particularly of the almond eye and simplified mouth, produces nuanced relations of light and shadow. Despite the geometric clarity of structure, the delicacy of the young girl’s features and her self-contained pose create a gentle, meditative quality.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2413

SALVADOR DALI (1904 – 1989)

BIRTH OF LIQUID DESIRES, 1931 - 1932

Oil and Collage on Canvas

Dimensions: 37 7/8 x 44 1/4 inches (96.1 x 112.3 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Movement: Surrealism

By the time Salvador Dalí joined the Surrealist group in 1929, he had formulated his “paranoid-critical” approach to art, which consisted in conveying his deepest psychological conflicts to the viewer in the hopes of eliciting an empathetic response. He embodied this theoretical approach in a fastidiously detailed painting style. One of his hallucinatory obsessions was the legend of William Tell, which represented for him the archetypal theme of paternal assault.¹ The subject occurs frequently in his paintings from 1929, when he entered into a liaison with Gala Eluard, his future wife, against his father’s wishes. Dalí felt an acute sense of rejection during the early 1930s because of his father’s attitude toward him.

Here father, son, and perhaps mother seem to be fused in the grotesque dream-image of the hermaphroditic creature at center. William Tell’s apple is replaced by a loaf of bread, with attendant castration symbolism. (Elsewhere Dalí uses a lamb chop to suggest his father’s cannibalistic impulses.) Out of the bread arises a lugubrious cloud vision inspired by the imagery of Arnold Böcklin. In one of the recesses of this cloud is an enigmatic inscription in French: “Consigne: gâcher l’ardoise totale?”

Reference to the remote past seems to be made in the two forlorn figures shown in the distant left background, which may convey Dalí’s memory of the fond communion of father and child. The infinite expanse of landscape recalls Yves Tanguy’s work of the 1920s. The biomorphic structure dominating the composition suggests at once a violin, the weathered rock formations of Port Lligat on the eastern coast of Spain, the architecture of the Catalan visionary Antoni Gaudí, the sculpture of Jean Arp, a prehistoric monster, and an artist’s palette. The form has an antecedent in Dalí’s own work in the gigantic vision of his mother in The Enigma of Desire of 1929. The repressed, guilty desire of the central figure is indicated by its attitude of both protestation and arousal toward the forbidden flower-headed woman (presumably Gala). The shadow darkening the scene is cast by an object outside the picture and may represent the father’s threatening presence, or a more general prescience of doom, the advance of age, or the extinction of life.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/935

SALVADOR DALI

UNTITLED, 1931
Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 27.2 x 35 cm
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 99
© Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, by SIAE 2008

ALEXANDER CALDER

THE COW, 1971
Painted Steel

Dimensions: 304.8 x 360.7 x 248.9 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and Rudolph B.

Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© 2014 Calder Foundation, New York / SIAE, Rome, all rights reserved.

CALDER ® is a registered trademark of Calder Foundation, NY.

ALEXANDER CALDER

ARC OF PETALS, 1941
Painted and Unpainted Sheet Aluminum, Iron Wire

Dimensions: Approximately 214 cm high
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 137
© 2014 Calder Foundation, New York / SIAE, Rome, all Rights Reserved.

CALDER ® is a Registered Trademark of Calder Foundation, NY.

ALEXANDER CALDER

RED DISC, WHITE DOTS ON BLACK,1960
Painted Sheet Metal, Metal Rods and Steel Wire

Dimensions: 88.9 x 101 x 99 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, Bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© 2014 Calder Foundation, New York / SIAE, Rome, all Rights Reserved. CALDER ® is a Registered Trademark of Calder Foundation, NY.

ALEXANDER CALDER

LE GRAND PASSAGE, 1974
Tempera and India Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 58 x 78 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 139a
© 2014 Calder Foundation, New York / SIAE, Rome, All Rights Reserved.

CALDER ® is a Registered Trademark of Calder Foundation, NY.

MAX ERNST (1891 – 1976)

ATTIREMENT OF THE BRIDE, 1940

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 51 x 37 7/8 inches (129.6 x 96.3 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

Attirement of the Bride is an example of Max Ernst’s veristic or illusionistic Surrealism, in which a traditional technique is applied to an incongruous or unsettling subject. The theatrical, evocative scene has roots in late nineteenth-century Symbolist painting, especially that of Gustave Moreau. It also echoes the settings and motifs of sixteenth-century German art. The willowy, swollen-bellied figure types recall those of Lucas Cranach the Elder in particular. The architectural backdrop with its strong contrast of light and shadow and its inconsistent perspective shows the additional influence of Giorgio de Chirico, whose work had overwhelmed Ernst when he first saw it in 1919.

The pageantry and elegance of the image are contrasted with its primitivizing aspects—the garish colors, the animal and monster forms—and the blunt phallic Symbolism of the poised spearhead. The central scene is contrasted as well with its counterpart in the picture-within-a-picture at the upper left. In this detail the bride appears in the same pose, striding through a landscape of overgrown classical ruins. Here Ernst has used the technique of decalcomania invented in 1935 by Oscar Domínguez, in which diluted paint is pressed onto a surface with an object that distributes it unevenly, such as a pane of glass. A suggestive textured pattern results.

The title of this work had occurred to Ernst at least as early as 1936, when he italicized it in a text in his book Beyond Painting. Ernst had long identified himself with the bird, and had invented an alter ego, Loplop, Superior of the Birds, in 1929. Thus one may perhaps interpret the bird-man at the left as a depiction of the artist; the bride may in some sense represent the young English Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

Lucy Flint

MAX ERNST (1891 – 1976)

THE ANTIPOPE, CA. 1941
Oil on Cardboard, Mounted on Board

Dimensions: 32.5 x 26.5 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 79
© Max Ernst, by SIAE 2008

MAX ERNST (1891 – 1976)

THE ANTIPOPE, 1941 – 1942

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 63 1/4 x 50 inches (160.8 x 127.1 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

Max Ernst settled in New York in 1941 after escaping from Europe with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. The same year he executed a small oil on cardboard (now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection) that became the basis for the large-scale The Antipope. When Guggenheim saw the small version, she interpreted a dainty horse-human figure on the right as Ernst, who was being fondled by a woman she identified as herself. She wrote that Ernst conceded that a third figure, depicted in a three-quarter rear view, was her daughter Pegeen; she did not attempt to identify another horse-headed female to the left.¹ When Ernst undertook the large version from December to March he changed the body of the “Peggy” figure into a greenish column and transferred her amorous gesture to a new character, who wears a pink tunic and is depicted in a relatively naturalistic way. The “Pegeen” figure in the center appears to have two faces, one of a flayed horse that looks at the horse-woman at the left. The other, with only its cheek and jaw visible, gazes in the opposite direction, out over the grim lagoon, like a pensive subject conceived by Caspar David Friedrich.

The great upheavals in Ernst’s personal life during this period encourage such a biographical interpretation. Despite his marriage to Guggenheim, he was deeply involved with Leonora Carrington at this time, and spent hours riding horses with her. As birds were an obsession for Ernst, so horses were for Carrington. Her identification with them is suggested throughout her collection of stories La Dame ovale, published in 1939 with seven illustrations by Ernst, two of which include metamorphosed horse creatures. It seems plausible that the alienated horse-woman of The Antipope, who twists furtively to watch the other horse-figure, represents a vision of Guggenheim. Like the triumphal bride in Attirement of the Bride, she wears an owl headgear. Her irreconcilable separation from her companion is expressed graphically by the device of the diagonally positioned spear that bisects the canvas. The features of the green totemic figure resemble those of Carrington, whose relationship with Ernst was to end soon after the painting was completed, when she moved to Mexico with her husband.

Lucy Flint

1. See P. Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, New York, 1979, pp. 261–62.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1188

MAX ERNST (1891 – 1976)

THE ANTIPOPE, 1941 – 1942 (DETAIL)

MAX ERNST (1891 – 1976)

THE FOREST, 1927 – 1928

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 37 7/8 x 51 inches (96.3 x 129.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 proclaimed “pure psychic automatism” as an artistic ideal, emphasizing inspiration derived from the chance juxtaposition of forms and the haphazard use of materials. Max Ernst came under the influence of Breton’s ideas in 1924, and soon thereafter developed his frottage or rubbing technique.¹ In making his first frottages, he dropped pieces of paper at random on floor boards and rubbed them with pencil or chalk, thus transferring the design of the wood grain to the paper. He next adapted this technique to oil painting, scraping paint from prepared canvases laid over materials such as wire mesh, chair caning, leaves, buttons, or twine. His repertory of objects closely parallels that used by Man Ray in his experiments with Rayograms during the same period. Using his grattage (scraping) technique, Ernst covered his canvases completely with pattern and then interpreted the images that emerged, thus allowing texture to suggest composition in a spontaneous fashion. In The Forest the artist probably placed the canvas over a rough surface (perhaps wood), scraped oil paint over the canvas, and then rubbed, scraped, and overpainted the area of the trees.

The subject of a dense forest appears often in Ernst’s work of the late twenties and early thirties. These canvases, of which The Quiet Forest, 1927, is another example, generally contain a wall of trees, a solar disk, and an apparition of a bird hovering amid the foliage. Ernst’s attitude toward the forest as the sublime embodiment of both enchantment and terror can be traced to his experiences in the German forest as a child.² His essay “Les Mystères de la forêt,” published in Minotaure in 1934, vividly conveys his fascination with the various kinds of forests. The Peggy Guggenheim canvas resonates with those qualities he identified with the forests of Oceania: “They are, it seems, savage and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow. . . . Naked, they dress only in their majesty and their mystery” (author’s translation).

Elizabeth C. Childs

1. For Ernst’s own account of frottage see Max Ernst, “Favorite Poets and Painters of the Past,” in Ernst, Beyond Painting, and other Writings by the Artist and His Friends (New York: Wittenbron, Schultz, 1948), p. 7.

2. Max Ernst, “Some Data on the Youth of M. E. as told by himself,” in Ernst, Beyond Painting, and other Writings by the Artist and His Friends (New York: Wittenbron, Schultz, 1948), p. 27.

EDUARDO CHILLIDA

UNTITLED, 1974
Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 55.2 x 44.8 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Eduardo Chillida, by SIAE 2012

EDUARDO CHILLIDA

UNTITLED, 1974
Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 55.2 x 44.8 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Eduardo Chillida, by SIAE 2012

EDUARDO CHILLIDA

UNTITLED, 1974
Collage on Paper

Dimensions: 55.2 x 44.8 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Eduardo Chillida, by SIAE 2012

EDUARDO CHILLIDA

Untitled, 1974
Collage on paper, 55.2 x 44.8 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Eduardo Chillida, by SIAE 2012

MAN RAY ( 1890 – 1976)

SILHOUTTE, 1916

India Ink, Charcoal, and Gouache on Wood Pulp Board

Dimensions: 20 15/16 x 25 1/4 inches (51.6 x 64.1 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Dada

In 1915 Man Ray abandoned what he called his “Romantic-Expressionist-Cubist” style and adopted a mechanistic, graphic, flattened idiom like that developed by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp during the same period. This drawing is preparatory to his most successful painting in this style, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows of 1916 (Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York), the subject of which was inspired by a vaudeville dancer whose movement he wished to suggest in a series of varying poses.¹ Man Ray’s interest in frozen sequential movement may derive from the experiments in photography he initiated about this time.

The particularized features of the figures in this drawing are eliminated to produce two-dimensional patterned forms that are silhouetted against black oval shadows. The dancer is accompanied not only by her shadow but also by music, concisely indicated by the voluted head of an instrument at the lower right of the support, the strings across the bottom, and the music stand at left. The position of her feet on the strings, which may double as a stave, may be meant to convey a specific sequence of notes, as if the dancer were indeed accompanying herself musically. It seems likely that this drawing represents the first stage in the conception of the painting. In the canvas the three positions of the dancer are superimposed and appear at the top of the composition, with the greater part of the field occupied by her distorted, enlarged, and vividly colored cutout shadows.

Lucy Flint

1. Man Ray discusses the genesis of this work in his autobiography, Self Portrait, Boston and Toronto, 1963, pp. 66–67, 71.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2602

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO
THE NOSTALGIA OF THE POET

Oil and Charcoal on Canvas

Dimensions: 89.7 x 40.7 cm
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 65
© Giorgio de Chirico, by SIAE 2008

This work belongs to a series of paintings of 1914 on the subject of the poet, the best known of which is the Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire. Recurrent motifs in the sequence are the plaster bust with dark glasses, the mannequin, and the fish mold on an obelisk. These objects, bearing no evident relationships to one another, are compressed here into a narrow vertical format that creates a claustrophobic and enigmatic space.

As in The Red Tower, the use of inanimate forms imitating or alluding to human beings has complex ramifications. The sculpture at the lower left is a painted representation of a plaster cast from a stone, marble, or metal bust by an imaginary, or at present unidentified, sculptor. The character portrayed could be mythological, historical, symbolical, or fictional. The fish is a charcoal drawing of a metal mold that could produce a baked “cast” of a fish made with an actual fish. The fish has additional connotations as a religious symbol, and the hooklike graphic sign toward which its gaping mouth is directed has its own cryptic allusiveness. The mannequin is a simplified cloth cast of a human figure—a mold on which clothing is shaped to conform to the contours of a person. Each object, though treated as solid and static, dissolves in multiple significations and paradoxes. Such amalgams of elusive meaning in Giorgio de Chirico’s strangely intense objects compelled the attention of the Surrealists.

Lucy Flint

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/dettagli/opere_dett.php?id_art=48&id_opera=108

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO (1888 – 1978)

THE RED TOWER, 1913

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 28 15/16 x 39 5/8 inches (73.5 x 100.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Giorgio de Chirico’s enigmatic works of 1911 to 1917 provided a crucial inspiration for the Surrealist painters. The dreamlike atmosphere of his compositions results from irrational perspective, the lack of a unified light source, the elongation of shadows, and a hallucinatory focus on objects. Italian piazzas bounded by arcades or classical façades are transformed into ominously silent and vacant settings for invisible dramas. The absence of event provokes a nostalgic or melancholy mood as if one senses the wake of a momentous incident; if one feels the imminence of an act, a feeling of anxiety ensues.

De Chirico remarked that “every object has two appearances: one, the current one, which we nearly always see and which is seen by people in general; the other, a spectral or metaphysical appearance beheld only by some individuals in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction, as in the case of certain bodies concealed by substances impenetrable by sunlight yet discernible, for instance, by x-ray or other powerful artificial means.”¹ Traces of concealed human presences appear in the fraught expanse of this work. One is the partly concealed equestrian monument often identified as Carlo Marochetti’s 1861 statue of King Carlo Alberto in Turin,² which also appears in the background of de Chirico’s The Departure of the Poet of 1914. In addition, in the left foreground, overpainting barely conceals two figures (or statues), one of which resembles a shrouded mythological hero by the 19th-century Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. The true protagonist, however, is the crenellated tower; in its imposing centrality and rotundity it conveys a virile energy that fills the pictorial space.

Lucy Flint

1. Quoted in William Rubin, “De Chirico and Modernism,” in De Chirico, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 57.

2. James Thrall Soby, De Chirico, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), pp. 49–50.

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)

VOICE OF SPACE, 1931 (DETAIL)

RENE MAGRITTE (1898 – 1967)

VOICE OF SPACE, 1931

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 28 5/8 x 21 3/8 inches (72.7 x 54.2 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

MARCEL DUCHAMPB (1887 – 1968)

NUDE (STUDY), SAD YOUNG MAN ON A TRAIN, 1911 - 1912

Oil on Cardboard, Mounted on Masonite

Dimensions: 39 3/8 x 28 3/4 inches (100 x 73 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Succession Marcel Duchamp

Movement: Cubism

This painting, which Marcel Duchamp identified as a self-portrait, was probably begun during December of 1911 in Neuilly, while he was exploring ideas for the controversial Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912. In Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train his transitory though acute interest in Cubism is manifested in the subdued palette, emphasis on the flat surface of the picture plane, and in the subordination of representational fidelity to the demands of the abstract composition.

Duchamp’s primary concern in this painting is the depiction of two movements, that of the train in which we observe the young man smoking and that of the lurching figure itself. The forward motion of the train is suggested by the multiplication of the lines and volumes of the figure, a semitransparent form through which we can see windows, themselves transparent and presumably presenting a blurred, “moving” landscape. The independent sideways motion of the figure is represented by a directionally contrary series of repetitions. These two series of replications suggest the multiple images of chronophotography, which Duchamp acknowledged as an influence, and the related ideas of the Italian Futurists, of which he was at least aware by this time. Here he uses the device not only to illustrate movement, but also to integrate the young man with his murky surroundings, which with his swaying, drooping pose contribute to the air of melancholy. Shortly after the execution of this and similar works, Duchamp lost interest in Cubism and developed his eccentric vocabulary of mechanomorphic elements that foreshadowed aspects of Dada.

Lucy Flint

MARCEL DUCHAMPB (1887 – 1968)

NUDE (STUDY), SAD YOUNG MAN ON A TRAIN, 1911 - 1912 (DETAIL)

ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO

BOXING, 1935
Terra-Cotta

Dimensions: 76.6 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 26
© Alexander Archipenko, by SIAE 2008

MAX ERNST (1891 – 1976)

THE KISS, 1927

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 50 3/4 x 63 1/2 inches (129 x 161.2 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

From humorously clinical depictions of erotic events in the Dada period, such as Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person, Max Ernst moved on to celebrations of uninhibited sexuality in his Surrealist works. His liaison and marriage with the young Marie-Berthe Aurenche in 1927 may have inspired the erotic subject matter of this painting and others of this year. The major compositional lines of this work may have been determined by the configurations of string that Ernst dropped on a preparatory surface, a procedure according with Surrealist notions of the importance of chance effects. However, Ernst used a coordinate grid system to transfer his string configurations to canvas, thus subjecting these chance effects to conscious manipulation. Visually, the technique produces undulating calligraphic rhythms, like those traced here against the glowing earth and sky colors.

The centralized, pyramidal grouping and the embracing gesture of the upper figure in The Kiss have lent themselves to comparison with Renaissance compositions, specifically the Madonna and Saint Anneby Leonardo da Vinci (Collection Musée National du Louvre, Paris).¹ The Leonardo work was the subject of a psychosexual interpretation by Sigmund Freud, whose writings were important to Ernst and other Surrealists. The adaptation of a religious subject would add an edge of blasphemy to the exuberant lasciviousness of Ernst’s picture.

Lucy Flint

1. See the interpretation of this work by N. and E. Calas in The Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Modern Art, New York, 1966, pp. 112–13.

ANDRE MASSON

ARMOR, 1925
Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 80.6 x 54 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 106
© André Masson, by SIAE 2008

MARK ROTHKO

UNTITLED (RED), 1968
Acrylic on Paper, Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 83.8 x 65.4 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / ARS, New York, by SIAE 2012

WOMAN WALKING, 1936

Bronze

Dimensions: 144.6 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 133
© Alberto Giacometti Estate / by SIAE in Italy, 2014

FRANZ KLINE

UNTITLED, 1951
Ink on Paper

Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, Bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Franz Kline, by SIAE 2012

STUART DAVIS
COLOR SKETCH FOR DRAKE UNIVERSITY MURAL

(STUDY FOR ALLEE)

Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 24.7 x 90.8 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Gift, Earl Davis 97.4564
© Stuart Davis, by SIAE 2008

RAOUL HAUSMANN

UNTITLED, 1919
Watercolor on Paper

Dimensions: 38.8 x 27.5 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 88
© Raoul Hausmann, by SIAE 2008

JEAN METZINGER (1883 – 1956)

AT THE CYCLE-RACE TRACK, 1912

Oil and Collage on Canvas

Dimensions: 51 3/8 x 38 1/4 inches (130.4 x 97.1 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Cubism

Jean Metzinger, a sensitive and intelligent theoretician of Cubism, sought to communicate the principles of this movement through his paintings as well as his writings. Devices of Cubism and Futurism appear in At the Cycle-Race Track, though they are superimposed on an image that is essentially naturalistic. Cubist elements include printed-paper collage, the incorporation of a granular surface, and the use of transparent planes to define space. The choice of a subject in motion, the suggestion of velocity, and the fusing of forms find parallels in Futurist painting. Though these devices are handled with some awkwardness and the influence of Impressionism persists, particularly in the use of dots of color to represent the crowd in the background, this work represents Metzinger’s attempt to come to terms with a new pictorial language.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2897

JEAN METZINGER (1883 – 1956)

AT THE CYCLE-RACE TRACK, 1912 (DETAIL)

ALBERTO GIOCOMETTI (1901 – 1966)

STANDING WOMAN (“LEONI”), 1947

Bronze

Dimensions: 60 1/4 inches (153 cm) high, including base

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

An early example of the mature style with which Giacometti is usually identified, this figure is more elongated and dematerialized than Woman Walking, although it retains that sculpture’s frontality and immobility. A sense of ghostly fragility detaches the figure from the world around it, despite the crusty materiality of the surfaces, as animated and responsive to light as those of Rodin.

Giacometti exploited the contradictions of perception in the haunting, incorporeal sculptures of this period. His matchstick-sized figures of 1942 - 1946 demonstrate the effect of distance on size and comment on the notion that the essence of an individual persists even as the body appears to vanish, that is, to become nonexistent. Even his large-scale standing women and striding men seem miniaturized and insubstantial. In 1947 the sculptor commented that “life size figures irritate me, after all, because a person passing by on the street has no weight; in any case he’s much lighter than the same person when he’s dead or has fainted. He keeps his balance with his legs. You don’t feel your weight. I wanted—without having thought about it—to reproduce this lightness, and that by making the body so thin.”¹ Giacometti sought to convey several notions simultaneously in his attenuated plastic forms: one’s consciousness of the nonmaterial presence of another person, the insubstantiality of the physical body housing that presence, and the paradoxical nature of perception. The base from which the woman appears to grow like a tree is tilted, emphasizing the verticality of the figure as well as reiterating the contours of the merged feet.

Giacometti had the present cast made expressly for Peggy Guggenheim.

Lucy Flint

1. Quoted in R. Hohl, Alberto Giacometti,, New York, 1971, p. 278.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/4480

ELLSWORTH KELLY

BLUE RED, 1964
Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 91.4 x 91.4 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Ellsworth Kelly

ELLSWORTH KELLY

42 ND, 1958
Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 153.7 x 203.2 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, Bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Ellsworth Kelly

ELLSWORTH KELLY

GREEN RED, 1964
Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 91.4 x 91.4 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Ellsworth Kelly

JEAN ARP

CROWN OF BUDS I, 1936
Limestone

Dimensions: 49.1 x 37.5 cm
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 56
© Jean Arp, by SIAE 2008

TANCREDI

TRANSPARENCIES OF THE ELEMENTS, 1957
Wax Crayon and Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 68.7 x 99.2 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 287

TANCREDI

UNTITLED, 1954
Gouache on paper,

Dimensions: 69.9 x 99.8 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 286

TANCREDI (1927 – 1964)

COMPOSITION, 1955

Oil and Tempera on Canvas

Dimensions: 51 x 76 3/4 inches (129.5 x 195 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Where Piet Mondrian used the square as a unit with which to express a notion of space and infinity, Tancredi, who saw his aims as parallel to those of Mondrian, seized on the point as his module. He was intrigued by the point’s identity as the determinant sign of location, the smallest indication of presence. Tancredi’s ideas about infinite space and the use of the point within it were developed by 1951, when he settled in Venice. This work typifies the crowded, architectonic compositions he painted before his visit to Paris in 1955.

Incomplete circles vibrant with undiluted pigment radiate from pivotal points and swirl throughout the canvas. These appear below, above, and amid rectangular slabs, the whole comprising a multilayered scaffolding of light and color producing the illusion of extensive, textured depth. Density of form and color increases toward the center of the composition, which consequently appears to bulge forward from the corners, illustrating Tancredi’s view of space as curved. The vitality of execution and tactile richness reflect the influence of Jackson Pollock. The choppy, animated repetition of color applied with a palette knife resembles that of the French-Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, with whom Tancredi exhibited in 1954.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/4032

MANOLA VALDES

LAS MENINAS, 2000
Ten Etchings With Collage on Handmade Paper
Dimensions: case 67.5 x 52.4 x 5.4 cm, each 65 x 50 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Gift in honor of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
by Sandro Rumney and Art of This Century 2000.108
© Manolo Valdés, by SIAE 2008

MANOLA VALDES

MARINO MARINI

THE CLOVEN VISCOUNT, 1998 (CAST 2001)
Bronze

Dimensions: 235 x 95 x 40 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Gift of the Artist 2001.35
© Mimmo Paladino, by SIAE 2008

JOAN MIRO (1893 – 1983)

PAINTING, 1925 (DETAIL)

JOAN MIRO (1893 – 1983)

PAINTING, 1925

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 45 1/8 x 57 3/8 inches (114.5 x 145.7 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

During the mid- to late 1920s Joan Miró developed a private system of imagery in which the motifs have symbolic meanings that vary according to their context. By studying the constellations of these motifs, one is encouraged to infer meanings appropriate to a particular painting.

In Painting two “personages” (the designation Miró used for his abstract figures) and a flame have been identified. The personage on the right can perhaps be read as a female because of the curvaceous nature of the eight-shape, and by analogy with forms in other paintings that are specifically identified by the artist as women. The black dot with radiating lines can be interpreted as the figure’s eye receiving rays of light, or as a bodily or verbal emission. The same motif appears in Personage, also of 1925, in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Moons, stars, suns, or planets float at the upper left of several canvases of the mid-1920s. In the present work the semicircular orange-red image not only carries a cosmic implication, but also possibly doubles as the head of the second personage, probably a male. This head is presented in a combined full-face and profile view, in the manner of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist portraits.

The flame, used repeatedly by Miró in this period, may signify sexual excitation in this context. The erotic content that prevails in much of his work in 1925 is particularly explicit in the Lovers series, in which two figures approach each other or are united in sexual embrace. The two figures in Painting are less clearly conjoined. The submersion of legible subject matter and the ambiguity of the painting’s meaning transfer the emphasis to the purely abstract qualities of the work. Line and color articulate a language as complex and poetic as the hieroglyphic signs that constitute the imagery. The generalized ground, rich in texture from the uneven thinning of paint and the use of shadowy black, provides a warm and earthy support for the expressive black lines, the areas of red and yellow, and the staccato rhythm of dots.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2936

MARINO MARINI

POMONA, 1945
Bronze

Dimensions: 163,5 x 64,5 x 53,5 cm
Long Term Loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Courtesy Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia
© Marino Marini, by SIAE 2008

PIET MONDRIAN

SCAFFOLD: STUDY FOR TABLEAU III, 1914

Charcoal on Paper, Glued on a Homosote Panel in 1941 by Mondrian
Dimensions: Paper 152.5 x 100 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 37

MARINO MARINI

THE ANGEL OF THE CITY, 1948 (CAST 1950 ?)

Bronze

Dimensions: 175 x 176 x 106 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 183
© Marino Marini, by SIAE 2008

WILLEM DE KOONING

NUDE FIGURE – WOMAN ON THE BEACH, 1963
Oil on Paper, Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 81.3 x 67.3 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York, by SIAE 2012

PIET MONDRIAN (1872 – 1944)

COMPOSITION NO: 1 WITH GREY & RED 1938

COMPOSITION WITH RED 1939

Oil on Canvas, Mounted on Wood Support

Dimensions: Canvas: 41 7/16 x 40 5/16 inches (105.2 x 102.3 cm);

Mount: 43 x 41 3/4 x 1 inches (109.1 x 106 x 2.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: De Stijl

Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939

From 1938 to 1940 Piet Mondrian, who had fled wartime Paris, was established in London near his friends Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson. During this period he continued working in the highly reductivist Neo-Plastic mode he had developed in France, in which horizontal and vertical black lines intersect on the canvas in asymmetrically balanced relationships to yield flat white or colored quadrilaterals. The palette is generally restricted to black, white, and primary colors. The present work is among the more coloristically austere examples.

By divorcing form completely from its referential meaning, Mondrian hoped to provide a visual equivalent for the truths that inhabit nature but are concealed in its random, flawed manifestations. He felt that if he could communicate these truths by means of a system of resolved oppositions, a “real equation of the universal and the individual,”¹ the spiritual effect on the viewer would be one of total repose and animistic harmony. In order to effect this transmission the artist must sublimate his personality so that it does not interfere with the viewer’s perception of the rhythmic equilibrium of line, dimension, and color. These elements, however, are organized not according to the impersonal dictates of mathematics but rather to the intuition of the artist. Likewise, although the artist’s gesture is minimized and the reference to personal experience erased, his presence can be detected in the stroke of the paintbrush and the unevenness of the edge of the transcendent line. The individual consciousness exists in a dialectical relationship with “the absolute,” which is realized pictorially through, in Mondrian’s words, the “mutual interaction of constructive elements and their inherent relations.”² Just as the forms and space of the canvas are abstracted from life, so the spiritual plane is removed from, though related to, the work of art. Mondrian sought to unite art, matter, and spirit to discover in all aspects of experience the universal harmony posited in Neo-Plasticism.

Lucy Flint

1. Quoted in Theories of Modern Art, ed. H. B. Chipp, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968, p. 350.

2. Ibid., p. 351.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3053

PAUL KLEE (1879 – 1940)

MAGIC GARDEN, 1926 (DETAIL)

OCEANIA

SUSPENSION HOOK
Papua, New Guinea, East Sepik Province, Western latmul
Wood

Dimensions: 65 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 235
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

PAUL KLEE (1879 – 1940)

MAGIC GARDEN, 1926

Oil on plaster-filled wire mesh in artist's frame

Dimensions: Plaster: 20 1/2 x 16 5/8 inches (52.1 x 42.2 cm);

Frame: 20 7/8 x 17 3/4 inches (53 x 45.1 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Bauhaus

JAPAN

WAGOJIN
Wood

Dimensions: 71 x 38 cm
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 260
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

PIET MONDRIAN (1872 – 1944)

OCEAN 5, 1914

Charcoal and Gouache on Wood-Pulp Wove Paper, Glued to Homosote Panel

Dimensions: Sheet: 34 1/2 x 47 3/8 inches (87.6 x 120.3 cm);

Mount: 35 1/2 x 48 3/8 x 1/2 inches (90.2 x 123 x 1.3 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Cubism

Piet Mondrian first treated the theme of the sea in naturalistic works of 1909–11, during lengthy sojourns in the village of Domburg on the coast of Dutch Zeeland. He assimilated and adapted the Cubismof Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris soon after his arrival there in the winter of 1911–12. He returned to the Netherlands in the summer of 1914 and probably in the following war years worked on the studies of the sea that culminated in the Pier and Ocean paintings of 1917.

The oval format and grid structure used in these works are devices derived from Cubism. They serve respectively to resolve the problem of the compositional interference of the corners and to organize and unify the picture’s elements. For Mondrian the horizontal-vertical arrangement did not have an exclusively pictorial function, as it did for the Cubists, but carried mystical implications. He viewed the horizontal and vertical as basic oppositional principles that could interact to produce a union symbolizing a state of universal harmony.

Although Mondrian’s source exists in the natural world, in the motion of waves and their contact with breakwaters, the signs for this source have been reduced to their most essential pictorial form. The strokes are determined by their structural function rather than their descriptive potential, and there is no sense of perspectival recession despite the atmospheric texture of the gouache highlighting. This highlighting evokes the reflection of light on water and also defines planar surfaces. As Mondrian developed the theories of Neo-Plasticism, these suggestions of natural phenomena disappeared.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3009

PABLO PICASO (1881 – 1973)

THE POET, 1911

Oil on Linen

Dimensions: 51 5/8 x 35 1/4 inches (131.2 x 89.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Cubism

Like The Accordionist in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Poet was painted during the summer of 1911, when Pablo Picasso was working in close association with Georges Braque in the French Pyrenees town of Céret. Similar in style and composition to Braque’s contemporaneous Man with a Guitar (Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York), this canvas epitomizes the moment in the development of Analytic Cubism when the degree of abstraction was so extreme that objects in the painting are almost unrecognizable.

As the title indicates, it is the human form that has been visually dissected and reconstructed as an architecture of rectilinear and curvilinear elements. Despite the elusiveness of the visual clues, the viewer can detect a densely articulated central pyramidal figure fused coloristically and texturally with the less detailed ground. The small circle at the upper center of the canvas penetrated by the acme of a triangular plane becomes an eye when associated with the longer, broader plane of a possible nose and the crescents of a probable mustache. Once this recognition occurs, a complete image can be reconstituted by the inference of chin, pipe, neck, attenuated torso, elbows, and chair arms.

Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image. The fragmentation of the image encourages a reading of abstract rather than representational form. The imagined volumes of figure and object dissolve into non-objective organizations of line, plane, light, and color. Interpenetrating facets of forms floating in a shallow, indeterminate space are defined and shaded by luminous, hatched, almost Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes. The continuity of certain lines through these facets creates an illusion of a system of larger planes that also float in this indefinite space yet are securely anchored within an architectonic structure. The chromatic sobriety characteristic of works by Picasso and Braque of this period corresponds with the cerebral nature of the issues they address.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3429

THE CLARINET, 1912

Oil With Sand on Oval Canvas

Dimensions: 91.4 x 64.5 cm
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 7
© Georges Braque, by SIAE 2008

PABLO PICASSO

HALF-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF A MAN IN A STRIPED JERSEY, 1939
Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 63.1 x 45.6 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 6
© Succession Picasso, by SIAE 2008

PABLO PICASSO
THE DREAM & LIE OF FRANCO, 1937

Aquatint, Two Parts

Dimensions: Each 38.2 x 54.5 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 4a–b
© Succession Picasso, by SIAE 2008

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)

ON THE BEACH, 1937

Oil, Conté Crayon, and Chalk on Canvas

Dimensions: 50 13/16 x 76 3/8 inches (129.1 x 194 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: School of Paris

During the early months of 1937 Pablo Picasso was responding powerfully to the Spanish Civil War with the preparatory drawings for Guernica and with etchings such as The Dream and Lie of Franco, an example of which is in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. However, in this period he also executed a group of works that do not betray this preoccupation with political events. The subject of On the Beach, also known as Girls with a Toy Boat, specifically recalls Picasso’s Three Bathers of 1920. Painted at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre near Versailles, On the Beach is one of several paintings in which he returns to the ossified, volumetric forms in beach environments that appeared in his works of the late 1920s and early 1930s. On the Beach can be compared with Henri Matisse’s Le Luxe, II, ca. 1907–08, in its simplified, planar style and in the poses of the foreground figures. It is plausible that the arcadian themes of his friendly rival Matisse would appeal to Picasso as an alternative to the violent images of war he was conceiving at the time.

At least two preparatory drawings have been identified for this work. In one (Collection Musée Picasso, Paris), the male figure looming on the horizon has a sinister appearance. In the other drawing (present whereabouts unknown),¹ as in the finished version, his mien is softened and neutralized to correspond with the features of the two female figures. The sense of impotent voyeurism conveyed as he gazes at the fertile, exaggeratedly sexual “girls” calls to mind the myth of Diana caught unaware at her bath.

Lucy Flint

1. Reproduced in Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 8 (Paris: Editions cahiers d’art, 1957), no. 343.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3449

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)

PIPE, GLASS, GLASS, BOTTLE OF VIEUX MARC, 1914

Block - Printed, White - Laid, Wove, and Wood Pulp Paper, Newspaper, Charcoal,

India Ink, Printer's Ink, Graphite, and Gouache on Fine Linen Unprimed Canvas

Dimensions: 28 13/16 x 23 3/8 inches (73.2 x 59.4 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Cubism

Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Vieux Marc ( Pipe, verre, bouteille de Vieux Marc )

After fragmenting representational form almost to the point of extinction in 1911, the following year Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque reintroduced more legible imagery, usually derived from the environment of studio or café. Without abandoning all devices of Analytic Cubism, they developed a new idiom, referred to as Synthetic Cubism, in which they built their compositions with broader, flatter, and chromatically more varied planes. In the summer of 1912 Braque produced the first papier collé, in which cut paper is glued to the support and used as a compositional element. In the present example Picasso’s pasted papers include printed material—a piece of wallpaper and the January 1, 1914, issue of Lacerba, a Futurist magazine founded in Florence in 1913. These elements mimic their functions in the external world and therefore introduce a new level of reality into the picture. The printed papers appear to be integrated into the pictorial space rather than lying flat on the surface. A transparent plane outlined in chalk appears to penetrate the newspaper and the guitar seems to cast a shadow on it; the actual physical presence of the wallpaper is similarly contradicted by the addition of drawing.

The treatment of other collaged papers multiplies meaning. In the case of the pipe or table leg, the cutout itself defines the contour of the object and is modeled accordingly with chalk. Penciled indications of other objects, such as the guitar or glass, ignore the shape of the pasted paper, which acts as both a support and a compositional element. The opacity of the collage materials is refuted and the transparency of the object depicted is upheld when Picasso discloses parts of the guitar behind the glass. On the other hand, a piece of Lacerba remains visible through the guitar, which in reality is opaque. Not only does each object have a multiple nature, but its relations in space to other objects are changeable and contradictory. The table assuredly occupies a space between the wall and the picture plane; its collaged corner overlaps a portion of wallpaper and its visible leg obscures part of a baseboard molding. Yet the depth of this space is indeterminate, as the tabletop has reared up so that it is parallel to the picture plane. The respective situations in space of the still-life subjects are equally equivocal—the silhouette of the bottle of Vieux Marc simultaneously obscures and is obscured by the guitar.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3432

BARBARA HEPWORTH

SINGLE FORM, 1961
Bronze

Dimensions: 106 x 67.3 x 11.4 cm
Edition 3/7
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and Rudolph

B. Schulhof Collection, Bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Bowness, Hepworth Estate

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973)

PIPE, GLASS, GLASS, BOTTLE OF VIEUX MARC, 1914 (DETAIL)

THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION

THE PALACE

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice (1). Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level (2). The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Mark’s and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/museum/palazzo.html

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM

PEGGY Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.

In 1921 Peggy traveled to Europe. Thanks to her husband Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, who was an artist), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriot society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. When in 1938, Peggy opened an art gallery in London, called Guggenheim Jeune, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was “a living thing,” and Duchamp introduced her to artists and taught her, as she put it, “the difference between abstract and Surrealist art.” The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, and the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.

In 1939 Peggy conceived “the idea of opening a modern museum in London,” with her friend Herbert Read as its director. The museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection. In 1939-40, having abandoned her project for a museum in London, Peggy busily acquired works for her collection, keeping to her resolve to “buy a picture a day.” Some of the masterpieces, such as works by Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Piet Mondrian and Francis Picabia, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusi’s Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city. In July 1941 Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Sindbad, Pegeen and Laurence Vail (and his second wife Kay Boyle and their children), and Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later.

In October 1942 Peggy opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Romanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery consisted of innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City. Of the opening night, she wrote: “I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art." Peggy exhibited there her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. She produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Ernst, and held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the ‘star’ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.

Pollock and the other artists were among the pioneers of American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of America’s first art movement of international importance.

In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy. Soon after, Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1950 Peggy organized the first European exhibition of Jackson Pollock, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, she continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 she was nominated made an Honorary Citizen of Venice.

In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy to show her collection there. In 1970 she donated her palazzo and in 1976 her works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheim’s uncle Solomon, in order to promote the understanding of art and establish and operate “a museum or museums,” beginning with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum which holds his collection and, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous spiral structure on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of her museum. Since this time, under the oversight of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection has become one of the finest museums of modern art in the world.

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/museum/peggy.html

THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION

BEN NICHOLSON (1894 – 1982)

FEBRUARY, 1956 (MENHIR)

Oil and Ink on Carved Board

Dimensions: 39 1/8 x 11 13/16 inches (99.4 x 30 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

In the early thirties Ben Nicholson began carving reliefs. By 1934 these were composed of circular and rectilinear elements that he painted white. The first series was completed in 1939. When Nicholson focused again on the form in the mid-1950s, the reliefs became subtly varied in coloration and texture. The present example is particularly severe, the absence of curved or diagonal lines recalling the work of Piet Mondrian, whom Nicholson knew and admired. The muted, chalky color evokes early Italian Renaissance frescoes and shards of classical pottery.

The parenthetical menhir (Breton for “long stone”) in the title refers to the simple prehistoric stone slabs found throughout western Europe, especially in Brittany. The association is reinforced by the vertical format and the hewn monochromatic surface of the board. The balance of shape, proportion, and placement, apparently so simple, is achieved adroitly. The thickness of the central rectangle decreases gradually from top to bottom, so that the form projects where it meets the upper rectangle, while lying flush above the lower rectangle. This manipulation produces a tapering shadow that softens the strictly perpendicular alignment of the relief to produce a work of austere harmony.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3237

EL LISSITZKY (1890 – 1941)

UNTITLED 1919 – 1920

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 31 5/16 x 19 1/2 inches (79.6 x 49.6 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Suprematism

This painting reveals the principles of Suprematism that El Lissitzky absorbed under the influence of Kazimir Malevich in 1919–20. Trained as an engineer and possessing a more pragmatic temperament than that of his mentor, Lissitzky soon became one of the leading exponents of Constructivism. In the 1920s, while living in Germany, he became an important influence on both the Dutch De Stijl group and the artists of the German Bauhaus.

Like Malevich, Lissitzky believed in a new art that rejected traditional pictorial structure, centralized compositional organization, mimesis, and perspectival consistency. In this work the ladder of vividly colored forms seems to be floating through indeterminate space. Spatial relationships are complicated by the veil of white color that divides these forms from the major gray diagonal. The linkage of elements is not attributable to a mysterious magnetic pull, as in Malevich’s untitled painting of ca. 1916, but is indicated in a literal way by the device of a connecting threadlike line. The winding line changes color as it passes through the various rectangles that may serve as metaphors for different cosmic planes.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2511

VICTOR BRAUNER

UNTITLED, 1945
Encaustic on Board

Dimensions: 23.3 x 14.8 cm (sight)
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 115
© Victor Brauner, by SIAE 2008

VICTOR BRAUNER

UNTITLED, 1945
Encaustic on Board

Dimensions: 23.3 x 14.8 cm (sight)
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 115
© Victor Brauner, by SIAE 2008

VICTOR BRAUNERB (1903 – 1966)

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SHOCK, 1951

Wax Encaustic on Hardboard

Dimensions: 64 x 80 cm

Credit: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

A symbolic struggle is expressed between the human and bird halves of the hybrid form in Consciousness of Shock, in which Victor Braunerportrays a complex boat-shaped figure in the course of battling for control of itself. Drawn in the schematic profile style of Egyptian hieroglyphs, a large androgynous head unites with the raised prow of a boat elaborated with breasts. The body of the vessel, directed by rudderlike legs and feet, merges at the stern with the upright body of a bird. Two powerful hands, at the ends of crossed arms, suppress the internal battle by restraining the limbs of the bird, while a third hand doggedly forges progress along the river by paddling. Thus, in keeping with the nature of much psychic conflict, a difficult internal struggle is self-contained, while the vessel-self continues along a predetermined route.

Nicolas Calas has suggested that Brauner was inspired by two Egyptian themes, the “Sun Barge” and the “Heavenly Vault,” in the creation of this image.¹ While a generalized Egyptian style undoubtedly influenced Brauner’s imagery, it seems more likely that the artist derived this fantastic visual vocabulary from his own imagination, rather from specific art-historical sources.

Elizabeth C. Childs

1. Nicolas and Elena Calas, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), pp. 124–25.

LUCIANO MINGUZINI

TWO FIGURES, 1950 - 1952
Bronze

Dimensions: 140 x 80 x 60 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Gift of the artist 88.3604

PAUL DELVAUX (1897 – 1994)

TITLE THE BREAK OF DAY, 1937

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 47 1/4 x 59 1/4 inches (120 x 150.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

Like his compatriot René Magritte, Paul Delvaux applied a fastidious, detailed technique to scenes deriving their impact from unsettling incongruities of subject. Influenced by Giorgio de Chirico, he frequently included classicizing details and used perspectival distortion to create rapid, plunging movement from foreground to deep background. Unique to Delvaux is the silent, introspective cast of figures he developed during the mid-1930s. His formidable, buxom, nude or seminude women pose immobile with unfocused gazes, their arms frozen in rhetorical gestures, dominating a world through which men, preoccupied and timid, unobtrusively make their way.

Although the fusion of woman and tree in the present picture invites comparison with Greek mythological subjects, the artist has insisted that no such references were intended. The motif of the mirror appears in 1936 in works such as Woman in a Grotto (Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Lugano) and The Mirror (formerly Collection Roland Penrose, London; destroyed during World War II). In The Break of Day a new element is introduced; the reflected figure is not present within the scene, but exists outside the canvas field. She is, therefore, in some sense, the viewer, even if that viewer should happen to be male. The irony of the circumstance in which a clothed male viewer could see himself reflected as a nude female torso would have particularly appealed to Marcel Duchamp, who appropriated the detail of the mirror in his collage of 1942 In the Manner of Delvaux (Collection Vera and Arturo Schwarz, Milan).

Lucy Flint

PHILIP GUSTON

STILL LIFE, 1964
Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 45.7 x 59.7 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, Bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012

AFRICA

COFFER
Mali, Dogon
Wood

Dimensions: 118 cm long
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 248
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

PHILIP GUSTON

STILL LIFE, 1962
Ink on paper,

Dimensions: 45.7 x 59.7 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012

ARMAN (1928 - 2005)

VARIABLE & INVARIABLE, 1963

Metal and Wood

Dimensions: 25 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches (24.8 x 85.1 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

PERICLE FAZZINI

LARGE SEATED WOMAN (SIBILLA), 1947 (CAST IN 1956)
Bronze

Dimensions: 97 x 44 x 68 cm
Edition #4
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and Rudolph

B. Schulhof Collection, bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, 2012
© Pericle Fazzini, by SIAE 2012

EDMONDO BACCI (1913 – 1978)

EVENT #247, 1956

Oil With Sand on Canvas

Dimensions: 55 3/16 x 55 1/8 inches (140.2 x 140 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912 – 1956)

TWO, 1943 – 1945

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 76 x 43 1/4 inches (193 x 110 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Abstract Expressionism

In the decades following World War II, a new artistic vanguard emerged, particularly in New York, which introduced radical new directions in art. The war and its aftermath were at the underpinnings of the movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism. These artists, anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, expressed their concerns in an abstract art that chronicled the ardor and exigencies of modern life. Their heroic aspirations are most evident in Jackson Pollock’s innovative “drip” paintings that forever altered the course of American art.

Arriving in New York in 1930 from the West Coast, Pollock began working with figuration of both human and imaginary beings. Most of this imagery was connected to that of American Indian sand painting and the Mexican muralists he saw as a youth and that reemerged through psychoanalysis to treat his lifelong alcoholism. His first fully mature works—dating between 1942 and 1947—use an idiosyncratic iconography he developed in part as a response to Surrealism, popular in New York with its numerous European exiles from World War II. Employing mythical subject matter, calligraphic markings, and a vibrant and distinctive color palette, Pollock produced emotionally charged works that retain figurative subject matter yet emphasize abstract qualities.

The year 1943 proved to be a watershed year for Pollock, principally due to his introduction to Peggy Guggenheim, who had opened her New York gallery Art of This Century the year before. Encouraged by Marcel Duchamp and Matta, among others, Guggenheim offered Pollock a monthly stipend, which allowed him to devote all his time to painting. In this same year he had his first solo show at the gallery. Among the works from this period, Two (1943–45), depicts a figurative subject in emblematic, abstract terms derived from various sources, among them tribal painting and Pablo Picasso’s Cubist works. Rapidly applied strokes of thick black paint harshly delimit the two totemic figures. A columnar figure on the left, probably male, faces the center. Black contours only partially delineate the white and flesh colored areas that signify his body, as Pollock separates and liberates line from a descriptive function. The figure on the right, possibly female, bends and thrusts as it approaches the static figure on the left—a sexual union of the two is implied at the juncture of their bodies in the center of the canvas. Brought together in agitated union, the two figures suggest the primacy of the male and the female in the genesis of human life.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3474

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912 – 1956)

ENCHANTED FOREST, 1947

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 87 1/8 x 45 1/8 inches (221.3 x 114.6 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Abstract Expressionism

Like Alchemy, Enchanted Forest exemplifies Jackson Pollock’s mature abstract compositions created by the pouring, dripping, and splattering of paint on large, unstretched canvases. In Enchanted Forest Pollock opens up the more dense construction of layered color found in works such as Alchemy by allowing large areas of white to breathe amidst the network of moving, expanding line. He also reduces his palette to a restrained selection of gold, black, red, and white. Pollock creates a delicate balance of form and color through orchestrating syncopated rhythms of lines that surge, swell, retreat, and pause only briefly before plunging anew into continuous, lyrical motion. One’s eye follows eagerly, pursuing first one dripping rope of color and then another, without being arrested by any dominant focus. Rather than describing a form, Pollock’s line thus becomes continuous form itself.

Michael Fried has described Pollock’s achievement: “[His] all-over line does not give rise to positive and negative areas. There is no inside or outside to Pollock’s line or to the space through which it moves. And that is tantamount to claiming that line, in Pollock’s all-over drip paintings of 1947–50, has been freed at last from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes.”¹ It is this redefinition of the traditional capacity of the artist’s formal means that distinguishes Pollock’s art in the history of Modernism.

Elizabeth C. Childs

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3483

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912 – 1956)

THE MOON WOMAN, 1942

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 69 x 43 1/16 inches (175.2 x 109.3 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Abstract Expressionism

Like other members of the New York School, Jackson Pollock was influenced in his early work by Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, and seized on the Surrealists’ concept of the unconscious as the source of art. In the late 1930s Pollock introduced imagery based on totemic or mythic figures, ideographic signs, and ritualistic events, which have been interpreted as pertaining to the buried experiences and cultural memories of the psyche.

The Moon Woman suggests the example of Picasso, particularly his Girl Before a Mirror of 1932. The palettes are similar, and both artists describe a solitary standing female as if she had been x-rayed, her backbone a broad black line from which her curving contours originate. Frontal and profile views of the face are combined to contrast two aspects of the self, one serene and public, the other dark and interior.

The subject of the moon woman, which Pollock treated in several drawings and paintings of the early 1940s, could have been available to him from various sources. At this time many artists, among them Pollock’s friends William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, were influenced by the fugitive, hallucinatory imagery of Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists. In his prose poem “Favors of the Moon” Baudelaire addresses the “image of the fearful goddess, the fateful godmother, the poisonous nurse of all the moonstruck of the world.” The poem, which is known to have inspired Baziotes’s Mirror at Midnight, completed in 1942, alludes to “ominous flowers that are like the censers of an unknown rite,” a phrase uncannily applicable to Pollock’s bouquet at the upper right. Although it is possible that Pollock knew the poem, it is likelier that he was affected in a more general way by the interest in Baudelaire and the Symbolists that was pervasive during the period.

Lucy Flin

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3473

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912 – 1956)

CIRCUMCISION, 1946

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 56 1/16 x 66 1/8 inches (142.3 x 168 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Abstract Expressionism

In this transitional work of 1946 the subtle persistence of the Cubist grid system is felt in the panels that organize the composition and orient major pictorial details in vertical or horizontal positions. However, Jackson Pollock’s dependence on Pablo Picasso has virtually dissolved, giving way to a more automatic, fluidly expressive style. Line loses its descriptive function and begins to assume a self-sufficient role, the rhythm, duration, and direction of each brushstroke responding to the artist’s instinctual gesture. The compositional focus is multiplied and decentralized, and areas of intense activity fill the entire surface. Fragmented figural elements are increasingly integrated into the shallow pictorial space, as background, foreground, and object merge and the texture of the paint gains in importance. By 1945 the vigor and originality of Pollock’s work had prompted the critic Clement Greenberg, one of his earliest champions, to write in The Nation of April 7: “Jackson Pollock’s second one-man show at Art of This Century . . . establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró.”

Primitive art forms are alluded to in the crudely drawn arrows, cult and stick figures, and ornamental markings discernable in Circumcision. Totemic figures (the rotund being standing at the left and the owl-like creature at upper center) are posed stiffly, observing what seems to be a scene of violence in the center of the canvas. The enactment of a rite of passage is suggested, but the visual evidence does not encourage a specific reading. Pollock’s concern with archetypal imagery and pancultural rituals and mythologies is evoked with varying degrees of specificity in his work.

Lee Krasner suggested the title to Pollock after the painting was completed.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3478

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912 – 1956)

ALCHEMY, 1947

Oil, Aluminum, Alkyd Enamel Paint With Sand, Pebbles, Fibers, and Wood on Commercially Printed Fabric

Dimensions: 45 1/8 x 87 1/8 inches (114.6 x 221.3 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Abstract Expressionism

Alchemy is one of Jackson Pollock’s earliest poured paintings, executed in the revolutionary technique that constituted his most significant contribution to twentieth-century art. After long deliberation before the empty canvas, he used his entire body in a picture-making process that can be described as drawing in paint. By pouring streams of commercial paint onto the canvas from a can with the aid of a stick, Pollock made obsolete the conventions and tools of traditional easel painting. He often tacked the unstretched canvas onto the floor in an approach he likened to that of the Navajo Indian sand painters, explaining that “on the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”¹ Surrealist notions of chance and automatism are given full expression in Pollock’s classic poured paintings, in which line no longer serves to describe shape or enclose form, but exists as an autonomous event, charting the movements of the artist’s body. As the line thins and thickens it speeds and slows, its appearance modified by chance behavior of the medium such as bleeding, pooling, or blistering.

When Alchemy is viewed from a distance, its large scale and even emphasis encourage the viewer to experience the painting as an environment. The layering and interpenetration of the labyrinthine skeins give the whole a dense and generalized appearance. The textured surface is like a wall on which primitive signs are inscribed with white pigment squeezed directly from the tube. Interpretations of these markings have frequently relied on the title Alchemy; however, this was assigned not by Pollock, but by Ralph Manheim and his wife, neighbors of the Pollocks in East Hampton.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3482

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912 – 1956)

UNTITLED, CA. 1946

Gouache and Pastel on Paper

Dimensions: 22 7/8 x 31 1/2 inches (58 x 80 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

KURT SCHWITTERS
MERZ DRAWING 75, 1920

Paper and Fabric Collage, Tempera, Ink and Graphite on Paper
Dimensions: 14.6 x 10 cm

JOAN MIRO (1893 – 1983)

SEATED WOMAN II, 1939

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 63 3/4 x 51 3/16 inches (162 x 130 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

The expressionistic Seated Woman II can be seen as a final manifestation of Joan Miró’s peintures sauvages, works characterized by violence of execution and imagery. It was painted at a time when Miró, like Pablo Picasso and Julio González, was responding acutely to the events of the Spanish Civil War.

The human figure has been transmogrified here into a grotesque and bestial creature. However, the aggressiveness of imagery and formal elements coexists with fanciful details and cosmic implications. Though the open, saw-toothed mouth imparts a sense of the woman’s voraciousness or anguish, her bottle-breast implies her generative force. Her expansive torso constitutes an impenetrable ground, its horizon line described by her squared shoulders, out of which grow the vegetative stems of arms and neck. The bird and fish forms floating through the atmosphere become insignias for air and water, while the moon, star, and planet emblems on the woman’s collar broaden the associations to encompass the astral plane. The remaining abstract shapes seem to course slowly in mysterious orbits, passing through and beyond one another, changing color where they intersect. A cohesive universe is created despite the dichotomies of light and dark, nurture and destruction, life and nonexistence. Integration is provided by the repetition of shapes, such as the leaf and oval, which suggests analogies: the woman’s pendant becomes a moon or vagina, her hair resembles lines of sight, like those of the fish, or rays of light, and her teeth are equated with the decorative motifs or mountains in the miniature landscape of her collar.

This work postdates by about two months the more generalized Seated Woman I (Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2941

JOAN MIRO (1893 – 1983)

DUTCH INTERIOR II, 1928

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 36 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches (92 x 73 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Surrealism

GEORGE BRAQUE

THE BOWL OF GRAPES, 1926

Oil with Pebbles and Sand on Canvas

AFRICA

MASK
Nigeria, Yoruba
Polychrome Wood

Dimensions: 72 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

JUAN GRIS (1887 – 1927)

BOTTLE OF RUM & NEWSPAPER, 1914

Paper Collage, Gouache, Conté Crayon, and

Graphite on Newspaper, Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 21 5/8 x 18 1/4 inches (54.8 x 46.2 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Cubism

In 1913 Juan Gris began using the technique of papier collé developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, with whom he had been working in close contact since 1911. By 1914 Gris’s handling of the technique was personal and sophisticated, as evidenced by works such as Bottle of Rum and Newspaper, executed in Paris shortly before he left for Collioure at the end of June. Here the pasted elements overlap and intermesh with one another in relationships calculated with mathematical rigor. These collaged papers cover the entire surface of the canvas, simultaneously forming an abstract composition and serving as a multilayered support for naturalistic details.

The dynamism of the picture derives from the tension between horizontals, verticals, and thrusting diagonals. Gris presents the table as if it were viewed from several vantage points at once, demonstrating that a diagonal can be understood as a horizontal perceived from an oblique angle, and also suggesting the movement of the observer or artist around objects. The telescoping of a number of viewpoints in a single image produces the illusion of a spatial dislocation of the objects themselves. Dissected parts of the bottle of rum, recognizable by correspondence of shape or by labeling, float beside, below, or above the drawing of the complete bottle. These paper cutouts, at once more tangible and more fragmented than the shadowy outline, confuse one’s perceptions of the bottle’s presence.

Gris confounds expectations of the nature of materials. He usually depicts the glass objects as transparent and the others as opaque but does not hesitate to betray this faithfulness to the properties of objects when formal demands intercede.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1560

JUAN GRIS (1887 – 1927)

BOTTLE OF RUM & NEWSPAPER, 1914 (DETAIL)

AFRICA

YAKA MASK
Guinea, Baga
Wood

Dimensions: 138 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 243
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

FRANK STELLA

GRAY SVRAMBLE, 1968 - 1969
Oil and Pencil on Canvas

Dimensions: 175.3 x 175.3 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

AFRICA

WALL PANEL WITH SCULPTURED FACE OF OWL
Congo, Nkanu
Polychrome Wood

Dimensions: 48 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 252
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

BRICE MARDEN

STUDY #5, 1976
Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 15.9 x 15.9 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

TINY PIECE #1, 1961
Painted and Chromium - Plated Steel

Dimensions: 16.5 x 25.4 x 22.9 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

EMILIO VEDOVA

HOSTAGE CITY, 1954
India Ink, Tempera, Sand and Enamel on Paper

EMILIO VEDOVA (1919 – 2006)

IMAGE OF TIME (BARRIER), 1951

Egg Tempera on Canvas

Dimensions: 51 3/8 x 67 1/8 inches (130.5 x 170.4 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Emilio Vedova produced art in response to contemporary social upheavals, however his political position was contrary to that of his early modern counterparts, the Italian Futurists, who coalesced as a group in the years preceding World War I. While the Futurists romantically celebrated the aggressive energies inherent in societal conflict and technological advancement, Vedova’s feverish, violent canvases convey—in abstract terms—his horror and moral protestation in the face of man’s assault on his own kind.

Vedova expressed a political consciousness in his work for the first time during the late 1930s, when his works were inspired by the Spanish Civil War. His continuing commitment to social issues gave rise to series such as Cycle of Protest (Ciclo della protesta, 1956) and Image of Time (Immagine del tempo, 1946–59). Although the motivation behind Image of Time (Barrier) (Sbarramento) is political, its formal preoccupations parallel those of the American Abstract Expressionists, namely Franz Kline. The drama of the angular, graphic slashes of black on white is heightened with accents of orange-red. Occupying a shallow space, pictorial elements are locked together in formal combat and emotional turmoil.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/4142

JEAN DUBUFFET

THE ARMCHAIR II, 1966
Felt Pen on Paper

Dimensions: 24.8 x 16.5 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

STAIRCASE VII (ESCALIER VII), APRIL 27, 1967
Vinyl on Canvas

Dimensions: 149.5 x 132.1 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

JEAN DUBUFFET

PORTRAIT OF SOLDIER LUCIEN GEOMINNE, 1950
Oil - Based Mixed-Media on Masonite

Dimensions: 64.8 x 61.6 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

JEAN DUBUFFET (1901 – 1985)

TITLE FLESHY FACE WITH CHESNUT HAIR, 1951

Oil-Based Mixed Media on Isorel

Dimensions: 25 9/16 x 21 1/4 inches (64.9 x 54 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Art Brut

Jean Dubuffet was attracted to the surfaces of dilapidated walls, pitted roads, and the natural crusts of earth and rock, and during the 1940s and 1950s he sought to create an equivalent texture in his art. He experimented with a variety of materials to produce thick, ruggedly tactile surfaces that constitute deliberately awkward, vulgar, and abbreviated imagery, often of grotesque faces or female nudes. Dubuffet made the present work with an oil-based “mortar,” applying it with a palette knife, allowing areas to dry partially, then scraping, gouging, raking, slicing, or wiping them before applying more medium. The resulting surface is so thick that incisions providing the contours and delineating features seem to model form in relief. He wrote that this mortar enabled him to “provoke systems of relief in objects where reliefs are least expected, and lent itself, at the same time, to very realistic effects of rugged and stony terrains. I enjoyed the idea that a single medium should have this double (ambiguous) power: to accentuate the actual and familiar character of certain elements (notably in figurations of ground and soils), and yet to precipitate other elements into a world of fantasmagoric irreality.”

Dubuffet’s aggressively anticultural, anti-aesthetic attitude and spontaneity of expression provided an example for members of the COBRA group in Europe, and New York artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine.

Lucy Flint

JEAN DUBUFFET

LOGOGRIPH OF BLADES, 1969
Epoxy Paint With Polyurethene on Cast Polyester Resin

Dimensions: 55.2 x 57.8 x 38.1 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

JEAN DUBUFFET (1901 – 1985)

TITLE FLESHY FACE WITH CHESNUT HAIR, 1951 (DETAIL)

VASILY KANDINSKY (1866 – 1944)

UPWARD, 1929

Oil on Cardboard

Dimensions: 27 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches (70 x 49 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Bauhaus

Geometric shapes and sections of circles combine in Upward in a structure suspended in a field of rich turquoise and green. A partial circle rests delicately on a pointed base. Another fragment of a circle glides along its vertical diameter, reaching beyond the circumference of the first form to penetrate the space above it. Vasily Kandinsky achieves an effect of energy rising upward, while anchoring the forms together by balancing them on either side of a continuous vertical line. In a closely related work of the same period, Depressed (Collection Galleria Marescalchi, Bologna), Kandinsky distributes motifs of partial circles horizontally. Here he represses the sense of energy found in Upward both through his composition and a subdued palette.

A linear design in the upper right corner of the present canvas echoes the vertical thrust of the central motif. This configuration resembles the letter E, as does the black cutout shape at the base of the central motif. Another E shape is legible in the upper right corner of a related drawing (Collection Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). These forms may at once be independent designs and playful references to the first letter of Empor, the German title of the painting.

The related drawing reveals that the small black circle and the horizontal bars of the central motif, which have the physiognomic character of eye and mouth, were not part of Kandinsky’s original design concept and evolved as he worked on the painting. As he wrote in 1929, the year he painted Upward, “I do not choose form consciously; it chooses itself within me.”¹ The physiognomic character of Upward indicates Kandinsky’s association at the Dessau Bauhaus with fellow Blaue Vier artists Paul Klee and Alexej Jawlensky. Jawlensky showed sixteen abstract heads, a motif that appeared in his work as early as 1918, in an exhibition of the Blaue Vier at the Galerie Ferdinand Möller in Berlin in October 1929. Shown during the month when Upward was completed, these paintings offered Kandinsky the model of large, abstract faces composed of geometric planes of non-naturalistic color and accented by bar-shaped features. However, Kandinsky’s working method more closely resembled that of Klee, who began with intuitively chosen forms that gradually suggested counterparts in the natural world, than that of Jawlensky, who began with the model and moved toward abstraction. In particular, the whimsy of the hovering black eye in Upward and the incorporation of a letter as a pictogram with a possible reference to the title of the painting suggest the reverberations of Klee’s art.

Elizabeth C. Childs

1. Quoted in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo, Boston, 1982, vol. 2, p. 740.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2019

VASILY KANDINSKY (1866 – 1944)

UPWARD, 1929 (DETAIL)

HENRY MOORE (1898 – 1986)

THREE STANDING FIGURES, 1953

Bronze and Patina

Dimensions: 28 3/16 inches (71.7 cm) high

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

In its abstraction of the human figure and exaggeration of isolated anatomical features, this work is related to African sculpture and to the Surrealist sculpture of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. Within Henry Moore’s own body of work, Three Standing Figures can be seen in connection with the “shelter” drawings of the early 1940s, in which the artist explored the psychological interaction of groups, and with the monumental Three Standing Figures of 1947–49 erected at Battersea Park in London. Classicizing elements of the latter, however remote, endure in the Peggy Guggenheim work. The grouping of three figures, their contrapposto stances, the variety of rhetorical gestures, and the echoes of drapery creases and swags provide visual analogies with ancient sources. Typically, Moore conflates the human figure with the forms of inanimate natural materials such as bone and rock. The perforations through the mass of the sculptured bodies suggest a slow process of erosion by water or wind.

At least three preparatory drawings exist for Three Standing Figures, which was cast in bronze from a plaster original in an edition of eight, with one artist’s proof. A ten-inch maquette preceding it in 1952 was also cast in bronze. Neither of the original plasters survives. Moore used bronze increasingly from the late 1940s; he commented on its greater flexibility in comparison with stone, and its relative strength in withstanding the action of the elements.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3055

HENRY MOORE

UNTITLED, 1937
Watercolor, Charcoal, Black Pencil and Conté Crayon on Paper

Dimensions: 38 x 56 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 189
Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation

AFRICA

STANDING MALE FIGURE
Côte d'Ivoire, Senufo
Wood

Dimensions: 72 cm high
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 257
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

FERNAND LEGER (1881 – 1955)

MEN IN THE CITY, 1919

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 57 3/8 x 44 11/16 inches (145.7 x 113.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Cubism

Fernand Léger temporarily abandoned representational depiction in his Contrast of Forms series of 1913–14, begun a few months after he completed Nude Model in the Studio (Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). When he returned from the front in 1917 and resumed painting, he reintroduced recognizable imagery in his work. Responsive to the technological advances and assertive advertising that followed World War I, he embarked on his “mechanical” period with works such as Men in the City and the related The City of 1919–29 (Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art).

In the urban themes of this period the human figure becomes as de-individualized and mechanized as the environment it occupies. Léger is able to express the rhythmic energy of contemporary life by finding its pictorial equivalent. Form, color, and shape are considered primarily for their plastic values and are given equal emphasis. They confront one another in a multitude of relations, creating single images that capture simultaneous sensations. Confusion of parts does not result, because Léger distributes planes evenly and builds his compositions with blocky areas of flat, easily read, unmixed color and clear and incisive outline. He conveys a sense of depth through overlapping planes and changes in scale rather than with modeling. Léger’s simple, varied, and clear pictorial elements, like ideal machines, efficiently produce effects of maximum power.

Lucy Flint

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2442

ANTONI TAPIES

RAG AND STRING, 1968
Pigments, Sand, Rag, String on Cardboard Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 108.5 x 75 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

LUCIO FONTANA

CONCETTO SPAZIALE, 1951
Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 85.1 x 66 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

LUCIO FONTANA

CONCETTO SPAZIALE, 1957
Oil, Sand and Glitter on Canvas

Dimensions: 115.6 x 88.9 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

AFRICA

RELIQUARY FIGURE
Gabon, Kota
Kota Ethnic Group, Gabon, Central Africa,

Dimensions: 57 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 245
Photo: Paolo Manusardi, Milan

ANSELM KIEFER

THY GOLDEN HAIR MARGARETHE, 1981
Painted Gelatin Silver Print With Straw

Dimensions: 58.7 x 83.8 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

ANSELM KIEFER

THY GOLDEN HAIR MARGARETHE, 1981

Acrylic, Emulsion, Charcoal and Straw on Burlap

Dimensions: 118 x 145 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

KENNETH ARMITAGE

DIARCHY, 1957
Bronze

Dimensions: 29.8 cm High
Credit Line: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 197
© The Estate of Kenneth Armitage

GIACOMO BALLA (1871 – 1958)

ABSTRACT SPEED + SOUND, 1913 - 1914

Oil on Unvarnished Millboard in Artist's Painted Frame

Dimensions: Framed: 21 1/2 x 30 1/8 inches (54.5 x 76.5 cm)

Credit Line: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976

Movement: Futurism

In late 1912 to early 1913 Giacomo Balla turned from a depiction of the splintering of light to the exploration of movement and, more specifically, the speed of racing automobiles. This led to an important series of studies in 1913–14. The choice of automobile as symbol of abstract speed recalls Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s notorious statement in his first Futurist manifesto, published on February 20, 1909, in Le Figaro in Paris, only a decade after the first Italian car was manufactured: “The world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. . . . A roaring automobile …. that seems to run on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

It has been proposed that Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–14) was the central section of a narrative triptych suggesting the alteration of landscape by the passage of a car through the atmosphere.¹ The related Abstract Speed (Velocità + paesaggio, 1913) and Abstract Speed - The Car Has Passed (1913) would have been the flanking panels. Indications of sky and a single landscape are present in the three paintings; the interpretation of fragmented evocations of the car’s speed varies from panel to panel. The Peggy Guggenheim work is distinguished by crisscross motifs, representing sound, and a multiplication of the number of lines and planes.

The original frames of all three panels were painted with continuations of the forms and colors of the compositions, implying the overflow of the paintings’ reality into the spectator’s own space. Many other studies and variations by Balla on the theme of a moving automobile in the same landscape exist.

Lucy Flint

1. Virginia Dortch Dorazio, Giacomo Balla: An Album of His Life and Work (New York: Wittenborn, 1969) figs. 2–4

AFRO

UNTITLED, 1964
Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 17.8 x 29.8 cm
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Hannelore B. and

I may work as a freelance Architect. I graduated Yıldız Technical University Istanbul, Turkey. I prepare all the presantation by myself. This blog is my magical attic. Blog include that I already collected and will collect time by time past to future. Some of them influence me with their story , other fascinate me charm of colour, some is bents me differ of design. Some of them come into my life all the fascinating contex together that fuse different concept with there imagination and presantation. They all take part enjoyable place in my memory library to be as metaphor. Some of them I already forgot but when I seen them that make me in good spirits. Other is unforgettable. Some of them connect before to now that make to come new people in our life with new stories. Dream and reality fuses in life. All of them take part in this blog that I love.
I share all the knowledge of art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, people’ s story etc… without professional doubt. After all this progress , my magical attic will improve, get rich, increase and multiply when new comer join us day by day as our universe.
Please you may not hesitate to contact me. I may prefer to hear your idea that you could share with me your own work or other' s people work.

You could contact me :
mymagicalattic@gmail.com

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June 30, 2019

THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION: ARTS, ARTISTS & COLLECTOR