Hello everyone, my name is Grazina Subelyte and I am the Assistant Curator
at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Today, I will introduce you to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,
one of the most significant museums of European and American art
of the twentieth century in Italy.
It is located in Peggy Guggenheim’s former
home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice.
She was one of the most important and progressive collectors and patrons of art in the 20th century.
I will speak to you briefly about her life
and achievements and take you on a quick tour of her home-museum,
describing her palazzo and garden,
and then concentrating specifically on the
part of her collection covering the early
European abstraction.
As we are all staying at home these days,
we can’t do the tour in person onsite,
but I hope you will have a wonderful time
and enjoy it even remotely!
Let’s start! Peggy Guggenheim was born in
New York in 1898
and she was a daughter of Florette Seligman and Benjamin Guggenheim.
Benjamin was one of seven Guggenheim brothers who, with their father,
Meyer of Jewish Swiss German origin, created a family fortune in the late 19th century
from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead.
We know of Peggy’s father, that he liked
to travel in Europe.
At some time in the early 1900s he took Peggy and her older sister Benita to Munich to have
their portraits made!
This is a wonderful portrait of Peggy Guggenheim
made by Franz von Lenbach then during their trip.
In April 1912, Peggy’s father died bravely on the Titanic. In 1921, she travelled to Europe.
Thanks to her husband Laurence Vail
the Dada artist and writer,
who was the father of her two children
Sindbad and Pegeen,
Peggy Guggenheim soon found herself
at the heart of Parisian bohème and American
expatriate society. She met many of the artists and intellectuals at the time.
Then, in 1938, she opened an art gallery in
London, calling it Guggenheim Jeune.
It was then that she was beginning, at 39 years old,
a career which would significantly affect
the course of postwar art. For example, there she organized the first solo exhibition in
Great Britain of works by the Russian artist
Vasily Kandinky. Her friend Samuel Beckett,
the Irish novelist and playwright, urged her
to dedicate herself to contemporary art as
it was “a living thing,” while the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp introduced her to artists
and taught her “the difference between abstract and Surrealist art.” Despite the beginning
of the Second World War, Peggy busily acquired works, resolving to “buy a picture a day.”
She then fled the Nazi-occupied France and
returned to her native New York, together
with her children, Laurence Vail, as well
as the German Surrealist artist Max Ernst,
who was to become her second husband.
In New York, she opened her museum-gallery Art of This Century in October 1942.
Here she exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, and held temporary exhibitions
of leading European artists, and of several
then still unknown young Americans such as
Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, the ‘star’ of the gallery, who were among
the pioneers of American Abstract Expressionism.
Peggy’s museum-gallery quickly became the most stimulating
venue for contemporary art in New York.
Yet, Peggy Guggenheim always wanted to return to Europe, and on her way there in 1947 she
decided that Venice would be her future home.
She had written in her memoirs that
“It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error.
To live in Venice or to even to visit it means
that you fall in love with the city itself.
There is nothing left over in your heart for
anyone else.” In Venice, Guggenheim’s
collection was shown for the first time at
the 1948 Venice Biennale, and a year later,
she bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, where
her collection is housed to this day.
Here is how the palazzo looked like back in the day, and this is how it looks today!
Peggy Guggenheim passed away in 1979, and following her death, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened in Venice
under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, based in New York, which was created
by Peggy’s uncle Solomon and to which she had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Now we shall enter inside Guggenheim’s home-museum.
At the entrance, you see the mesmerizing garden
gates by the American sculptor Claire Falkenstein that Peggy Guggenheim commissioned in 1960.
The gates are composed of welded iron rods forming a metal network encasing large irregular
pieces of the famous colored glass from the island of Murano in Venice. Falkenstein was
a pioneering experimental artist in postwar
American sculpture. Her art was inspired by
nature and science, and especially by the
modern notion of the expanding universe.
She embraced spontaneity in creation, and she sought to render in three dimensions the concepts
of chance, flux and the expanding form. 
She emphasized the continuous flow between matter
and space, as you can see clearly in the gates.
The notion of expanding form and or even infinity
was embodied in Falkenstein’s radical concept
of the “Never-Ending Screen”, of which
Peggy Guggenheim’s gate is a significant
example.
Past the gates, we enter into the sculpture
gardens, which is a special feature of the
Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Peggy Guggenheim’s ashes are placed in a corner of the garden
of her palazzo, next to the place where she
buried her beloved Lhasa Apso dogs. In the
garden, you can enjoy works by artists such as Jean Arp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Alberto
Giacometti, and Germaine Richier.
Let’s take a look at the bronze work entitled
The Horse from 1914 by the French sculptor
Raymond Duchamp-Villon. In fact, in the beginning he studied medicine, but an illness made him
abandon his studies and he pursued an interest in sculpture. Initially, he wanted The Horse
to be realistic, but then developed a dynamic combination of horse and machine. What do
you think? Can you see a horse or, perhaps,
a machine, in it? Why could that be? So Duchamp-Villon
explored pure sculptural form and three-dimensional Cubism, which meant abandoning traditional
representation and concerns with external
appearances in order to stress the
subject’s structure and its inner forces.
His career culminated in this sculpture, The
Horse, which was his final work and has been described as perhaps “the most powerful
piece of sculpture produced by any strictly
Cubist artist”. The work reflects how Duchamp-Villon
closely observed the movement of horses during his experience in the cavalry and he also
studied the subject in the late 19th century
photographic experiments. Here, the animal
appears to be gathering its hooves, summoning strength to jump. The metamorphosis of the
horse, which was a traditional symbol of power, into a machine reflects the arrival of the
new technological age and reminds us that
the horse was being replaced in cities by
the automobile and combustion engine as the means of transport. Therefore, while today
we can’t imagine our daily life without
technology, at the time it was still a fresh
idea and it is at the heart of this work.
After passing through the garden, we
now turn our attention to the palazzo in which
Peggy Guggenheim lived and showed her collection.
As you might tell by the name – Palazzo
Venier dei Leoni – the palace was commissioned by the Venier family, who was among the oldest
Venetian noble families. They commissioned it in 1749 to the architect Lorenzo Boschetti,
whose only other known building in Venice
is the church of San Barnaba. However, historical
events related to both the family and the
city prevented the palazzo to be completed.
Only the first of its originally planned five
floors was built. Today, a model for the completed
palace can be found in the Museo Correr in
Venice. As you can see from the model, it
would have been one of the grandest palaces on the entire Grand Canal! Although it is
said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the reference to lions – Leoni – in the
name of the palazzo is likely to have arisen
from the lions’ heads of Istrian stone which
decorate the façade at water level. Having
bought the palazzo in 1949, two years later
Peggy Guggenheim opened her collection to the public three afternoons a week from Easter
to autumn. Back in the day, one could come
in and even meet her while visiting her palazzo!
On the grand canal terrace, you can see the
sculpture The Angel of the City from 1948
by the Italian artist Marino Marini, which
has become one of the most emblematic works
of this museum. Beginning his career as a
painter, Marini turned to sculpture and became
one of the leading masters in postwar Italy.
The theme of the equestrian statue is traditional
in Western art and it became Marini’s most
characteristic image. His inspiration sprang
from the civilizations of the past, such as
ancient Greek, Roman, and Northern European
sculpture, but he wished to create a mythic
image that we could apply in a contemporary
context. We have to remember that at the time the Second World War had just taken place.
This work belongs to Marini’s sequence of
equestrian sculptures, leading from serenity
to tragedy. The rider here seems euphoric,
even ecstatic. In fact, here Marini might
have translated states of mind into form.
How do you think we can see this? Well, the
man is portrayed almost like a child, appears
as if worshipping the sun and willing to soar
upwards. The horse is the opposite, as he
is bound to earth. So, the horse and rider
might represent the tension between spirit
and matter, and heaven and earth. Look closely
— can you recognize this? I think this adds
to the great, expressive quality of this sculpture.
And now we shall take a look inside the palazzo.
The display is more or less chronological
and reflects Peggy Guggenheim’s interest in the art of the first half of the 20th century and beyond,
including Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical
painting, European abstraction, avant-garde
sculpture, Surrealism, American Abstract Expressionism, and postwar Italian art, among others.
She acquired these works thanks to the friendships that she forged with artists and intellectuals.
In addition, presented in the palazzo are
some of the objects from her collection of
the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the indigenous
Americas, which she assembled in the 1950s and 60s.
While there are so many masterpieces and true jewels of 20th-century art to be discovered
in the collection, today, I will give you
a brief overview of some of the highlights
of European abstraction exhibited there. Let’s begin with the painting with a long title,
Windows Open Simultaneously 1st Part, 3rd Motif, created in 1912 by the French artist
Robert Delaunay, who was a pioneer of abstract art. He was one of the first artists that
believed that color can at once be both form and subject. This composition is both a pure
color abstraction and a distillation of a
view across the rooftops of Paris all the
way to the Eiffel Tower. This iconic structure is expressed here as an elongated green form
near the center of the composition. Can you recognize it? Are there other elements that
you see? Completed in 1889 as part of the
Paris World’s Fair, the Eiffel Tower was
at the time the highest construction in the
world. It was engraved with the names of 72
French scientists, engineers, and mathematicians
and, for Robert Delaunay, it represented a
symbol of man’s technological and scientific
accomplishments. A curious detail is that
Peggy Guggenheim’s father Benjamin was,
in fact, an investor in a company for installing
lifts in the Eiffel Tower. Might this be another
reason why Peggy liked this work? But even
beyond this, this painting is so much more
than just a view of the city. The windows,
implied in the title, open not only onto a
distant view but, for Delaunay, also onto
a new world of visual expression: pure painting based on light. This is one of at least 13
works on the theme of windows that Delaunay painted, referring to them as “windows opening
onto a new reality.” He shared Leonardo
da Vinci’s affirmation that the eye is the
window of the soul and believed that colored light in abstract patterns was the purest
way to transmit beauty to our consciousness.
Now I shall discuss a few works by the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky, who was also one
of the artists associated with the origins
of abstract painting, a visual language that
does not attempt to represent an exact depiction of reality, but instead conveys its meaning
by using colors, shapes and marks. Kandinsky had an exceptional sensitivity to color.
As a young man, he was enchanted by the colors of his home city of Moscow at sunset.
In his youth, listening to a performance of an opera by Richard Wagner with his eyes closed, Kandinsky
saw the music as color. Music had a profound influence on his art, as he admired the way
it could elicit an emotional response.
He believed that painting should also aspire
to be as abstract as music in order to give
rise to a similar emotion or a spiritual sensation.
Let’s take a close look at the earliest
work by Kandinsky in the collection, titled
Landscape with Red Spots No. 2 and painted in 1913. It comes as no surprise that here
he presents the landscape as a spiritualized
vision. He achieved by emphasizing the expressive
power of color. Kandinsky had published an influential text on painting, in which he
described colors in a strongly emotive way.
For a few years, he stayed frequently in the
southern Bavarian village of Murnau in Germany and his landscape paintings, such as this,
were inspired by the Alpine surroundings.
Can you see how the colours in the alps spoke
to him? What else do you see in the painting?
This composition comes before Kandinsky’s
fully abstract works, since here landscape
references are still identifiable. We might
recognize a church marked by the black outline set among the hills, the bell tower, houses
at lower left, and the high, distant Alpine
mountains in the back.
Then, nine years later, in 1922, Kandinsky
painted White Cross. Let’s take a moment
to compare these two paintings. Can you spot some differences? For example, the contours
in the landscape are softer, while they are
more tight and sharp in the White Cross.
Yet if you take a close look at White Cross, you will notice the loosely painted, exploding
green sphere in the lower right which contrasts with the clearly shaper shapes on the left,
indicating that this is a work of transition
from one manner of abstraction to another.
This impossible world of harmonious and conflicting shapes and colors, both light and dark, is
a testament of the power of Kandinsky’s
abstract imagination. And the white cross
of this painting’s title appears in the
checkered pattern in the upper right. Though
Kandinsky uses it as an abstract element,
the cross is an evocative, symbolic form.
It is a Greek cross, reminding us that Kandinsky was born into the Russian Orthodox faith.
A key element of his art was his desire to
paint his feelings about his home.
Like Kandinsky and Delaunay, the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich also made a decisive contribution
to the development of abstract painting.
By 1915, he was the founder of Suprematism,
an art movement of pure abstraction, which developed into a philosophy and even a program for changing
society. Malevich said that he wanted to “desperately free art from the dead weight of the real
world.” He painted this untitled work in
ca. 1916. It consists of colored trapezoid,
triangular and rectangular shapes suspended in a seemingly ‘infinite’ white space.
Malevich wanted to eliminate of any reference to nature, or even to coordinates of physical
reality, such as gravity, space, or natural
light. The “supremacy” that he claimed
was that of feeling—feeling that, however,
is unrelated to morality or to emotions brought
about by personal relations. Suprematism was meant to generate feeling from pure painting—our
sensation of shape, color, and the relations
of forms.
The last artist whose works I would like to
introduce to you is the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian,
who was a friend and advisor of
Peggy Guggenheim. They even used to dance
together in the jazz clubs of London!
He started out painting the Dutch landscape
but his work quickly progressed towards an abstract
geometrical framework. Mondrian became aware of Cubism, developed by Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque, and that emphasized the flat,
two-dimensional nature of the canvas and had
a limited color range usually of greys, browns and blacks. Mondrian’s work Ocean 5 painted
in 1915, which depicts a view of the ocean,
has its origins in Cubism. Still, more than that,
Mondrian believed that basic geometric
shapes were inherent in nature and that each
part found its place and balance in an underlying design of universal harmony. So while the
horizontal-vertical arrangement in this composition
might evoke the movement of waves in the ocean
mentioned in the title and the color white
in the center might refer to the sunlight
shimmering on the water’s surface, for Mondrian this carried more profound, mystical implications.
Can you see it in the painting?
He transmitted the ideas about universal harmony also to his later works of pure abstraction,
in which again he wished to convey maximum content through minimal means. His mature
style consisted of grid-like, horizontal and
vertical black lines intersecting on a white
picture plane and animated with primary colors.
A signature example is his painting
Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939 from 1938–39.
You might be wondering about the long title of the work.
It is indeed curious and, in fact, the title
suggests that the initial arrangement of the
painting included a small rectangle of color
grey on the upper left. It was likely over-painted by Mondrian himself. While at first glance
the red is barely noticeable, it soon becomes
the dominant fragment, towards which our eyes
gravitate. Mondrian was affected by the troubled sociopolitical climate of the early twentieth
century, including the anguish of the First
World War and the impending Second World War.
Through his reduced, rhythmic works, he wanted to instill a calming, spiritual effect on us,
the viewer, at the time of such distress.
What do you think, did Mondrian succeed?
While minimalist in form, the work is still personal and subjective, since Mondrian constructed the composition
based entirely on his intuition.
This is where my tour ends today. Thank you so much for listening to it! I hope you have
enjoyed it, and remember there are so many
more gems to be discovered here! Please subscribe
to the GetYourGuide channel and come visit the museum as soon as we are all able to travel.
We will be waiting for you to come and see
the collection that Peggy Guggenheim assembled
with great commitment and passion. I would like to end it by quoting her: “I dedicated
myself to my collection. A collection means hard work. It was what I wanted to do and
I made it my life’s work. I am not an art
collector. I am a museum.” I might only
add that you can still feel this spirit in
her home-museum to this day, and we cannot
wait to welcome you here soon.
