The Peggy Guggenheim Collection to Feature "Themes & Variations: Script and Space"

Written by Giuseppi Cavalcanti Thursday, 06 October 2011 01:32

Venice.- The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is pleased to present "Themes & Variations: Script and Space", on view at the museum from October 15th through January 1st 2012. First conceived in 2002 by Luca Massimo Barbero, this is the third edition of an innovative exhibition formula that offers visitors fresh perceptions of the museum’s collections, whether known or less known, by means of a dialogue with works by more contemporary artists from other collections, thus opening up new, multiple possible interpretations. Hung in the same galleries, works from the early 20th c. avant-garde connect thematically in a confrontation and comparison with post war and contemporary works, tracing the evolution of forms of visual expression as they change with time. Each gallery narrates its own story, its own theme, a curiosity or a variation, sometimes self-evident and sometimes purposefully obscured by the artist.

Beginning with Modernist works from early last century so strongly characteristic of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, such as Cubism and Futurism, "Themes & Variations. Script and Space", looks at the theme of script: as language, as sign, through the medium of paint and other materials, signs suggestive of images, or script that approaches typography. Forging a chronological bridge to the past, the first room connects the energy and onomatopoeia of the printed words of Pablo Picasso and of the Italian Futurist Carlo Carrà to the more deadpan script of Lawrence Weiner, or to the mysterious panels of Vincenzo Agnetti. Other thematic rooms follow, in which Piet Mondrian’s inflexible geometries are offset by Gianni Colombo’s flexible, ironic and elastic spaces; or uniformly patterned works, with a density of medium to the point of congestion, by Rudolf Stingel that contrast with Jackson Pollock’s allover calligraphy. Writing-as-sign in Mark Tobey compares with the cryptic vocabulary of marks in Dadamaino and Riccardo de Marchi.

Then again, in a gallery dedicated to nature, a roaring lion by Mirko contradicts the existential complacency of a chimpanzee by Francis Bacon, and the metamorphosis of Germaine Richier’s Tree Man echoes in Luigi Ontani’s metamorphic ‘personage’. With Peggy Guggenheim’s "Celestial Bodies" by Rufino Tamayo, the exhibition engages the notion of cosmic space, understood as a multiplicity of perspectives, in which the woven textures of François Morellet and the self-contained spaces of Mario Nigro educate and enchant the spectator’s eye in readiness for the shadowy figurations of Arthur Duff’s Ropes and Knots, the photographs of Thomas Ruff, a small print of constellations by Giorgio de Chirico and the enigma of space in Lucio Fontana. The theme of script and matière, in the widest senses, are also key to the Gastone Novelli and Venice (1925-1968), with which "Themes & Variations" closes. A major figure in Italian art in the 1950s and 60s, Novelli in recent years has begun to assume a position in the forefront of international contemporary art of his time.

For "Themes & Variations", his poetical inscriptions on outsize canvases, in which marks, colors, and words are suspended in a delicate balance, have been selected to reconstruct his relation to Venice. Together with small sketchbooks of the 60s, which depict Venice—an enduring source of inspiration for him—there are his canvases painted between 1964 and 1968, in which Venice may be both subject and the place of his studio. 1968 was a critical year for Novelli—he was at the center of the polemics and the struggles against the Biennale that year, turning some of his paintings in his one-man show to face the wall, thus linking himself and his work to a now legendary episode in the student riots of that year.


The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is among the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century. It is located in Peggy Guggenheim's former home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice. The museum was inaugurated in 1980 and presents Peggy Guggenheim's personal collection of 20th century art, masterpieces from the Gianni Mattioli Collection, the Nasher Sculpture Garden, as well as temporary exhibitions. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is owned and operated by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which also operates the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. The 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. 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. 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. The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim herself. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, Gino Severini, Francis Picabia, Giorgio de Chirico, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Renee Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder and Marino Marini. The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections. Visit the museum's wesbsite at ... http://www.guggenheim-venice.it

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