Solidity of Fog, 1912

Luigi Russolo (Italian, 1885-1947)

 

 

About the Show:

Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection honors, among other collectors and artists, two forward-thinking men. First, it marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the “Futurist Manifesto” by writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Italian, 1876-1944) in Le Figaro. Second, it showcases the foresight of Italian businessman and art collector Gianni Mattioli (1903-1977) who amassed numerous Futurist works long before they were fashionable. The Mattioli Collection has made 26 works available to the Guggenheim in Venice on a long-term, renewable loan, and here they are intermingled with the Guggenheim Collection’s own pieces.

 

 

European Art: 1949-1979

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM’S GALLERY

February 29–May 6, 2012The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents a selection of works from its holdings of postwar European painting and sculpture, largely from the period 1949–79, in the museum’s temporary exhibition galleries. This exhibition documents how Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect even after her withdrawal from New York, the center of the artistic avant-garde, in 1947, the year she closed her museum-gallery, Art of This Century. This exhibition is therefore a celebration of Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian life and her residence in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.It is also an opportunity to exhibit donations, works that have entered the Foundation since Peggy Guggenheim’s death, in 1979. Several sculptures regularly on view in the museum’s Nasher Sculpture Garden belong in this category, including works by Germaine Richier, Anthony Caro, Bryan Hunt, Jenny Holzer, Mirko, and Barry Flanagan. Among the many other donations exhibited areLetter to Palladio by Giuseppe Santomaso; early and late paintings by Armando Pizzinato; decoupages by Mimmo Rotella; two paintings by Lucio Fontana, including a 1955 example of “holes” bequeathed in 2011; a major painting by Pierre Alechinsky; an aluminum relief by Heinz Mack; prints by Eduardo Chillida;Homage to the Square by Josef Albers; an “extroflexed” canvas by Agostino Bonalumi; an entire room of sculptures by Mirko, as well as his iconic tempera study for the gates of the Fosse Ardeatine; a late monotype by Emilio Vedova; works by Bice Lazzari, Gastone Novelli, and Toti Scialoja; and two paintings by Carla Accardi, including the magnificent Concentric Blue of 1956.Opening with a sculpture and a painting by Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini, respectively, the first three galleries focus on Venetian and Italian art, with particular emphasis on Peggy Guggenheim’s circle in the 1950s—Edmondo Bacci, Pizzinato, Santomaso, Tancredi, and Vedova. To these are added paintings by Accardi, Afro, Enrico Baj, Piero Dorazio, and William Congdon. Rooms 4 to 6 are predominantly non-Italian, with a room dedicated to British masters in the 1950s (Kenneth Armitage, Francis Bacon, Alan Davie, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland), and another dedicated to the CoBrA movement in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, with paintings by Alechinsky, Karel Appel, and Asger Jorn, as well as Jean Dubuffet. Art Informel works by Lazzari and Scialoja are joined by rarely seen sculptures by Arman, Alberto Guzman, and Zoltan Kemeny, as well as decoupages by Gwyther Irwin and Rotella. Room 7 focuses on “visual research” (with optical works by Franco Costalonga, Victor Vasarely, Manfredo Massironi, Martha Boto, Lazzari and Francesco Sobrino). Room 8 closes the presentation with monochromes by Albers, Fontana, and Bonalumi; wall sculptures by Mack and Gunther Uecker; A Sphere by Arnaldo Pomodoro; embossed prints by Eduardo Chillida; and a major 1960 painting by Novelli, recently donated by the Fondazione Araldi Guinetti.

Tancredi, Composition, 1955. Oil and tempera on canvas, 51 x 76 3/4 inches (129.5 x 195 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

Dialectical document-Reviews on Arun Khopkar

Jean-Francois Chevrier said ‘the document provides facts and is a fact in itself’, which, cleverly pointed out a question that ‘how documentaries should be regarded’?

Directors use their cameras to record and present a sheet of facts in front of the spectators, but during this process, it’s a procedure about choosing. To the directors, they need to choose what to be shot in their films, how to shoot it; while to the spectator they need to choose what information they want from the films. so during this procedure the original object been filmed has already gone through as least two filters, which, in some extent, been twisted at least twice. When we were watching Arun’s documentary ‘volume zero’, we got to know about the great architect Charles Correa, we got hold of his general ideas about his works, we approached his thoughts through the interviews, stills, diagrams, animation etc., and without doubt we know that is a brilliant documentary, it’s well-shot, well-edited, well-preformed, well-made, it’s touching and moving and convincing, and it’s a piece of art work. How real can a nice piece of art work be?

As put out in the beginning, the document itself shaped a fact, and this existence of fact is trying to illustrate another existence of fact. No matter how hard we tried to reserve every fact stay in the state of fact but the outcome will more or less contain the objective emotion, perspective, feeling and attitude of the director, which would be added upon the fact. 

However, this is not to say that the documentaries are not successful or not good, but we may see that all the documentaries are dialectical, and as long as they’re dialectical, we would be able to seize some new artificial ideas and make them more like humanity.