2016 · Venezia
by Barbero, Luca Massimo
Venezia: Marsilio, 2016. Grey/color-illus. wraps; white lettering on grey spine. Acetate half wrapper with white lettering. Text in Italian. Catalogue from the exhibition held at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 19 March - 24 July 2016. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, the exhibition - the result of a cooperative venture involving the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York - offered visitors a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the crucial work of European masters of modern art such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Pablo Picasso and European masters of so-called Art Informel, or "Unformed Art," such as Alberto Burri, Emilio Vedova, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, with large paintings and sculptures by some of the most important personalities on the American art scene in the 1950s and 1960s such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein and Cy Twombly. Devoting an exhibition to the Guggenheim collections means telling the fast-paced story of the birth of the Neo-Avant-Garde movements after World War II in a tight and uninterrupted interplay between European and American artists. But producing such an exceptional exhibition in Florence also means celebrating a very special tie that goes back a long way, because it was precisely in the Palazzo Strozzi's Strozzina undercroft that Peggy Guggenheim, who had only recently arrived in Europe, decided in February 1949 to show the collection that was later to find a permanent home in Venice. The large paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs on display at Palazzo Strozzi on loan from the Guggenheim collections in New York and Venice and from other leading international museums, paint a vast fresco of the extraordinarily heady season of 20th century art in which Peggy and Solomon Guggenheim played such a key role. - from the Palazzo Strozzi web site.
(Inventory #: 156996)