Page 37 - "he 2020 Guggenheim issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine

HILLA REBAY COLLECTION
Through her perpetual contact with artists over the
course of her lifetime, Hilla Rebay, first director and
curator of Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION
Painting - which would be renamed the Solomon R.
Widely recognized as one of the most influential art
Guggenheim Museum in 1952 - amassed her own
patrons of the 20th century, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–
significant art collection. Part of her estate, which
1979), Solomon R. Guggenheim’s niece, assembled an
included works by Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet
unrivaled collection of modern art, beginning in the
Mondrian, and Kurt Schwitters, was given to the
late 1930s and early 1940s in London and Paris and
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum four years after
continuing until 1947 in New York - where she provided
Rebay’s death in 1967.
critical support to the nascent American school of
Abstract Expressionism through her museum-gallery
Art of This Century - and, from 1947 until her death
in 1979, in Venice. Her collection of paintings and
sculptures embraces the major movements of Cubism,
Futurism, European Abstraction, Surrealism, and early
American Abstract Expressionism, and is comprised of
seminal works by the most important artists of these
periods including Jean Arp, Francis Bacon, Giacamo
Balla, William Baziotes, Umberto Boccioni, Constantin
Brancusi, Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul
Delvaux, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto
Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, Solomon R.
Giacometti, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 20, 2005–August 10, 2006. Photo:
René Magritte, Kazimir Malevich, Joan Miró, Piet David Heald
Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo
Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Gino Severini,
KATHERINE S. DREIER BEQUEST
and Yves Tanguy.
In 1953 the Guggenheim Foundation received a small
In 1970, Peggy donated her Grand Canal palazzo to
but important bequest by one of 20th-century art’s
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, reserving the
most influential figures, Katherine S. Dreier, who, along
right to live in it during her lifetime. In 1976, she gave
with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, had founded the
her entire collection to the foundation, complementing
Société Anonyme. Most important among the 33 works
her uncle’s collection and filling in critical gaps,
donated by the estate were Constantin Brancusi’s
particularly with her rich holdings of Surrealist works
Little French Girl, Alexander Archipenko’s Vase Woman
and paintings by Jackson Pollock.
II, Alexander Calder’s standing mobile Untitled, and a
Juan Gris still life Newspaper and Fruit Dish, and two
collages from 1920 and 1921 by the German Dadaist
Kurt Schwitters.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection sculpture garden, Venice.
Photo: David Heald

Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, January 29, 2004–September 19, 2004. Photo: David Heald

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