While I haven’t yet seen many of the world's great galleries - including Madrid’s Prado, Paris’s Lourve, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches or NYC’s MOMA (though the former three are on the itinerary for Emma’s and my backpacking trip after Rome!) - I predict that the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, will forever be a personal favourite.
There are many reasons for this, and it is difficult to put them in order. Of course, the primary reason is the quality of the collection. The first thing you come across is a sculpture garden, with the usual suspects, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Giacometti, Hans Arp and others. Near Peggy’s grave (she is buried with about fifteen of her cats) is a ‘wish tree’, a gift from Yoko Ono. This is a perfect introduction to the gallery itself.
If aliens visited earth after the apocalypse, and this gallery was the only thing left to represent twentieth century Western art, it would probably be enough. Being the private collection of the most astute collector of last century, there is absolutely no ‘filler’ here – every single work is a masterpiece: Picasso, Braque, Leger, Malevich, Delaunay, Duchamp, De Chirico, Mondrian, Ernst, Chagall, Magritte, Miro, Dali, Kandinsky, Bacon, Pollock and Clifford Still – and others whom I’ve shamefully forgotten. The gallery itself is immaculately curated, with Malevich staring down Mondrian, the analytic cubism of Picasso’s The Poet...
Pablo Picasso, The Poet (1911)
leading you around a corner (no pun intended) to Duchamp’s Sad Young Man on a Train,
Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train (1911)
... Magritte’s Empire of Light in your peripheral vision as you focus on a Dali etc etc. The gallery is really quite tiny when compared to something like the Tate Modern, but it is no way crowded – every painting has its moment. After only two rooms, I knew that it was going to stick with me forever.
Add to this the approach to the gallery. Though you can get there a couple of ways, we caught a traghetto across the mouth of the Grande Canal, and the tranquility of the lanes was in marked contrast to those in San Marco, a fact that brought much relief to myself, and Piergiorgio, and a mother and daughter pairing from New York, who accompanied me on the pilgrimage. Secondly, being on the Grande Canal, the gallery is situated on an unparalleled piece of real estate, with views to die for.
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For a bit of fun, then, I’ll list my 3 favourite works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and my utterly personal reasons for rating them thus – though the list is arbitrary, and could be entirely different on another day, or if I was in another mood:
1. Upward (1929) by Vasily Kandinsky
For me, Kandinsky strikes the perfect balance between the austere geometric formalism of Malevich or Mondrian, and the insanely bright pallet of Delaunay or Matisse. The result is a type of optimism: yes, there is room for colour in our world of hard edges and geometric curves, our world of inescapable rules. Up close, the subtlety of the bleeding tones is delightful. But what got me about this painting were the two shapes, in the lower left, and upper right corners. The former in particular: a simple, mauve rectangle, all at sea, a lone figure in the field. You know how in some works (ie by Monet or Goya) the artist includes a portrait of themselves in the scene? Well to me, that’s what this rectangle is: a clue to the lonely figure cut by the artist, perhaps by all artists, and by extension, the condition itself of being alone.
2. Study for Chimpanzee (1957) by Francis Bacon.
Readers of the London posts in this blog will know that Francis Bacon is one of my favourite artists. In my opinion, he nails the horror of the contemporary world, much like the way Munch does in his famous Skrik (The Scream). Bacon seems to say, we are all meat. This is kind of funny, given his name - but it is no laughing matter. His is a type of anti-humanism; just as the words beef and veal do a profound injustice to ‘cows’ – reducing them to items for our consumption – so, by reducing us to meat, Bacon seems to me to be acknowledging the utterly terrifying truth of our existence, that we can be reduced to nothing more than meat, meat that rots over time, meat that can mean nothing.
In this painting, we see the chimpanzee on its haunches – or is it Rodin’s The Thinker? – perched on a box or crate of some sort, and framed by a strange, feint geometric pattern. Indeed, the figure seems caught in a state between primate and genius, its identity smeared with the murkiest milky blue grey – like a mixture of sperm and ink. The pallet is typically nauseating.
3. Alchemy (1947) by Jackson Pollock.
The coruscating energy, the mesmerizing chaos – the universe on a canvas. What can you say about Pollock that hasn't already been said? Like a verse from Genesis, or a snapshot of the nanosecond after the Big Bang, the dominant black, white and grey is shot through with the primary colours, the optimistic yellow, traces of red and a finally the blue (water does come after light), with the faintest hints of orange and green for good measure. When the NGA bought Pollock’s Blue Poles in 1974, the typically conservative Australian public scoffed. ‘4 million bucks? My dog could paint that!’ To which I say, ‘Really? Well then why didn’t it?’
If my hypothetical apocalypse (above) was to occur, and if this gallery was saved, I’d hazard that this would be the one painting that would make the aliens (provided they could see) look meaningfully at each other, and nod in recognition...
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