Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858-1924), Festa del Redentore, ca. 1899, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast (91.18.5).

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858-1924), Monte Pincio, Rome, ca. 1898-99, Watercolor and graphite heightened with gum Arabic on ivory wove watercolor paper, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois; Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.117.

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858-1924), Venice, ca. 1898-99, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Colby College Museum of Art, The Lunder Collection.

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858-1924), Canal, Venice, ca. 1898-99, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Abby & Alan D. Levy Collection, Los Angeles.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
701 Dorsoduro Venezia
+39 041 2405404
Venice
Prendergast in Italy
October 10, 2009-January 3, 2010

For the first time in Italy, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection pays tribute to the American artist Maurice Prendergast (St. John’s, Canada, 1858-New York, USA, 1924) hosting the exhibition Prendergast in Italy (October 10, 2009-January 3, 2010) curated by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art, and Elizabeth Kennedy, Curator of Collection, Terra Foundation for American Art. This exhibition is organized by Williams College Museum of Art in partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art. Terra Foundation is lead sponsor with additional funding from the Eugénie Prendergast endowment.

Maurice Prendergast spent his youth in Boston where, like his contemporary the Impressionist Childe Hassam, he began his career in graphic design. In 1891, he travelled to Paris determined instead to become a painter. He studied at the Julian and Colarossi academies and became acquainted with the art of the Nabis and Whistler. Upon his return to the States in 1894 he had his first successes as an artist. By the time of his death in 1924, Prendergast was celebrated as one of the most important American Modernists of the early 20th century, and in particular the first to respond to the post-Impressionist art of Cézanne.

This exhibition assembles more than sixty of the paintings, watercolors, oils, and monotypes that Prendergast made during his two trips to Italy. In June 1898 he travelled to Italy staying there for 18 months visiting Venice (the main focus of his trip), Padua, Florence, Siena, Assisi, Orvieto, Rome, Naples, and Capri, returning late in 1899. He returned in August 1911-January 1912 and again visited Venice. The exhibition features a corpus of unique works dedicated to Venice, represented by the artist with evocative views of its modern, daily life. While Whistler’s etchings of Venice focus on the picturesque decay of the city, and Sargent with few exceptions painted its monuments, its interiors and its poorer inhabitants, Prendergast instead was attracted to its modernity—to wealthy visitors in fashionable dress, to processions and feste which were in part the expression of historic tradition and in part a response to international tourism. Prendergast chronicles la Serenissima with Impressionist, picturesque views crowded by colourful pedestrians walking through calli, campi and bridges. On view, in addition to his watercolors and oils, archival materials, such as photographs, letters, guidebooks and travel advertisements belonging to the Prendergasts, now in the Williams College Museum of Art collection, create a strong impression of Italian topography, manners and society c. 1900. Furthermore, two Japanese prints on view show the influence of Japanese coloured woodcuts — whether landscape or urban scenes — by Kuniyoshi and Toyokuni.

Prendergast’s prolific work on his first trip to Italy consolidated advances provoked by his previous acquaintance with the Parisian avant-garde and launched Prendergast to national attention, On his second trip to Venice his work shifted toward a more formalist style, with Symbolist content showing how the concepts of Modernism that had emerged in the work of 1898-99 came to fruition during the crucial first decade of the 20th century. As a whole, Prendergast's Italian works are, arguably, the most visually sumptuous and aesthetically challenging pieces he ever made and their presentation in Italy where they were created offers a new interest, and contributes to the comprehension of what characterized Modernism in the early 20th century and the role Prendergast played in the development of Modern art in America.

Prendergast in Italy highlights a selection of the collection of over four hundred works by artist-brothers Maurice and Charles Prendergast in the Williams College Museum of Art. In addition to artworks from WCMA and the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition features loans from over fifty institutions and private collections in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The catalogue, published by Merrell Publishers, London, is focused on Prendergast’s major Italian works and is an enduring contribution to the scholarship of modern American art. The main essay of the book is written by Nancy Mowll Mathews, with an additional essay by Elisabeth Kennedy. 250 illustrations of art, photography, maps, and documents give a complete context of Prendergast’s Italy.

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858-1924), Rialto, Venice, ca. 1911-12, Watercolor and pencil on paper, Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast (86.18.79).

© Courtesy Wim Delvoye Studio. Photo Kasper Jordaens.

© Courtesy Wim Delvoye Studio. Photo Kasper Jordaens.

© Courtesy Wim Delvoye Studio. Photo Kasper Jordaens.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
701 Dorsoduro Venezia
+39 041 2405404
Venice
Torre
June 3-November 22, 2009

"The Gothic energy, the love of life, and the everyday struggle to achieve a more intense expressive vigour…"

— John Ruskin

"My fascination with the Gothic isn’t dark at all. For me it evokes the springtime of Europe."

— Wim Delvoye

Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s latest creation is Torre, a corten steel tower, with ogival windows, tracery and turrets in the International Gothic style, on the terrace of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, overlooking the Grand Canal.

Both architecture and ornament, Torre by Delvoye demonstrates not only ethereal majesty and vision but forceful material presence, drawing inspiration from masterpieces of Gothic architecture such as Notre Dame, Paris, and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York. From a fusion of the sublime with the most advanced capabilities of computer technology, the Gothic style of Torre unites it with the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

Wim Delvoye’s artistic practice draws on the notion of the attraction of binary opposites: the sacred and the profane, the past and the present, the triumph of ornamentation over functionality. His art thrives on such paradoxes, that also form the basis of Surrealist artistic practice, combining these components of difference, not always manifest but ever present in his aesthetic. The placement of a Gothic tower from the High Middles Ages in the vicinity of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni’s 18th century classicism creates just such a forceful and provocative paradox.

For Wim Delvoye: “While the Renaissance was a world view, the Gothic was a state of mind. The Renaissance was a finite epoch lasting half a century before being succeeded by Mannerism. Gothic was an art outside of time. The human eye takes in detail like a stroboscope; glancing over lights and tracery, crockets and finials, it thrills to the joy of the tower’s soaring ascent.”

Born in 1965, Wim Delvoye lives and works in Ghent. He earned international recognition with his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 1999 and Documenta IX in 1992. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at the Ernst Museum Budapest (February-March 2008), a presentation of one of his Cloaca machines at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary (June-August 2008) and participation in exhibitions at MARTa in Herford (April-June 2008), Weserburg in Bremen (May 2008) and CAPC Bordeaux (June-September 2008).

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913, Oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm, Gianni Mattioli Collection, Long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Umberto Boccioni, Study for The City Rises (Studio per La città che sale), 1910, Oil on cardboard, 33 x 47 cm, Gianni Mattioli Collection, Long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Gino Severini, Blue Dancer (Ballerina blu), 1912, Oil on canvas with sequins, 61 x 46 cm, Gianni Mattioli Collection, Long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, © Gino Severini, by SIAE 2008.

Luigi Russolo, Solidity of Fog (Solidità nella nebbia), 1912, Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm, Gianni Mattioli Collection, Long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
701 Dorsoduro Venezia
+39 041 2405404
Venice
Masterpieces of Futurism
at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
February 18-
December 31, 2009

One hundred years after the publication in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909 of the Futurist Manifesto, signed by the ‘jeune poète italien’ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates this revolutionary avant-garde movement with the exhibition Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, curated by Philip Rylands, director of the Venetian museum (from February 18 through 2009). The exhibition also serves as an homage to the foresight of Gianni Mattioli, one of the great collectors of 20th century art, who accumulated a comprehensive presence of Futurism in his collection. This includes works by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Ottone Rosai, Mario Sironi and Ardengo Soffici.

Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents key paintings of the movement such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Mercury Passing Before the Sun by Balla, The Galleria of Milan by Carrà, Blue Dancer by Severini, three works from Peggy Guggenheim’s collection (Severini’s Sea = Dancer, Balla’s Abstract Speed + Sound, and Boccioni’s sculpture Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses), as well as loans from private collections by Balla, Boccioni, Carrà and Sironi. This will also be the debut of a recent gift to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Sironi’s early masterpiece The Cyclist (1916). The exhibition includes three of Boccioni’s four extant sculptures: in addition to the mixed media Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, bronze cast of his celebrated Development of a Bottle in Space and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

An introductory section of paintings, sculptures and drawings contextualizes the Futurist movement with works of other historical avant-gardes, such as Divisionism, Cubism, Orphism and Vorticism. Jean Metzinger and Raymond Duchamp-Villon explored notions of movement and the mechanical dynamism of modern life, while the London Vorticist Edward Wadsworth, who was inspired by the rhetoric of Marinetti, is represented with two woodcuts, Street Singers and Top of the Town, each of them recent gifts to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and now on exhibition for the first time.

Marinetti’s incendiary manifesto of 1909, which concluded “From the summit of the world we hurl once more our insolent challenge to the stars,” was literary in its focus (“the essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring and rebellion”), but it made a general appeal for the sweeping renewal of all aspects of Italian culture, predicated on dynamism, speed and technology. A year later five artists signed manifestoes of Futurist painting, on February 11 and April 11, 1910. They were Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini, all represented with masterpieces in the Mattioli collection, hosted by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection since 1997 on long-term loan.

Manifesto of Futurism
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure, and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

Flavio Fergonzi’s major work of scholarship, The Gianni Mattioli Collection, published in 2003 by Skira, documents the treasures of this special collection of 20th century art in a broad and comprehensive way.