Thursday, May 26, 2016

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Windows on the City: The School of Paris, 1900 –1945



From April 22 to October 23, 2016, t he Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Windows on the City: The  School of Paris, 1900  –1945,  an exhibition  of more than 50 masterpieces from the collection of the Solomon  R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This exhibition is the first since the renewal of the management  agreement with the Guggenheim Foundation, signed in December 2014 and valid for 20 years. The  agreement provides for a range of new initiatives that will broaden the partnership and emphasizes the Solomon R. Guggenheim  Museum’s commitment to present  an exhibition of key, iconic works from its collection every two years  at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.   

Windows on the City: The School of Paris, 1900  –1945  includes some of the most influential paintings and  sculptures of the last century, created by artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Robert  Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.  In the early twentieth century, Paris was the capital of the avant-garde. Artists from around the world  settled in the City of Light, where they created new forms of art and literature and responded to the rapid  economic, social, and technological developments that were fundamentally transforming city  life.  It was in Paris that Picasso and Braque radically overturned the conventions of painting, Delaunay composed  harmonious  visions of color, Kandinsky pursued new directions in abstraction, and Brancusi reimagined how sculptures could be present in space. 

The title of the exhibition, which refers  to a series by Delaunay,  illustrates  how the modern city became a backdrop and  an inspiration for artistic production. Spanning from the first years of the twentieth century through World War II , the exhibition charts the key movements of modernism  —from Cubism to Orphism to Surrealism—and the artists who came to be known  as the École de Paris  (School of Paris). 

Among the masterpieces featured are 



Picasso’s Le Moulin de la  Galette (1900,


Modigliani’s Nude (1917),  


and Marc Chagall’s Green  Violinist (1923  –24).

Though diverse, the artistic visions represented in this exhibition manifest a common impulse to eschew  conservative  aesthetics and transform perceptions of everyday life in a modern city.  The rise of Fascism and the occupation  of France  during  World War  II ultimately ended the School of Paris, as the artists who had once sought political, spiritual, and creative refuge in the city were forced to leave.  

A tour through the exhibition

Cubism  was  one of the most important artistic innovations that emerged in Paris  in the  first  half of the  twentieth  century. This  revolutionary approach to painting, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1914, challenged  the conventions of visual art and the very nature of representation.  This gallery includes key works that exemplify Analytic Cubism, an intellectual style in which  form and space are “broken  down  ;”  




Braque’s  Piano and Mandola (1909–10)  




 and Picasso’s Bottles and Glasses (1911–12)  

feature many characteristics of this approach, including a muted palette. While  still  recognizable in these paintings, object are fractured into multiple planes, as is the  background.  

In the years leading up to and following World War  I, artists used the visual vocabulary of Cubism to achieve various ends, such as exploring pure abstraction and  modern science, and  infusing contemporary  experience with the  spirituality of folk traditions.





Robert Delaunay
Red Eiffel Tower (La tour rouge), 1911–12
Oil on canvas
125 x 90.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 46.1036




Robert Delaunay
Circular Forms (Formes circulaires), 1930
Oil on canvas
128.9 x 194.9 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1184


Robert Delaunay’s depictions of Parisian life and landmarks,  are exemplified in works such as Red Eiffel Tower (1911-  12), while his later abstract painting, Circular Forms (1930)  showcases his interest in contemporary developments in optics.

In this gallery, visitors can also observe Green Violinist (1923) (above) by Russian  artist  Marc Chagall, who produced this painting upon his return to Paris after having spent much of World War  I in his home  country. The work merges the  Cubist fragmentation of  space with colorful imagery inspired by Russian and  Jewish folklore, conveying the artist’s nostalgia for the religious festivals and popular celebrations of his youth.  

The work of Constantin Brancusi, who traveled from his native Romania to settle in Paris  in 1904, rejects the theatrical, narrative impulse of much nineteenth century sculpture in favor of radically simplified,  abstract forms and the unadorned presentation of wood, metal, and other  materials.  Brancusi  never identified the specific sources or meanings of his works, but  The Sorceress (1916–24) might relate to a supernatural figure from  Romanian legends.  

Gallery  307  

After the First World War, Paris once again became a  center of  cultural  production. During that time, the  adherents of Surrealism—a movement inaugurated  with André Breton’s 1924  manifesto  —were  also  counted  as part of the School of Paris. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, these writers and artists  attempted  to  articulate and  give form to repressed desires, dream imagery, and other  elements of the  unconscious. Some, like Yves Tanguy  juxtaposed  incongruous images and objects;  others, like Jean Arp and Joan Miró, experimented with automatism, creating drawings without a premeditated composition or subject  in order to bypass the conscious mind. Infl  uenced by Arp and Miró, American  sculptor Alexander  Calder created a language of  movement  and balance with his famous mobiles and wire sculptures including Romulus and Remus  (1928).  

Vasily Kandinsky, who made significant advances in abstract painting while living in Germany and Russia during the 1910s and ‘20s, settled in  Paris in 1934. In his works from this period, including  




Yellow Painting (1938) and  



Around the Circle (1940),

Kandinsky combines  free-playing  forms  similar to those from his  earliest  abstractions  with the more geometric and biomorphic shapes he  developed while teaching at the Bauhaus.  

Didaktika  

The exhibition includes an educational area  that  aims to transport visitors to turn-of-the -century Paris through a “time tunnel” that provides a historical, political, economic, and social context of the time. An  icon  of modernity and the avant -garde, Paris is, in a way, a co-star of the exhibition. Focusing  on four  major  expositions  that took place in Paris  during the first half of the twentieth century   the 1900  Universal Exposition, the 1925  International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts,  the  1931 International Colonial  Exhibition, and the 1937  International Exposition  of Art and Technology in  Modern Life —the contents of the Didaktika are presented through texts, large photomurals, videos, and audio recordings that evoke the vibrancy  of  the City of Light.  



Georges Braque
Violin and Palette (Violon et palette), September 1, 1909Oil on canvas
91.7 x 42.8 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 54.1412 © VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016 





Marc Chagall
The Soldier Drinks (Le soldat boit), 1911–12
Oil on canvas
109.2 x 94.6 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1211

© VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016




Juan Gris
Newspaper and Fruit Dish (Journal et compotier), March 1916
Oil on canvas
46 x 37.8 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, By gift, Estate of Katherine S. Dreier, 53.1341




Vasily Kandinsky
Around the Circle (Autour du cercle), May–August 1940
Oil and enamel on canvas
96.8 x 146 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1222

© VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016



Fernand Léger
Nude Model in the Studio (Le modèle nu dans l'atelier), 1912–13
Oil on burlap
128.6 x 95.9 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1193

© VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016



Joan Miró
Landscape (The Hare) (Paysage [Le lièvre]), autumn 1927 Oil on canvas
129.6 x 194.6 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 57.1459

© 2016 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris



Amedeo Modigliani
Nude (Nu), 1917
Oil on canvas
73 x 116.7 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift, 41.535




Piet Mondrian
Still Life with Gingerpot II (Stilleven met gemberpot II), 1911–12 Oil on canvas
91.5 x 120 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, L294.76

© 2007 Mondrian / Holtzman Trust



Pablo Picasso
Le Moulin de la Galette, autumn 1900
Oil on canvas
88.2 x 115.5 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 78.2514.34 © Sucesión Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016




Pablo Picasso
Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl (Carafon, pot et compotier), summer 1909
Oil on canvas
71.8 x 64.6 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection,

By gift, 37.536
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016




Pablo Picasso
Mandolin and Guitar (Mandoline et guitare), 1924
Oil with sand on canvas
140.7 x 200.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 53.1358 © Sucesión Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016





Yves Tanguy
There, Motion Has Not Yet Ceased (Là ne finit pas encore le mouvement), 1945 Oil on canvas
71.1 x 55.5 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Bequest, Richard S. Zeisler, 2007.47 © 2016 Estate of Yves Tanguy / VEGAP, Bilbao, 2016