Visions and Visionaries

BY MARY GREGORY

To create successful art, and certainly a successful museum, you need visionaries. Without dedicated, inspired patrons, everything from pharaonic Egyptian, to classical Greek and Roman, Imperial Chinese, High Renaissance, Dutch Baroque and Modern art wouldn’t exist as we know them. And without artists who dream, sweat and confound conventionality, museums would be drab, uninspiring reliquaries. But, when those two forces combine, worlds change.

In commemoration of the Guggenheim Museum’s 80th anniversary, more than 170 iconic masterpieces of modernity fill the rotunda and spill over into the Thannhauser Gallery. “Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim” is a celebratory, best-of-the-best look at the Guggenheim’s collection, its evolution and its founders. There’s never been a better time to visit the museum to discover or reconnect with what makes it so great.

From the lobby, Alexander Calder’s mobile, “Red Lily Pads,” spanning over 9 feet by 16 feet soars overhead, while Vasily Kandinsky’s ebullient “Black Lines” starts the show with clouds of bright color, punctuated by jittery little lines, recalling the way that, within the swell of a symphony, bright notes jump out. One of Kandinsky’s main themes was the relationship of music and art. In his treatise, “On the Spiritual in Art,” the painter wrote, “Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings.”

“Black Lines” leads into a stunning whole gallery filled with monumental Kandinsky paintings. Pure color and line mingle with shapes that reference vestiges of visual memory, things recalled or never really seen that somehow seem familiar. In “White Center” from 1921, objects that look like little flying cats float past. The gorgeous “Several Circles,” from five years later anchors the room. By this time, Kandinsky had embraced pure abstraction, presenting a composition of jewel-toned circles floating on a black expanse. But even with nothing but geometric shapes, the artist conjures thoughts of cells, eggs, planets and penumbra.

A sense of limitless reaching and endless exploring comes through in Kandinsky’s work and seems to infect each painter, school and style in the exhibition, while at the same time bearing witness to the vision of Solomon R. Guggenheim. In 1928, Guggenheim’s wife, Irene Rothschild, commissioned artist Hilla Rebay to paint her husband’s portrait. As he sat, they discussed art. Rebay’s influence was as enormous as Guggenheim’s trust in her. She steered him away from sporadic purchases of French and American landscapes and towards amassing a group of early, pioneering works of non-objective art. Together they termed it the “art of tomorrow” and set about bringing it to the people. So passionate was Solomon R. Guggenheim that he made his collection accessible to the public by appointment. It’s interesting to imagine scruffy scholars, students or artists turning up at the Guggenheim’s private apartment in the Plaza Hotel expecting to look at pictures. But, for a while, that happened.

When the Guggenheim Foundation finally opened in 1939, Hilla Rebay was the first curator and director, and her paintings and watercolors can be seen in the exhibition. The collection took shape over the 1930s and ‘40s with significant input from six individuals. Solomon R. Guggenheim, Hilla Rebay, Justin K. Thannhauser, Karl Nierendorf, Katherine S. Dreier and Peggy Guggenheim found, promoted and collected works reaching from Pissarro to Pollock, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism.

The Guggenheim and Frank Lloyd Wright’s brilliant architecture is perfect for this show. Ascending the ramp, one travels through every major “ism” from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Following the dazzling Kandinskys, sections of the circular walls are separated into distinct bays. Megan Fontanella, a a Guggenheim curator, along with Ylinka Barotto, a curatorial assistant, have used them to create mini solo shows of Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay, among others. The ability to consider a Delaunay on the fourth level, and then turn and look across the rotunda to see how it relates to Kandinsky, on the first, is extraordinary.

Chagall’s flight of fancy, “Paris through the Window,” depicts dichotomies of inside and outside and fantasy and reality, with a man-faced cat and a train running upside-down in front of the Eiffel Tower. Franz Marc’s rainbow-colored “Stables” beautifully blends architectural shapes with equine grace, and his “Yellow Cow” drew delighted coos from very young and young-at-heart visitors. Modigliani’s portrait of a woman in a yellow blouse and blue skirt seated against a sunlight-sculpted empty wall recalls Vermeer, at the same time reminding us of the vast distances art traveled in the three centuries that separated them.

Interspersed are masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Édouard Manet, René Magritte, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne. They’re joined by artists creating work just as beautiful and thought-provoking, but with less familiar names like Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Rudolf Bauer and Perle Fine, a New York Abstract Expressionist who’s beginning to have her breakout only three decades after her death.

The exhibition concludes with the spectacular “Alchemy” by Jackson Pollock. Crowds lingered before the wall-filling abstraction, which hasn’t been seen in New York in almost 50 years. A mini-exhibition within the exhibition focuses on this masterpiece, considered one of Pollock’s greatest works. Videos and documentary materials give a time traveler’s peek at the making of a painting that changed the course of painting. The energy coming off this canvas is palpable. Ardent lines loop and stride across the composition. Pollock’s every mark seems like an exclamation point. Poured, painted, sketched, pushed, pulled, stomped on, the history of every action that can happen between hand, material and picture plane is recorded on its complex surface.

It’s great to have the challenging forward-thinking shows the Guggenheim regularly exhibits that highlight today’s art of the future. That’s precisely what the founders wanted the museum to do. But it’s also great to celebrate the Guggenheim’s birthday and the opportunity to consider the present and future with an eye to its glorious past.