Megan Fontanella – författare

When Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) brought his collection of modern art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1965, it was his crowning achievement after more than a half century as one of Europe’s most influential and distinguished collectors and dealers. The collection’s formal bequeathal to the Guggenheim in 1978 represents a watershed moment for the museum – today its Thannhauser Collection constitutes the core of the Guggenheim’s Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and School of Paris holdings, including thirty-two works by Pablo Picasso.This lavishly illustrated volume presents the astonishing collection in full, offering a concentrated survey of works by such modern masters as Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Picasso, Camille Pissarro, and Vincent van Gogh, among others. Throughout, artworks are given rich context and detail with historical installation views and high-tech conservation images. Short essays on collection highlights by current and former Guggenheim curators and conservators illuminate the artists’ stylistic innovations as they sought to liberate art from academic genres and techniques. The book also features extensive technical analyses, offering rare insight into the artists’ materials and processes based on the latest advances in conservation technology. A lead essay by Megan Fontanella recounts the genesis of Thannhauser’s collection and its eventual transfer to the Guggenheim Museum.

Twenty-first-century Kandinsky: a reappraisal of the Russian abstractionist’s art, life and thought through the extraordinary collection of the iconic museumOne of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer.A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky’s life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place—and displacement—and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II.Kandinsky’s history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist’s work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum’s deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky’s life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.

A new look at a vanguard modernist artist who reimagined the still life, landscape and portrait genresThis landmark publication coincides with the major Guggenheim New York exhibition of works by the remarkable German Expressionist Gabriele Münter. Münter’s painting practice between 1908 and 1920 is the central focus of the exhibition and accompanying book. The study also illuminates her lesser-known later work and includes significant examples of her photography taken during earlier extensive travels in the United States. Münter was notably a cofounder of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a loose and transnational confederation of progressive artists and other creatives, with whom she probed the expressive potential of color and the symbolic resonance of forms. Her introspective portraits during World War II capture the “new woman” and explore questions of gender identity.Highlighting more than 90 paintings, drawings and photographs, this publication not only traces Münter’s pioneering and understudied practice but also challenges accepted historical narratives that have tended to sideline women artists. Reproductions of archival material appear alongside choice selections of the artist's sketches, prints and reverse glass paintings. Thematic texts by renowned scholars explore identity, place, belonging and the embodied experience of modernist women artists during this period.Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was at the forefront of the German avant-garde in the early 20th century and exhibited extensively at galleries and salons throughout Europe during her lifetime. Along with her artistic colleague and one-time partner, Vasily Kandinsky, Münter was a founder of the influential Expressionist group of artists, Der Blaue Reiter.

Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim celebrates the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth- century masterworks at the core of the institution’s holdings, and the trailblazers – artists and early patrons alike – whose contributions helped define the forward-looking identity of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Central to Visionaries is the story of museum founder Solomon R. Guggenheim, who with support from his trusted advisor, Hilla Rebay, become a great champion of ‘nonobjective’ art and assembled a radical collection against the backdrop of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and ’40s. A lead catalogue essay by museum curator Megan Fontanella explores Solomon Guggenheim’s fascinating activities in this period, together with that of five similarly pioneering art patrons whose personal holdings would become essential components of the foundation collection: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early School of Paris artworks from Justin K. Thannhauser; the eclectic Expressionist inventory of émigré art dealer Karl Nierendorf; the incomparable abstract and Surrealist paintings and sculptures from self-proclaimed ‘art addict’ Peggy Guggenheim; and key modern examples from the estates of artists Katherine S. Dreier and Rebay. Alongside vibrant illustrations of works by such iconic artists as Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock, Visionaries also features essays by six curators examining touchstone works from the foundation collection.

This comprehensive survey of the work of the Swiss-born modern master Alberto Giacometti offers a fresh and incisive account of his entire creative output. Published on the occasion of Giacometti’s first major museum presentation in the U.S. in over a decade, the volume brings together nearly 200 sculptures, paintings and drawings to trace the artist’s wide-ranging and hugely innovative engagement with the human form across various mediums. While Giacometti may be best known for his distinct figurative sculptures that emerged after World War II, including a series of elongated standing women, striding men and expressive busts, this volume devotes equal attention to the artist’s early and midcareer development. It explores his lesser-known engagement with Cubism and Surrealism as well as African, Oceanic and Cycladic art, which preceded his shift to figuration, while also highlighting his remarkable talents as a draftsman and painter alongside his sculptural oeuvre. Of particular focus is Giacometti’s studio practice, which is examined through rarely seen plaster sculptures that highlight the artist’s working process, in addition to ephemera and historical photographs documenting his relationship with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – which hosted the artist’s first U.S. exhibition, in 1955 – and with New York City.