Megan Fontanella – författare

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.

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.

This revised and redesigned edition of the Guggenheim Museum’s guide to its New York collection is a concise primer on art of the late 19th to the early 21st centuries Revised, updated, and completely redesigned, the fourth edition of the Guggenheim Museum’s popular guide to its New York collection is a beautifully produced volume, not only a handy overview of the museum’s holdings but also a concise, engaging primer on the art of the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. Organized alphabetically, the book consists of entries on more than 170 of the most important paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, site-specific installations, and other works in the collection by artists from Marina Abramovic to Maurizio Cattelan to Julie Mehretu to Gilberto Zorio. Also included are definitions of key terms and concepts of modern art, from “Appropriation” to “Non-Objective” to “Postcolonial” and beyond. The Guggenheim Museum Collection is beloved for this wealth of masterpieces by leading modern artists, such as Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso. Reflecting the recent growth in the collection, this edition of the guide includes new entries on Romare Bearden, Tacita Dean, Cao Fei, David Hammons, Catherine Opie and Adrian Piper, among many others. The text is by the museum’s curators as well as prominent authors and scholars, including Homi Bhabha, Tom Crow, Nikki Greene and Jeffrey Schnapp.

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.