Tracey Bashkoff – 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.

A groundbreaking study of visionary artist Hilma af Klint. When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than a thousand paintings and works on paper that she kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint’s radically abstract painting practice – one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction.Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States, Hilma af Klint represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of the artist’s life and work. Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic milieu of af Klint’s 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint’s sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art – a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, the site of the forthcoming exhibition.

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.

Hilma af Klint s works have taken the international art world by storm, more than one hundred years after they were created. Around the turn of the 20th century, the new spiritual and social movements of theosophy and later anthroposophy came to inspire the pioneers of modernism and abstract art Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and Hilma af Klint. What was the zeitgeist that inspired such an artistic explosion?  This anthology is based on a seminar held at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York at the opening of its highly-acclaimed exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future in October 2018.