Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z - Hardcover

Alsdorf, Bridget; Blessing, Jennifer

4.06

34 ratings by Goodreads

9780892072804: Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892072806 ISBN 13: 9780892072804

Publisher: Guggenheim Museum, 2003

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Revised, expanded and completely redesigned, this latest 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 a concise, engaging primer on twentieth-century art. Organized alphabetically, the book consists of entries on more than 250 of the most important paintings, sculptures and other artworks in the collection by artists from Marina Abramovic to Gilberto Zorio. Also included are definitions of key terms and concepts of modern art, from "Action" to "Non-Objective" 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 2001 edition includes new entries on such artists as Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman, among others. The text is by the museum's curators as well as prominent authors and scholars, including Dore Ashton, Gary Garrels and Rosalind Krauss.

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Review:

C is for C�zanne (and Chagall, Cornell, collaboration, and cultural activism) in the revised, redesigned handbook of the Guggenheim Museum's New York collection. The format is unorthodox: it's a little encyclopedia on topics from action (illustrated by de Kooning's 1955 Composition and 300 words by high-IQ critic Dore Ashton) to Gilberto Zorio (with a photo of the Italian artist's star-and-javelin sculpture and two helpful paragraphs by Guggenheim contemporary art curator Nancy Spector explaining what stars and javelins symbolize in his work). The reproductions are smallish but mostly eye-delighting, capturing at a glance, for instance, Picasso's leap from his first Paris painting Le Moulin de la Galette (done at 19 in 1900), vibrant in a Manet-meets-Munch way, to his still-startling cubist breakthroughs. Even the book's superb wraparound cover is a work of art: the Guggenheim by night, lit up by Dan Flavin's neon sculptures in exuberant surfer hues.

The entries range from more traditional thumbnail descriptions of artists and objects in the celebrated collection to some fairly arcane sections devoted to concepts like the fourth dimension (illustrated by a Braque cubist painting). The formidable art theorist Rosalind Krauss writes an entry on informe, elucidating French philosopher Bataille's principle of "formlessness": "Although Bataille's analogue for the informe was the crushed spider or the blob of spittle, and though Mir�'s detour from painting took the form of working with trash, Giacometti's example of formlessness cannily assumed a highly polished, even geometrically simple set of shapes." If you're up on art, you're intrigued; if Krauss confuses you, don't panic--simply turn to the accessible entry on Giacometti, which is more straightforwardly biographical.

I'm not sure an alphabetical listing is the best way to put the Guggenheim's awesome 20th-century masterworks in the clearest possible context. But this handbook is concise, lively, handsome, and a bit perverse. --Victoria Ellison

About the Author:

NANCY SPECTOR is curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

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