From Picasso To Pollock: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Museum - Softcover

Schaffner, Ingrid

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0892072989 ISBN 13: 9780892072989

Publisher: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004

Synopsis

From Picasso to Pollock highlights the history of the aesthetic vanguard from early Modernism through Abstract Expressionism. With distinctive focus yet remarkable comprehensiveness, From Picasso to Pollock unites the major artists and developments of the first half of the twentieth century through significant examples of non-objective, Cubist, Surrealist, Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture. A deep and broad assembly of masterpieces has been chosen from the Guggenheim's formative collection, and through it the viewer may perceive the era of Modern art emerging in all its diversity and complexity. Included here are reproductions of and short texts on seminal works by Brancusi, Braque, Chagall, de Kooning, Delaunay, Ernst, Fontana, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Malevich, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani, Mondrian, Popova and Schiele. Narrative biographies on a number of these artists are included, as well as a short, illustrated history of the collection by Lisa Dennison. From Picasso to Pollock is the second in a trilogy from the Guggenheim which highlights the greatest strengths of the museum's collection. The first title, Moving Pictures, showcased contemporary photography and video, and the third, Primary Forms, considered Minimalism, Conceptualism and their more contemporary progeny.

About this title

About the Author

Max Beckmannwas born in Leipzig in 1884 to a family of farmers. He began his formal studies in 1900 at the Weimar Art Academy and moved to Paris soon after with his new wife. Drafted into World War I, he was deemed unfit to serve in the Second, and spent the war years in Germany, outlawed by Hitler from exhibiting his "degenerate" paintings. After the war, he came to America, taking up the post of Painter-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In the late 1940s he moved to Manhattan, where he died of a heart attack en route to see his work in a show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 27, 1950.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 and is one of the most famous artists of the 20th century.

Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee near Bern in 1879. In the early 1910s, he met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich, and together they founded the Blaue Reiter movement. Through his involvement with Cubism, Klee then began to move towards abstract representation and to add greater depth of differentiation to his palette by using watercolor painting. He taught at the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius and later at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, leaving his post to escape the Nazis for Bern, where he died in 1940.

Franz Marc (Munich 1880-1916 near Verdun) began his studies at the Munich Academy in 1900 and worked in the style of Munich landscape painting. Early work reveals in its form and construction that he already possessed an astonishing mastery of traditional artistic means. From summer 1902 onwards, increasingly self-taught, he worked at Kochel in Upper Bavaria. As a young man Marc traveled on a study trip to Paris where he saw Impressionism and the work of Vincent Van Gogh. Upon his return to Germany he devoted himself primarily to illustrations of poems by Richard Dehmel, Carmen Sylva, Hans Bethge and others. Marc became acquainted with the artist August Macke in 1910 and by 1911 he founded the 'Blaue Reiter' group with Wassily Kandinsky.

Henri Matisse was born in 1869 and grew up in northern France, near Belgium. As a young man he studied law and worked in the courts until, convalescing after appendicitis, he began to paint. His work became some of the most important art made in the twentieth century. It is intensely composed and colored; he was the leader of the Fauvists and soon an acknowledged leader across the arts. His career was powerful and enduring by any standard, and 50 years after death in 1954, his work continues to rise in value. In 2003, The Museum of Modern Art organized 'Matisse Picasso,' a show setting the two artists' work side by side, and in 2005 Matisses' son's collection of his work appeared at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nancy Spector is Chief Curator at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and U.S. Commissioner to the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Edition details

• Publisher: Guggenheim Museum Publications
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0892072989
• ISBN 13: 9780892072989
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 174
• Editor: Abadie Daniel, Cross Susan, Dennison Lisa, Drutt Matthew, Ragheb J. Fiona