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European 19th- and 20th-Century Painting from
the Collections of the State Hermitage and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation The first exhibition by the Hermitage and the Guggenheim Foundation at the Venetian Casino-Resort in Las Vegas presented 45 masterpieces that underlined both the differences and the clearly complementary character of these two world-famous collections. The exhibition featured canvases by Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and pioneers of modern art, including outstanding works by Cézanne, Chagall, Kandinsky, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh. The exhibition allowed visitors to appreciate in full measure the collections assembled in Moscow by Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Founded in 1764, the State Hermitage in St Petersburg is one of the world's greatest museums. Its stocks number more than 3 million works of art spanning a period from prehistoric cultures to the beginning of the 20th century, including precious artefacts of Middle Eastern cultures, works of art from Greece and Rome, Islamic and Oriental art, the Italian Renaissance and works from the 19th and 20th centuries. The Guggenheim Museum can boast a first-class collection of art from the late 19th and 20th centuries, including works by Beuys, Brancusi, Cézanne, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rothko and Serra. The exhibition focussed on the period in which the two collections overlap: the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That was the period when the Parisian avant-garde turned away from the completion of the painted layer, natural colours, realistic depiction of form and frozen composition of traditional salon painting. The result was new, bold manners of painting and subjects from contemporary life. The exhibition, arranged in a chronological manner, included works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir and many other artists. Some of the exhibits provided by the Guggenheim Museum are part of the Thannhauser collection that comprises masterpieces of late19th- and early 20th-century painting donated to the museum by the German-born art dealer and collector Justin K. Thannhauser (1892-1976) and his wife Hilda (1919-1991). Other works are gifts from the personal collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim, or later acquisitions made by the museum. One further work - Picasso's Studio of 1928 - was provided from the collection of Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), the niece of the foundation's founder. In 1976 she handed over her collection and palazzo in Venice to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Before the 1917 Revolution in Russia the majority of paintings supplied by the Hermitage belonged to the private collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, prominent Russian businessmen who put together first-rate collections of French artists. A catalogue raisonne was published for the exhibition with a foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage, and Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. The entries were written by Albert Kostenevich, leading research worker at the State Hermitage. |
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Copyright © 2011 State Hermitage Museum |
