Search results for ""Author Megan Fontanella""

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.

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Twenty-first-century Kandinsky: a reappraisal of the Russian abstractionist’s art, life and thought through the extraordinary collection of the iconic museum One 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.

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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.

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