ART CITIES:Venice-New Acquisitions of Peggy Guggenheim Collection
During her career Berenice Abbott produced one of the most significant and varied bodies of photography ever made. The photographer had a sixty-year beginning as an assistant of Man Ray, then her initial success as a portrait photographer in Paris, followed by the huge project “Changing New York” and her pioneering work as a scientific photographer. “The world doesn’t like independent women. Why, I don’t know, but I don’t care”, these are the laconic words Berenice Abbott used to sum up her life experience.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Guggenheim Foundation Archive
The Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation has acquired 6 black and white vintage prints by Berenice Abbott that will enrich the Foundation’s collections at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. They consist of images of Peggy’s museum-gallery in New York, “Art of This Century”, and were taken in 1942. The purchase was made possible with funds donated by Alberto and Gioietta Vitale, the Guggenheim Circle of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Sotheby’s, and through prior gifts of the M.R. Taylor Bequest and Asbjorn Lunde, 2016. In 1923 Abbott had joined the studio of Man Ray as an assistant in Paris. Berenice Abbott’s career as an independent photographer was started by Peggy Guggenheim in the mid ‘20s. Peggy Guggenheim wrote in her memoirs: “While I was in Paris Berenice Abbott had asked me to lend her 5,000 francs to buy a camera. She said she wanted to start photography on her own. To pay me back [..] she took the most beautiful photographs of Sindbad and Pegeen and me. I certainly was well reimbursed”. On 20/10/ 1942, Peggy Guggenheim opened her museum-gallery “Art of This Century” in New York. Designed by the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery consisted of various innovative exhibition galleries and became Manhattan’s most stimulating venue for contemporary art. Here Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, Abstract and Surrealist art and organized temporary exhibitions of leading European artists and of several then unknown young Americans such as: Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. The photographs were taken by Berenice Abbott in late October and early November 1942, soon after the gallery’s completion. The photographs present various views of the museum-gallery, its Surrealist and Abstract galleries and the Painting Library, with unframed paintings mounted on adjustable arms attached to the concave walls, made of eucalyptus, or sculptures displayed on Kiesler’s “Correalist” furniture.
