View allAll Photos Tagged metaphysics
Day Two-hundred and Five, it's a Metaphysic Day. Big clouds, heavy rainfalls, hot and shiny sun, this is the end of summer.
365+1 Day of NEX-7 project
Smoke Photo Art.
"Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic."
Hans Hofmann
I can hardly believe I have made 600 of these smokreations. Although I am not keeping up with the pace of last years 1 a day, as I come up on the end my second year of doing this, I should finish with around 260, which isn't too bad conisdering how much more complex some of these have become.
This one (face and serving dish) has been sitting around on my hard drive for a couple of months. I thought it would be better for the Halloween season. I decided to add the background and water for a little extra punch. Hope people like it and please comment if you do. Thanks to all of you who have supported my work over the past years with your views, comments, and invites. And if you are just discovering my work...dig around in my sets...I think you'll find some magic in there. : )
Alexander Ney (born in Leningrad, Russia) is an American sculptor and painter. He immigrated to the United States in 1974. Developing several individualistic styles in modern art, he is most famous for his unique work in terra cotta sculpture, involving heavily perforated surfaces and intriguing forms.
After being given private art lessons at the home of influential Russian sculptor V.V. Lishev, Ney studied at the Art School of the Leningrad Academy of Arts, and the Art School of the Surikov Moscow Art Institute. Ney befriended a wide number of progressive-minded art students, now stars of the contemporary Russian art scene such as Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, Alexander Yulikov, Lev Nussberg and Vadim Kosmatschof. His relentless efforts in creating strikingly new interpretations of art quickly made the young artist legendary amidst his peers. In 1967 through 1969, Ney attended Art History and Theory courses at the Ilya Repin Institute. He continued to perfect his skills as both a painter and sculptor, as well as an art theoretician.
Ho abbandonato momentaneamente Flickr perché sto lavorando sul mio archivio e riscansionando la maggior parte dei miei scatti per avere delle scansioni al meglio...magari da esporre. Non sto facendo un lavoro cronologico ma su progetti che ritengo interessanti, e spesso su scatti che non avevo preso in considerazione. Inizio con questa serie di immagini del 96 fatte in Uruguay e ho deciso che la serie sarà Uruguay Metafisico, ditemi cosa ne pensate. Grazie
Metafisica nel senso pittorico: opere metafisiche sono la descrizione di una realtà che va al di là delle apparenze, il senso di mistero, allucinazione, sogno, le immagini statiche e le scene fuori dal tempo.
I temporarily abandoned Flickr because I'm working on my archive and rescan most of my shots to get the best scans ... maybe to expose. I'm not doing chronological work but on projects that I think are interesting, and often on shots that I hadn't taken into consideration. I start with this series of images of the 96 made in Uruguay and I have decided that the series will be Uruguay Metaphysical, tell me what you think. Thank you Metaphysics in the pictorial sense: metaphysical works are the description of a reality that goes beyond appearances, the sense of mystery, hallucination, dream, static images and timeless scenes.
Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature,
but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality
of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COLLAGE.
PHOTO (for collage)
The Church of Saint John the Baptist. Interier.
Grid (Fragment).
Ein-Kerem (now a part of Jerusalem), Israel.
Taken 02 December,2006
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For more information about my craft, please visit my profile page.
WILD LUPINE is a 140 carat handcrafted Amethyst Crystal Cluster pendant is created swirling and shaping nontarnish sterling silver plate wire by hand to enhance the natural beauty and shape of the stone. This dramatic and sparkly deep violet pendant shimmers with its many druzy points. The combination of the elegant, swirly silver wire setting, together with the natural bling of this dramatic gemstone creates a very versatile piece of wearable art that can be worn with a formal gown or your favorite casual jeans. Stylish Care More pendants are sure to add a touch of natural drama to your fashion wardrobe
It measures 1 1/2" across and 2 1/2" top to tip including the bail.
The bail is designed to be large enough to accommodate your favorite chain, choker or cord. A 17" sterling silver plate chain is included.
All purchases are nicely packaged in a gift box.
The following metaphysical healing properties have been collected from various sources. For more specific information please contact an experienced Crystal Therapist.
Amethyst's healing effects:
Considered the Master Healing Stone. An extremely powerful and protective stone with a high spiritual vibration. It's one of the most spiritual stones, promoting love of the divine, selflessness, & spiritual wisdom. It activates the crown Chakra. It increases a sense of responsibility and self worth. Sleep with it and it facilitates out of body experiences and intuitive dreams. Amethyst aids in headaches, insomnia, blood, pain, stress ,tension, bruising, injuries, skin, respiratory, intestinal. It cleanses the aura. It balances and connects physical, mental & emotional bodies to the spiritual.
* Le Icone e gli Awards dei gruppi, privi di commento personale, saranno rimossi.
* Icons and Awards of groups, without personal comment, will be removed.
Fuji FinePix X100, Fujinon Aspherical 23mm f/2, ISO 400, 1/680s, f/5.6
"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."
Walt Whitman
With especial thanks to the programmers of Inkscape, textures by Playing with Brushes, Christopher Lee Hewitt, and Skeletal Mass.
Peace and love to you. Namaste.
Collection Peggy Guggenheim
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City.
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" . There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice. Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level. The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miro (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City.
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" . There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice. Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level. The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miro (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
Balthasar de Monconys (1611-1665) was a French physicist and judge, born in Lyon. In 1618, Monconys' parents sent him to a Jesuit boarding school in Salamanca, Spain, as a plague had broken out in Lyon. Monconys was deeply interested in metaphysics and mysticism, and studied the teachings of Pythagoras, Zoroastrism, and Greek and Arab alchemists. From a young age, he dreamed of travelling to India and China. However, he returned to Lyon after finishing his studies. At the age of thirty-four years old he was finally able to leave behind the safety of his library and the theoretical speculation of the laboratory, and become a tireless traveller in Europe and the East.
Monconys travelled to Portugal, England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Istanbul and the Middle East with the son of the Duke of Luynes. Even in his very first journey to Portugal, it is obvious that in each city Monconys is very soon able to connect with mathematicians, clergymen, surgeons, engineers, chemists, physicians and princes, to visit their laboratories and to collect “secrets and experiences”.
After Portugal, Monconys travelled to Italy, and finally departed to the East, to study the ancient religions and denominations, and meet the gymnosophists. In 1647-48 he was in Egypt. Seeking the Zoroasters and followers of Hermes Trismegistus, he reached Mount Sinai. In Egypt, the 17th century European was lost in a labyrinth of small and winding streetlets, and discovered different cults and religions, the diversity of ethnicities and their customs: Turks, Kopts, Jews, Arabs, Mauritans, Maronites, Armenians, and Dervishes. He followed several superstitious suggestions and discovered marvellous books of astronomy in Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Later on, after his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he crossed Asia Minor and reached Istanbul, from where he planned to travel to Persia. For once more in his life however, the plague forced him to change his course; he left for Izmir, and returned to Lyon in 1649.
Fron 1663 to 1665 Monconys travelled incessantly between Paris, London, the Netherlands and Germany. He visited princes and philosophers, libraries and laboratories, and maintained frequent correspondence with several scientists. Finally, after consequent asthma attacks he passed away before his travel notes could be published.
His travel journal (1665-1666) was edited and published by his son and by his Jesuit friend J. Berchet. The journal is enriched by drawings which testify to the wide scope of Monconys' interests. Monconys collected a vast corpus of material which includes medical recipes, chemistry forms, material connected to the esoteric sciences, mathematical puzzles, questions of Algebra and Geometry, zoological observations, mechanical applications, descriptions of natural phenomena, chemistry experiments, various machines and devices, medical matters, the philosopher's stone, astronomical measurements, magnifying lenses, thermometres, hydraulic devices, drinks, hydrometres, microscopes, architectural constructions and even matters connected to hygiene or the preparation of liquors.
The third volume includes a hundred and sixty-five medical, chemical and physics experiments with their outcomes as well as a sonnet on the battle of Marathon. There are five detailed indexes for the classification of the material. At the same time, this three-volume work permits the construction of a list of names (more than two hundred and fifty) of scholars, physicians, alchemists, astrologists, mathematicians, empirical scientists and other researches. From Monconys' text and correspondence a highly interesting network emerges, as it is possible for specialists of all disciplines to reconstruct the contacts between scientists and scholars of Western Europe, for a period spanning more than a decade in the mid-17th century.
Monconys' work is written in a monotonous style, but nevertheless possesses a perennial charm, as it is a combination of a travel journal and a laboratory scientist's workbook. The drawings accompanying the text make up a corpus of material unique in travel literature.
Written by Ioli Vingopoulou
Fransız asıllı fizikçi ve yargıç Balthasar de Monconys (1611-1665) (okunuş: Baltazar dö Monkoni) Lyon şehrinde doğar. Yaşadığı kentte 1618 yılında veba salgını baş gösterince, ailesi onu Salamanka şehrine bir Cizvit yatılı okuluna gönderir. Metafizik ve gizemcilik (mistisizm) için yoğun ilgi duyan Monconys, Pythagoras öğretilerini, Zerdüştlüğü, hatta Yunan ve Arap simyacıların eserlerini okur. Daha küçük yaştan beri Hindistan ve Çin'e kadar ulaşmayı düşlemesine karşın eğitimini tamamladıktan sonra Lyon'a geri döner ve nihayet 34 yaşındayken kütüphane güvenliğini ve teorik laboratuvar bilgilerini terkedip kararlı bir biçimde Avrupa ve Doğu'ya seyahat etmeye başlar.
Monconys, Luynes dükünün oğluyla birlikte Portekiz, İngiltere, Almanya, İtalya, Alçak Ülkeler (Hollanda), İstanbul ve Orta Doğu'ya seyahat eder. Daha ilk yolculuğundan (Portekiz'de) uğradığı her şehirde kısa zamanda matematikçi, rahip, cerrah, mühendis, kimyager, doktor ve prens gibi çeşit çeşit insanlarla bağ kurup laboratuvarlarını ziyaret ederek "sır ve tecrübeler" derler. Yazdığı metinde bu süreci izlemekteyiz. Portekiz'den sonra ilk kez olarak İtalya'ya gider ve nihayet çeşitli dogmaları, eski dinleri ve "gymnosophist"leri (çıplak bilgeler) incelemek üzere Doğu'ya doğru yola çıkar. 1647-48 yıllarında Mısır'da bulunmaktadır; Zerdüştçüler ve Hermes-Thot (Hermes Trismegistus) müritleriyle karşılaşmak için Sina dağına kadar ulaşır. Mısır'da 17. yüzyılın bu Batı Avrupalısı daracık sokakların oluşturduğu labirent içinde yitip, türk, kıptî, yahudî, arap, moritanyalı, maruni, ermeni, derviş gibi binbir çeşit dogma ve mezhep, milliyet ve kültürel adet keşfeder. Batıl inançlara uyar, ibranice farsça yada arapça dillerinde yazılmış şahane gökbilim kitapları keşfeder. Kutsal Yerlere hacılık ziyaretinin ardından Anadolu'yu boydan boya geçip İstanbul'a varır. Buradan İran'a gitmeyi planlar. Ancak veba salgını bir kez daha onu kaçmaya zorlar; İzmir'e geçip oradan 1649 yılında Lyon'a döner.
Monconys 1663'ten 1665'e kadar hiç ara vermeden Paris, Londra, Hollanda ve Almanya arasında mekik dokuyup prens ve filozoflarla konuşur, çeşitli kütüphane ve laboratuvarları ziyaret eder ve birçok bilim adamıyla yoğun bir mektuplaşma sürdürür. Ancak sonunda üstüste geçirdiği astım krizlerinden sonra seyahat notlarının kitap olarak basılmış halini göremeden ölür.
Sözkonusu yayın (1665-1666) Monconys'nin oğlu ve dostu Cizvit rahip J. Berchet tarafından hazırlanmıştır. Monconys'nin geniş bir ilgi alanına sahip oluşu günlüğünü tamamlayan desenlerle kanıtlanmaktadır. Derlemiş olduğu çeşitli ve zengin malzeme içinde: ilâç reçeteleri, kimyasal formüller, gizli ilimlerle ilgili malzeme, matematik bilmeceleri, cebir ve geometri problemleri, zoolojiye (hayvan bilimi) ilişkin gözlemler, mekanik uygulamalar, doğa fenomenleri betimlemeleri, kimyasal deneyler, makineler, tıp konuları, felsefe taşı, astronomi ölçümleri, büyüteçler, termometreler, su tesisatıyla ilgili cihazlar, içkiler, hidrometreler, mikroskoplar, mimarî yapılar, hijyen ve likör yapımı gibi konular var.
Kitabın üçüncü cildinde işlenen konular arasında 165 tane fizik kimya ve tıp deneyi ve sonuçları, ve Maraton muharebesi hakkında bir sone yer almaktadır. Bu içeriğin sınıflanması için kitaba beş tane ayrı çözümlemeli dizin eklenmiştir. Aynı zamanda, Monconys'nin üç ciltlik eserinden upuzun bir isimler katalogu da (250'den fazla isim) elde edilebilir. Bu isimler yazar ve düşünür, doktor, simyacı, astrolog, matematikçi, deneyci ve çeşitli uzman araştırmacılara aittir. Monconys'nin metninden ve mektuplaşmalarından, 17. yüzyıl ortalarında özellikle batı Avrupa'da, 20 yıldan fazla bir süre için, tüm bilim uzmanlarının yeniden birleştirebileceği son derece ilginç bir bilimler arası ilişki ağı ortaya çıkmaktadır.
Monconys'nin yazış uslubu tekdüze olmakla birlikte, bir laboratuvar araştırmacısının seyahat günlüğü ile gözlem defterini bir arada bulundurması açısından eşsiz bir cazibeye sahiptir. Metne eşlik eden desenler seyahat edebiyatı yayınlarında rastlanan ender türden bir malzeme oluşturmaktadır.
Yazan: İoli Vingopoulou
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection;
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic. (1)
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City. (3)
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" (4). There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion (5). In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden (6) curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice (1). Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level (2). The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979. (3) (4)
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miró (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
Please NO adding Favourites without comments (code
award). You risk being BLOCKE
My Images Do Not Belong To The Public Domain - All images are copyright by silvano franzi ©all rights reserved©
Collection Peggy Guggenheim
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City.
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" . There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice. Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level. The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miro (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
Collection Peggy Guggenheim
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City.
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" . There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice. Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level. The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miro (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
For more information about my craft, please visit my profile page.
FERN GULLEY is a large 135 carat handcrafted Malachite pendant that I created swirling and shaping gold toned silver plate wire by hand to enhance the natural beauty and shape of the stone. This raw malachite nugget is a beautiful shade of emerald green with natural bling crystals. The combination of the elegant, swirly copper wire setting, together with the earthy and dramatic gemstone creates a very versatile piece of wearable art that can be worn with a party dress or your favorite casual jeans. This gemstone is a raw, unpolished chunk of malachite, a direct biproduct of copper. Stylish Care More pendants are sure to add a touch of natural drama to your fashion wardrobe.
It measures 1 3/4" across and 2 1/2" top to tip including the bail.
The bail is designed to be large enough to accommodate your favorite chain, choker or cord. Your gift of a 17" gold plate chain is included. All purchases are nicely packaged in a gift box.
The following metaphysical healing properties have been collected from various sources. For more specific information please contact an experienced Crystal Therapist.
Malachite's healing effects:
Malachite helps balance pure love, romance, and one's own well-being. Counteracts self-destructive romantic tendencies and encourages true, pure love. A stone of good fortune, prosperity and abundance. Helps transformation, change and spiritual evolution. It can clear, activate & balance all chakras. Bridges the energy of the heart and root chakras. A very general protective stone as well as protection from evil, protection during pregnancy, childbirth, children and travel. Helps with nightmares. Good for release of negative emotions from experiences that one remembers. Removes obstacles and clears path towards goals. Stimulates intuition. Represents fidelity and loyalty in love and friendship. It can decrease one's tendency to radiation illness, asthma, arthritis, and tumors.
Chakras: Base, Heart, Solar Plexus, Soul Star, Third Eye, Thymus
Astrological sign: Scorpio, Capricorn
Collection Peggy Guggenheim
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City.
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" . There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice. Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level. The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miro (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
“There was something disquieting about the way an intimate object, seemingly withdrawn into its solemn steadfastness, could affect human emotions. Any old thing forgotten in a corner, if the eye dwelt on it, acquired an eloquence of its own, communicating its lyricism and magic to the kindred soul. If a neglected object of this kind were forcibly isolated, that is, divested of its warmth and of the protective coat of its environment, or even ironically combined with completely unrelated things, it would reassert its dignity in the new context and stand there, incomprehensible, weird, mysterious.”
—Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (1982)
Book of Shadows pages I created. These are not pre-punched so they can be customized for most any Book of Shadows. These pages are on parchment paper 8.5 x 11 size.
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic. (1)
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City. (3)
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" (4). There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion (5). In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden (6) curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice (1). Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level (2). The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979. (3) (4)
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miró (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
O estudo da metafísica consiste em procurar, num quarto escuro, um gato preto que não está lá.
Voltaire
__________
The study of metaphysics is to search in a dark room a black cat that is not there.
Voltaire
Balthasar de Monconys (1611-1665) was a French physicist and judge, born in Lyon. In 1618, Monconys' parents sent him to a Jesuit boarding school in Salamanca, Spain, as a plague had broken out in Lyon. Monconys was deeply interested in metaphysics and mysticism, and studied the teachings of Pythagoras, Zoroastrism, and Greek and Arab alchemists. From a young age, he dreamed of travelling to India and China. However, he returned to Lyon after finishing his studies. At the age of thirty-four years old he was finally able to leave behind the safety of his library and the theoretical speculation of the laboratory, and become a tireless traveller in Europe and the East.
Monconys travelled to Portugal, England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Istanbul and the Middle East with the son of the Duke of Luynes. Even in his very first journey to Portugal, it is obvious that in each city Monconys is very soon able to connect with mathematicians, clergymen, surgeons, engineers, chemists, physicians and princes, to visit their laboratories and to collect “secrets and experiences”.
After Portugal, Monconys travelled to Italy, and finally departed to the East, to study the ancient religions and denominations, and meet the gymnosophists. In 1647-48 he was in Egypt. Seeking the Zoroasters and followers of Hermes Trismegistus, he reached Mount Sinai. In Egypt, the 17th century European was lost in a labyrinth of small and winding streetlets, and discovered different cults and religions, the diversity of ethnicities and their customs: Turks, Kopts, Jews, Arabs, Mauritans, Maronites, Armenians, and Dervishes. He followed several superstitious suggestions and discovered marvellous books of astronomy in Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. Later on, after his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he crossed Asia Minor and reached Istanbul, from where he planned to travel to Persia. For once more in his life however, the plague forced him to change his course; he left for Izmir, and returned to Lyon in 1649.
Fron 1663 to 1665 Monconys travelled incessantly between Paris, London, the Netherlands and Germany. He visited princes and philosophers, libraries and laboratories, and maintained frequent correspondence with several scientists. Finally, after consequent asthma attacks he passed away before his travel notes could be published.
His travel journal (1665-1666) was edited and published by his son and by his Jesuit friend J. Berchet. The journal is enriched by drawings which testify to the wide scope of Monconys' interests. Monconys collected a vast corpus of material which includes medical recipes, chemistry forms, material connected to the esoteric sciences, mathematical puzzles, questions of Algebra and Geometry, zoological observations, mechanical applications, descriptions of natural phenomena, chemistry experiments, various machines and devices, medical matters, the philosopher's stone, astronomical measurements, magnifying lenses, thermometres, hydraulic devices, drinks, hydrometres, microscopes, architectural constructions and even matters connected to hygiene or the preparation of liquors.
The third volume includes a hundred and sixty-five medical, chemical and physics experiments with their outcomes as well as a sonnet on the battle of Marathon. There are five detailed indexes for the classification of the material. At the same time, this three-volume work permits the construction of a list of names (more than two hundred and fifty) of scholars, physicians, alchemists, astrologists, mathematicians, empirical scientists and other researches. From Monconys' text and correspondence a highly interesting network emerges, as it is possible for specialists of all disciplines to reconstruct the contacts between scientists and scholars of Western Europe, for a period spanning more than a decade in the mid-17th century.
Monconys' work is written in a monotonous style, but nevertheless possesses a perennial charm, as it is a combination of a travel journal and a laboratory scientist's workbook. The drawings accompanying the text make up a corpus of material unique in travel literature.
Written by Ioli Vingopoulou
Fransız asıllı fizikçi ve yargıç Balthasar de Monconys (1611-1665) (okunuş: Baltazar dö Monkoni) Lyon şehrinde doğar. Yaşadığı kentte 1618 yılında veba salgını baş gösterince, ailesi onu Salamanka şehrine bir Cizvit yatılı okuluna gönderir. Metafizik ve gizemcilik (mistisizm) için yoğun ilgi duyan Monconys, Pythagoras öğretilerini, Zerdüştlüğü, hatta Yunan ve Arap simyacıların eserlerini okur. Daha küçük yaştan beri Hindistan ve Çin'e kadar ulaşmayı düşlemesine karşın eğitimini tamamladıktan sonra Lyon'a geri döner ve nihayet 34 yaşındayken kütüphane güvenliğini ve teorik laboratuvar bilgilerini terkedip kararlı bir biçimde Avrupa ve Doğu'ya seyahat etmeye başlar.
Monconys, Luynes dükünün oğluyla birlikte Portekiz, İngiltere, Almanya, İtalya, Alçak Ülkeler (Hollanda), İstanbul ve Orta Doğu'ya seyahat eder. Daha ilk yolculuğundan (Portekiz'de) uğradığı her şehirde kısa zamanda matematikçi, rahip, cerrah, mühendis, kimyager, doktor ve prens gibi çeşit çeşit insanlarla bağ kurup laboratuvarlarını ziyaret ederek "sır ve tecrübeler" derler. Yazdığı metinde bu süreci izlemekteyiz. Portekiz'den sonra ilk kez olarak İtalya'ya gider ve nihayet çeşitli dogmaları, eski dinleri ve "gymnosophist"leri (çıplak bilgeler) incelemek üzere Doğu'ya doğru yola çıkar. 1647-48 yıllarında Mısır'da bulunmaktadır; Zerdüştçüler ve Hermes-Thot (Hermes Trismegistus) müritleriyle karşılaşmak için Sina dağına kadar ulaşır. Mısır'da 17. yüzyılın bu Batı Avrupalısı daracık sokakların oluşturduğu labirent içinde yitip, türk, kıptî, yahudî, arap, moritanyalı, maruni, ermeni, derviş gibi binbir çeşit dogma ve mezhep, milliyet ve kültürel adet keşfeder. Batıl inançlara uyar, ibranice farsça yada arapça dillerinde yazılmış şahane gökbilim kitapları keşfeder. Kutsal Yerlere hacılık ziyaretinin ardından Anadolu'yu boydan boya geçip İstanbul'a varır. Buradan İran'a gitmeyi planlar. Ancak veba salgını bir kez daha onu kaçmaya zorlar; İzmir'e geçip oradan 1649 yılında Lyon'a döner.
Monconys 1663'ten 1665'e kadar hiç ara vermeden Paris, Londra, Hollanda ve Almanya arasında mekik dokuyup prens ve filozoflarla konuşur, çeşitli kütüphane ve laboratuvarları ziyaret eder ve birçok bilim adamıyla yoğun bir mektuplaşma sürdürür. Ancak sonunda üstüste geçirdiği astım krizlerinden sonra seyahat notlarının kitap olarak basılmış halini göremeden ölür.
Sözkonusu yayın (1665-1666) Monconys'nin oğlu ve dostu Cizvit rahip J. Berchet tarafından hazırlanmıştır. Monconys'nin geniş bir ilgi alanına sahip oluşu günlüğünü tamamlayan desenlerle kanıtlanmaktadır. Derlemiş olduğu çeşitli ve zengin malzeme içinde: ilâç reçeteleri, kimyasal formüller, gizli ilimlerle ilgili malzeme, matematik bilmeceleri, cebir ve geometri problemleri, zoolojiye (hayvan bilimi) ilişkin gözlemler, mekanik uygulamalar, doğa fenomenleri betimlemeleri, kimyasal deneyler, makineler, tıp konuları, felsefe taşı, astronomi ölçümleri, büyüteçler, termometreler, su tesisatıyla ilgili cihazlar, içkiler, hidrometreler, mikroskoplar, mimarî yapılar, hijyen ve likör yapımı gibi konular var.
Kitabın üçüncü cildinde işlenen konular arasında 165 tane fizik kimya ve tıp deneyi ve sonuçları, ve Maraton muharebesi hakkında bir sone yer almaktadır. Bu içeriğin sınıflanması için kitaba beş tane ayrı çözümlemeli dizin eklenmiştir. Aynı zamanda, Monconys'nin üç ciltlik eserinden upuzun bir isimler katalogu da (250'den fazla isim) elde edilebilir. Bu isimler yazar ve düşünür, doktor, simyacı, astrolog, matematikçi, deneyci ve çeşitli uzman araştırmacılara aittir. Monconys'nin metninden ve mektuplaşmalarından, 17. yüzyıl ortalarında özellikle batı Avrupa'da, 20 yıldan fazla bir süre için, tüm bilim uzmanlarının yeniden birleştirebileceği son derece ilginç bir bilimler arası ilişki ağı ortaya çıkmaktadır.
Monconys'nin yazış uslubu tekdüze olmakla birlikte, bir laboratuvar araştırmacısının seyahat günlüğü ile gözlem defterini bir arada bulundurması açısından eşsiz bir cazibeye sahiptir. Metne eşlik eden desenler seyahat edebiyatı yayınlarında rastlanan ender türden bir malzeme oluşturmaktadır.
Yazan: İoli Vingopoulou
About the Book
Dejan Stojanović, Sunce sebe gleda, Književna reč, Beograd, 1999
By statement: Dejan Stojanović.
Series: Biblioteka Pismo
Source records: Library MARC record
Library MARC record
Language: Serbian
Dimensions: 21 cm.
Pagination: 157 p. ;
LCCN: 00279202
LC: PG1419.29.T587 S86 1999
Subject: Poetry
THE SUN WATCHES ITSELF
The second collection of Dejan Stojanovic's verse, "The Sun is Watching Itself," is covered by a metaphysical and philosophical veil. Eleven segments are connected by these two abstract approaches and by such key images as a circle, suggesting infinity, and silence, reflecting space and eternity. The circle serves as a powerful symbol and a device of the perpetual in this poetry: "the end without endlessness is only a new beginning," claims the poet. Thus, one of the poems bears the title "God and Circle," symbolizing the perennial search for an exit and the eventual finding of one, which only leads into another circle and to continuous evolution. This prompts Stojanovic to pose the question "Is God himself a Circle?"--implying that God is endless and ever present.
Although concise, the poems convey in a powerful and specific manner messages from the triad circle-God-eternity, connected by man's destiny and the poet's concept of human life and origins, and of the universe itself. In other words, microcosmic observations lead to macrocosmic revelations and didactic conclusions. The poems seem to teach us what is obvious in the context of common sense, often surprisingly remote to the modern man.
In terms of style and format, the author has a coextensional approach; he uses relatively simple expressions and words in an interplay of brilliant meanings that bring about highly complex but easily readable structures. If elegance is represented by simplicity, then these are some of the most elegant verses imaginable; unadorned verses that are a source of beauty and wisdom.
Stojanovic's perceptions of light and darkness, of fantasy and reality, of truth and falsehood present us with a circular format of infinity and resurrection.
The format has its logical beginning and end. "The Sun is Watching Itself" begins with poems dedicated to God and the universe, then descends from the metaphysical to the philosophical, focusing on more ordinary such us the symbolic meaning of a stone, a game, a place, silence, hopelessness, and the question "Is it possible to write a poem?" Stojanovic's collection might well serve as an affirmative answer to this question. The poet has taken us on a long journey from God and universe to our everyday world. We all seem to be a part of a circle, says the author, searching for the eternal in the universe, only to realize the finality of life on earth. The poet's message is doubly effective for its extraordinary, soul-searching content and its reflective, powerful language.
-Branko Mikasinovich, Washington, D.C.
WLT World Literature Today, A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Volume 74, Number 2, Page 442, Spring 2000
SOLARNI KRUG ISTINE
Već sa prvom zbirkom ("Krugovanje") Dejan Stojanović je kvalitativno značajno postulirao svoj poetički credo i simbolički kompleks tako da uz pomoć njega može uspešno da se prati obimno koncipirana celina, kontinuitet i preokupacije, drama pesničkog stvaranja u borbi za istinu i traženje smisaonosti kroz kreaciju u zbirci "Sunce sebe gleda." Kroz poetičku prizmu narečenih zbirki jasno se sagledava i poetsko "vjeruju" Dejana Stojanovića koje bi bilo najbliže Nastasijevićevoj misli da bi trebalo prožeti se poezijom, a ne samo dodirnuti je. Pesnik sa prvom zbirkom prihvata izazov, koji još bolje značenjski produbljuje u drugoj; odricanje od moderne koja je sama sebi svrha, opredeljujući se da pesničkim simbolima iskaže univerzalnu dramatičnost.
Pesnik, i kada je osećanje slobode u njemu jedna od osnovnih dominanti osećanja sveta, ne može se oteti utisku da je još samo jedna karika u lancu potvrđivanja i nastavljanja volje onih spodoba koje iz dubina nebića izlaze na svetlo dana, zauzimajući sebi svojstvena i primerena mesta u hipokriziji, oportunizmu i egocentričnom konformizmu naših dana. Otuda je u poeziji Dejana Stojanovića put ka suštini i istini poetički i smisleno lociran "s druge strane vida" ("Krugovanje") dok se formalno poigravanje smislom reči—koje na planu metafizičkog usložnjavanja povlači razgranato poigravanje značenjem—prepliće sa nepomućenom verom u pročišćujuću ulogu reči. Profetska uloga poezije u prizivanju i ovekovečavanju kataklizme totalitarnog sveta daruje ontološki pečat postojanja svemu; u rekombinacijama i specifičnim međuodnosima i višnjoj harmoniji između stvari iz fundusa očiglednosti. Osluškivanje pulsacija bića izjednačeno je sa osluškivanjem večnosti koja vaskrsava u poetskoj matrici saznanja o nepreglednosti i, u isto vreme, uniženosti bića u odnosu na apsolut, ciji je pečat jasno utisnut u svakodnevnu pojavnost. Samim tim kategorije vanljudskog počivaju u metaforama i slikama sveta koji se atomizira u supstancijalni praelement smisla; u prapočelo, odakle se ponovo vaspostavlja pod blagotvornim utiskom i oblikom pesme.
Poniranje u nemušte i tajinske zone bica, osetljivost i pažljivost u građenju lirskog subjekta, imaginativni spojevi prepuni duhovne osetljivosti, od velike većine pesama zbirke "Sunce sebe gleda" stvaraju univerzalne simbole poetski rafinovane imaginacije, fantazijskih obasjanja i pazljivo odabranih folklornih rudimenata pamćenja izniklih iz našeg tla. Jezički senzibil uvodi nova značenja u poznate relacije; svetlo i tama—oportuna simbolika sna, pretvaraju se u okolnosti stvaranja, tišina prerasta u dinamično stanje unutrašnje molitve, a istina, kroz potrage za njenim ontološkim parametrima—preispitivanjem nutrine, postaje samosvojno stanje izopštenih i jurodivih umova. Upravo takvo posedovanje istine, kao unutrašnjeg osećanja i kao istupa iz sebe, u poetskom ludensu Dejana Stojanovića povlači irinijske i sarkastične linije pevanja; asketskog izrugivanja svetu materije, hipokrizije i prosečnosti, suprotstavljanja istine jedinke (bića) "istini" mase (kolektivnog zla utemeljenog u ne-bicu). Pozicija čoveka samca jeste pozicija pesnika u odnosu na, do obezličenja multiplikovan, organon vaskolikog sveta.
Stišani tonovi gradacije simbola, stvaranje specifične hijerarhije, traženje sebe u drugima i drugih u sebi, elementarizuju u ovoj zbirci jedinstvo kruga kao alegorični pečat apsoluta i istraživanja beskonačnosti i konačnosti zemaljskih dana. Između reči i glasova, katalizatora duhovnog i uzvišenog, apsoluta i smisla postojanja, sugestivno i simbolički redukovanih stihova, do širokog narativnog zamaha, utkana je čitava ova zbirka. Ova poezija je sva u jeziku i sva od jezika. Put Nojeve barke jezika jeste njeno apsolutno znanje kojim plovi kroz žamor i bure nerazumevanja, neshvatanja i reči iz kojih je iscureo smisao kao pesak iz klepsidre sveta čije dane prepune iskušenja intenzivno proživljavamo.
-Petar V. Arbutina, 1999.
PESNIK PRED OTVORENIM VRATIMA
Dejan Stojanović, u poslednje dve godine načinio je pravi podvig: objavio je šest knjiga. Osim jedne, sve knjige pesama.
Stojanović je pesnik koji traga za savršenim pesničkim oblikom jer istovremeno traga i za apsolutnim smislom čovekovog postojanja.
"Krugovanje" (1993) je naznačilo Stojanovićev pesnički put, a nove knjige—"Sunce sebe gleda", "Znak i njegova deca", "Tvoritelj", Oblik, uz treće, dopunjeno izdanje "Krugovanja", zaokruzile su njegovo dosadašnje pesničko delo. U "Razgovorima," Dejan Stojanović je sabrao intervjue koje je početkom devedesetih godina vodio sa veoma istaknutim srpskim i stranim stvaraocima, u Beogradu, Parizu i Čikagu, a objavljivao ih je tih godina (1990-1992) u magazinu "Pogledi". Nije mala stvar naći se oči u oči sa piscima kakvi su Alek Vukadinović, Momo Kapor, Nikola Milosević, Žak Klod Vilar, Sol Belou, Stiv Tešić, Branko Mikašinović, Čarls Simić i Nadja Tesić, ili sa slikarima Petrom Omčikusom, Ljubom Popovićem, Milošem Šobajićem, Savom Rakočevićem. Umeti sa njima razgovarati na visokom, dakle njihovom nivou, postavljati im odgovarajuća, za svakog od njih dobro promišljena i pronađena pitanja, koja otključavaju brave i njihovih dela i njihovih ličnosti, to je posao koji zahteva veliko i veoma rznovrsno znanje. Nije, onda, čudo što je za ovu knjigu Dejan Stojanović dobio nagradu Matice iseljenika i Udruženja književnika Srbije za intelektualni angažman.
Knjiga pesama "Krugovanje" bila je objavljena prvi put 1993. godine, a zatim je doživela još dva izdanja, 1998 i 2000. Pesnika iz Čikaga srpska javnost je doskora poznavala samo po toj knjizi. Poznavala i cenila, što se može zaključiti iz sažete ocene Aleka Vukadinovića: "Specifičan, iznenađujuće originalan, izvan tokova kolektivno negovanih senzibiliteta i pomodnih trendova. "
I poznati američki pesnik, Čarls Simić, ima laskavo misljenje o prvoj Stojanovićevoj knjizi.: "'Krugovanje' je knjiga u kojoj sam u potpunosti uživao. Obilje lepih kratkih pesničkih formi." Ne iznenađuje ovakva Simićeva ocena, jer on kao stvaralac i prevodilac Nastasijevića i Pope zna šta je lepota kratke pesničke forme. Zato je i važno to priznanje kada ono baš od njega dolazi, a pogotovo što se odnosi na nešto sto je bitna karakteristika Stojanovića kao pesnika: za njega su reči sakralni znaci, pa se on prema njima i odnosi sa krajnjim poštovanjem, odgovornošću, uzdržanošću, koja je na samoj granici straha:
Kada bismo utvrdili
Koliko je važno da se nešto kaže
Mozda nijednu reč ne bismo napisali
("Isto")
Ali strah ne sputava pesnika. Razmišljajuci o svojoj poetici , Stojanović se prisetio majstora nad majstorima, Betovena:
"Samo praznina kad gleda / Uvek isto vidi". Praznina može da vidi samo prazninu. A čovek kada gleda vidi čoveka—mada ni njega nije lako videti, pogotovo sagledati. Pesnik, međutim, gleda kroz čoveka i vidi ono što vide pravi stvaraoci, umetnici i duhovnici—tajnu. Stojanović je, pored ostalih, napisao i dve lepe pesme o tajni. Prva "Tajna" kao da je od ovoga, čovekovog i prirodnog sveta:
Bogata i daleka
Ti nemo čekas
Gde se kriješ
Daj znak
Primi u goste
Morem opasana
Nehajna—sebi dovoljna
Nećeš da otvoriš vrata
A druga tajna, u pesmi "Tajna i istina", kao da je ona koja je u vezi, pored drugih, sa jednom, najvišom istinom, istinom nad istinama, u vezi sa samim izvorom života i postojanja, sa istinom Tvoritelja:
Ima mnogo tajni
Nemoj ih sve rešavati
Ima mnogo istina
Samo ka jednoj teži
Sve istine iz jedne dolaze
U pesmi "Blago izvora", iz tog istog ciklusa "Betoven i smrt", u knjizi "Sunce sebe gleda", Stojanović se ponovo vraća sličnoj slici početka svih početaka, ishodištu svih ishodišta, izvoru svih izvora:
Ne propusti da vidiš
Kako se cveće Suncu
Galeb vodi raduje
Primi ih u sebe
Gledaj kroz mrak
Sanjaj kroz svetlost
Ka jezgru
Iz kog si na put krenuo
Pored apsolutnih, svemirskih "vrata", Stojanović ne zaboravlja ni čovekova vrata, na kojima se, ranije ili kasnije, ugleda smrt. I ta se pesma, "Betoven i smrt" odlično uklapa u ovaj ciklus u kojem se ukrštaju simboli izlazaka i ulazaka:
Smrt je na vratima
Kaže Betoven
Da li da mu verujemo
Možda se i nije šalio
Možda je stvarno video smrt
Oči im se srele
Njemu nije imao ko da kaže
Da zaključa vrata
I da mu je rekao, Betoven ih ne bi zaključao. Nije ih zaključao ni Stojanović. Srećom po sebe i poeziju koju piše drži ih i on širom otvorena.
Sreću mu se oči sa smrću, ali i sa svetlošću.
-Aleksandar Petrov
Amerikanski Srbobran, Književni dodatak, decembar 2000.
Table of contents:
NEBOKRET
Prva Tišina, 7
Vrh i dno, 8
Omeđen beskrajem, 9
Vetrenjača, 10
Sveti plam, 11
Tačka, 12
Vasiona, 13
Cvet svemira, 14
Jesi li ili nisi 15
BOG I KRUG
Dan svemira, 19
Nebo i krug, 20
Istina kruga, 21
Bog i krug, 22
NEBOHOD
Kiša apsoluta, 25
Oblak I, 26
Oblak II, 27
Svetlost i mrak, 28
Obmana, 29
Mladi starac, 30
Večnost i trajanje, 31
Večnost i večnost, 32
Nula, 33
Brzina, 34
Beskraj i kraj, 35
MESTO ZABORAVLJENO
Ognjište, 39
Bajka i kraj, 40
Paradoks, 41
Božji šegrt, 42
Varka, 43
Čvsrta zemlja, 44
Bog je zauzet, 45
Zvezda u travi, 46
Slovo njegovo, 47
Mesto zaboravljeno, 48
Vatra, 49
Povratak, 50
KAMEN I REČ
Gde prestaje pesma, 53
Reč, 54
Prva reč, 55
Kaman i reč, 56
Slaganje reči, 57
Skrivene reči, 58
Reči nekazane, 59
Priče, 60
Hipnoza reči, 61
Nekoliko reči, 62
Ista priča, 63
Misao II, 64
Laž, 65
Istina i laž, 66
Sokrat, 67
Umor, 68
Nova reč, 69
ŠTA POSLE
Nemost, 73
Ili, 74
Pitomi zvuk, 75
Tamo i ovde I, 76
Ništa, 77
Svetiljka, 78
Ovako i onako, 79
Šta posle, 80
Vitez, 81
Vitezovi, 82
IGRE
Ne, 85
Rat, 86
Stvari, 87
Prevara, 88
Cirkus, 89
Visočanstvo, 90
Patuljak, 92
Virus duše, 93
Vrednost i promašaj, 94
Produži dan, 95
Igra I, 96
Igra II, 97
Igra III, 98
Razmišljanje naljućenog, 100
MOŽE LI SE NAPISATI PESMA
Da li postoji Bog, 103
Uvreda I, 104
Božji sin, 105
Hrist, 106
Glava, 107
Život, 108
Blesak tišine, 109
Dobrotvori, 110
Može li se napisati pesma, 111
Predah, 112
BEZIZLAZ
Oduzetost, 115
Nasamo sa sobom, 116
Ako, 117
Tamo i ovde II, 118
Apsurd, 119
Uvreda II, 120
Podvala, 121
Misao o nama, 122
Pitanje suncu, 123
Seansa, 124
Stara klupa, 125
Vrt , 126
ZVUK TIŠINE
Šapni mi svoju tajnu, 129
Mera borbe, 130
Jednostavnost, 131
Empatija, 132
Put, 133
Pakao i raj, 134
Miris polja, 135
Lek, 136
Zrak, 137
Dan, 138
BETOVEN I SMRT
Izlaz, 141
Tajna, 142
Tajna i istina, 143
Blago izvora, 144
Možda, 145
Betoven i smrt, 146
Isto, 147
EPILOG
Pakao, 151
DODATAK
Solarni krug istine, Petar V. Arbutina, 155
Beleška o piscu, 158
By statement: Dejan Stojanović.
Series: Biblioteka Pismo
Source records: Library MARC record
Library MARC record
Language: Serbian
Dimensions: 21 cm.
Pagination: 157 p. ;
LCCN: 00279202
LC: PG1419.29.T587 S86 1999
Subject: Poetry
giorgio de chirico metaphysische Malerei geschichtet / giorgio de chirico pittura metafisica stratificata / giorgio de chirico metaphysical painting layered / giorgio de chirico 形而上学分层绘画 / Джорджо де Кирико многослойная метафизическая живопись
“The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn’t what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.” - Terence Donovan
This shot was taken during our trip with colleagues and friends going to Anawangin Cove and Capones Island in Brgy. Pundaquit, San Antonio, in the province of Zambales, in the Philippines last February 11 and 12, 2012.
A dancer, singer, highly regarded actress and metaphysical time traveler, Shirley MacLaine is certainly among Hollywood's most unique stars. Born Shirley MacLane Beaty on April 24, 1934 in Richmond, Virginia, MacLaine was the daughter of drama coach and former actress Kathlyn MacLean Beaty and Ira O. Beaty, a professor of psychology and philosophy. Her younger brother, Warren Beatty, also grew up to be an important Hollywood figure as an actor/director/ producer and screenwriter. MacLaine's mother, who gave up her own dreams of stardom for her young family, greatly motivated her daughter to become an actress and dancer. MacLaine took dance lessons from age two, first performed publicly at age four, and at 16 went to New York, making her Broadway debut as a chorus girl in Me and Juliet (1953). When not scrambling for theatrical work, MacLaine worked as a model.
Interestingly, MacLaine's big break was the result of another actress's bad luck. In 1954, MacLaine was understudying Broadway actress Carol Haney The Pajama Game when Haney fractured her ankle. MacLaine replaced her and was spotted and offered a movie contract by producer Hal Wallis. With her auburn hair cut impishly short, the young actress made her film debut in Hitchock's black comedy The Trouble With Harry (1955). Later that year, she co-starred opposite Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the comedy Artists and Models. In her next feature, Around the World in 80 Days (1956), she appeared as an Indian princess.
MacLaine earned her first Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a pathetic tart who shocks a conservative town by showing up on the arm of young war hero Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running (1959). She then got the opportunity to show off her long legs and dancing talents in Can-Can (1960). Prior to that, she appeared with Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford in Oceans Eleven (1960). MacLaine, the only female member of the famed group, would later recount her experiences with them in her seventh book My Lucky Stars. In 1960, she won her second Oscar nomination for Billy Wilder's comedy/drama The Apartment, and a third nomination for Irma La Douce (1963). MacLaine's career was in high gear during the '60s, with her appearing in everything from dramas to madcap comedies to musicals such as What a Way to Go! (1964) and Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity! (1969). In addition to her screen work, she actively participated in Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and served as a Democratic Convention delegate. She was similarly involved in George McGovern's 1972 campaign.
Bored by sitting around on movie sets all day awaiting her scenes, MacLaine started writing down her thoughts and was thus inspired to add writing to her list of talents. She published her first book, Don't Fall Off the Mountain in 1970. She next tried her hand at series television in 1971, starring in the comedy Shirley's World (1971-72) as a globe-trotting photographer. The role reflected her real-life reputation as a world traveler, and these experiences resulted in her second book Don't Fall Off the Mountain and the documentary The Other Half of the Sky -- A China Memoir (1975) which she scripted, produced and co-directed with Claudia Weill. MacLaine returned to Broadway in 1976 with a spectacular one-woman show A Gypsy in My Soul, and the following year entered a new phase in her career playing a middle-aged former ballerina who regrets leaving dance to live a middle-class life in The Turning Point. MacLaine was memorable starring as a lonely political wife opposite Peter Sellers' simple-minded gardener in Being There (1979), but did not again attract too much attention until she played the over-protective, eccentric widow Aurora Greenway in James L. Brooks' Terms of Endearment (1983), a role that finally won MacLaine an Academy Award. That same year, she published the candid Out on a Limb, bravely risking public ridicule by describing her experiences and theories concerning out-of-body travel and reincarnation.
MacLaine's film appearances were sporadic through the mid '80s, although she did appear in a few television specials. In 1988, she came back strong with three great roles in Madame Sousatzka (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989) and particularly Postcards from the Edge (1990), in which she played a fading star clinging to her own career while helping her daughter Meryl Streep, a drug addicted, self-destructive actress. Through the '90s, MacLaine specialized in playing rather crusty and strong-willed eccentrics, such as her title character in the 1994 comedy Guarding Tess. In 1997, MacLaine stole scenes as a wise grande dame who helps pregnant, homeless Ricki Lake in Mrs. Winterbourne, and the same year revived Aurora Greenway in The Evening Star, the critically maligned sequel to Terms of Endearment.
MacLaine's onscreen performances were few and far between in the first half of the next decade, but in 2005 she returned in relatively full force, appearing in three features. She took on a pair of grandmother roles in the comedy-dramas In Her Shoes and Rumor Has It..., and was a perfect fit for the part of Endora in the bigscreen take on the classic sitcom Bewitched.
For a long time, MacLaine did seminars on her books, but in the mid '90s stopped giving talks, claiming she did not want "to be anyone's guru." She does, however, continue writing and remains a popular writer. Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic. (1)
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City. (3)
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" (4). There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion (5). In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden (6) curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice (1). Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level (2). The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979. (3) (4)
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miró (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
WIZARD BOOTS -
During a moonlit drive through the hills of Austin, Texas with Hillary, Chris had a moment of clarity and saw the way forward. He elaborates, "We were listening to Nick Drake and I suddenly became aware of this thread connecting that and a bunch of other records I'd been playing around the same time. The Moody Blues, Syd Barrett era Floyd, Leonard Cohen, Robyn Hitchcock…. pretty much any kind of interesting metaphysical folk psychedelia. It was anything you could imagine an old man with a long white beard and a flowing hooded cloak singing on a windswept hillside. It was…Wizard Music, and I wanted to create my own little world within that world." Chris took advantage of the Casa's empty back office, turning it into a recording studio, which was utilized in mapping out the new directions he'd begun to explore. The awkward melancholy "I Miss You" was the first song to materialize under the moniker of Wizard Boots, followed quickly by a string of oddly dissimilar new recordings running the gamut from whispered lunacy ("I'm Naked") to spaghetti western splendor ("Screaming At The Stars") and depraved lecherous ravings ("She Used To Fuck Me"). Accomplished songstress Desiree Anastasia contributed vocals to several Boots compositions during a very loose recording session that yielded the Radiohead-on-acid insanity of "Magic 8 Ball" and the ethereal "Lost Lovers". With a stockpile of new materiel, obscure cover tunes and re-arranged El Kabong crowd pleasers in his constantly evolving repertoire, a return to the stage seemed imminent.
Chris chose his home turf, Casa Del Covington for the first official show on December 10th 2005, unveiling the new project in the cavernous photo studio/disco beneath a shower of mirror balls and laser lights for an invitation only group of about twenty close friends. The single voice/acoustic guitar instrumentation was a radical departure from the electric bombast of El Kabong, but his twisted sense of humor and adventurous showmanship remained a part of the new direction. Later bringing Miss Hillary aboard to play tambourine for a hilariously inappropriate appearance at The Grapevine Bar, Wizard Boots continued forward as a duo for a few shows around Dallas. The pair also traveled north for a gig in Chris' hometown of Fort Smith, Arkansas in March of 2006, his first performance there since the days of Voodoo Moon twelve years earlier. Things seemed promising and creativity was high, but a sinister undercurrent of chaos seemed to be lurking just beneath the surface and some performances were spinning out of control. As Mr. Boots puts it, "Sometimes I just don't know when to keep my mouth shut…. I could transform into quite the vicious bastard after a certain amount of drinks, and encouragement from an audience is sometimes just as bad for me as provocation." Returning to Fort Smith in April for a very long and chaotic set at Roosters, Wizard Boots ended the evening with a verbal battle against a roaming group of drunks that nearly turned violent. He laughs about it now and remembers the night as "A sign of things to come.
Back in Texas, Wizard Boots mutated once again with the addition of heavy hitting drummer, Paylyn 66. The trio, now billed as Wizard Boots & The Sex Zombies, made an explosive debut in late May of 2006 at Rack Daddy's in North Dallas. They also hit the studio, slapping a sinister sonic stamp on several reworked El Kabong tunes as well as a handful of new Wizard Boots compositions. Stoner metal epic "The White Witch (This Is The Last Time I Sing Happy Birthday To You)", pyromaniac love story "Gonna Set U On Fire", the Spacemen 3 inspired "Raining Frogs" and the garage psych droning "Sex Zombie Theme" were all captured on tape during this period. The Wizard was primarily playing electric guitar again and experimenting with an extremely loud, bottom heavy reverb drenched sound that meshed with Paylyn's brutal drumming and took the mayhem of the live show up several notches. "We seemed to have set off down the path to the dark side." Chris recalls, " I was having a lot of fun, but burning myself out at the same time…my breaking point was coming and I didn't care." Miss Hillary had already reached her breaking point and left the group in June, leaving the tambourine slot to a rotating cast of hooligans from the Assassination City Roller Derby League. The lovely Tank eventually became a fulltime Sex Zombie; Mia Hammer and Jessika Doom filled in for some shows. Casio keyboard flourishes, sampled electronic beats and a bizarre karaoke style cover of Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" all began to surface in the live show, evidence that Wizard Boots was still pushing forward creatively even as he maintained a collision course with a complete mental breakdown. He elaborates, "We were tearing up the pool hall circuit and making good money, but that scene is more suited for proper cover bands and here we were doing whatever the fuck we wanted and getting away with it…. no one was going to stop us, so naturally we had to stop ourselves. Can't speak for anyone else, but I was an absolute mess at the time." Following a particularly drunken performance at Coyote Ugly in Deep Ellum, Wizard Boots tried in vain to claw his way out of the downward spiral. He led The Sex Zombies through the rest of July's shows completely sober and to great effect, but couldn't shake the overwhelming depression and paranoia that had set in. Accepting that he couldn't hold himself together any longer, much less a band, Wizard Boots announced he was leaving Texas just a few weeks after a final WB&TSZ's show in Hurst on August 12th 2006. Despite the unraveling of his personal life, Boots now recalls more good times than bad during the brief Sex Zombie era. "We had a lot of fun, caused a whole lot of trouble, did quite a bit of damage and made a hell of a lot of noise while that whole period of the band lasted only 3 months. It's all a blur of violent sound and chaos looking back…sort of the "Motley Crue: Behind The Music" era of Wizard Boots."
A solo acoustic version of Robyn Hitchcock's "She Doesn't Exist", which turned out to be the final song recorded in the Casa Del Covington studio, truly captured the fractured state of the Wizard Boots psyche around that time. Completely lost and hopelessly detached from the world, Chris packed up the van and moved back to Fort Smith, deflated and feeling the sting of surrender. "I felt like Wizard Boots had gone the way of El Kabong and died." He recalls, "It was horrible. I'd lost all interest in making music and was considering technical college for welding." However, a second coming of Wizard Boots was just over the horizon and he was about to find himself in exactly the right place and time to make a gigantic artistic leap forward. That story and more when we pick up in the next chapter kiddies…time for a cocktail.
--Larry Steve
Varanasi, also known as Benares, or Kashi is an Indian city on the banks of the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, 320 kilometres south-east of the state capital, Lucknow. It is the holiest of the seven sacred cities (Sapta Puri) in Hinduism, and Jainism, and played an important role in the development of Buddhism. Some Hindus believe that death at Varanasi brings salvation. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Varanasi is also known as the favourite city of the Hindu deity Lord Shiva as it has been mentioned in the Rigveda that this city in older times was known as Kashi or "Shiv ki Nagri".
The Kashi Naresh (Maharaja of Kashi) is the chief cultural patron of Varanasi, and an essential part of all religious celebrations. The culture of Varanasi is closely associated with the Ganges. The city has been a cultural centre of North India for several thousand years, and has a history that is older than most of the major world religions. The Benares Gharana form of Hindustani classical music was developed in Varanasi, and many prominent Indian philosophers, poets, writers, and musicians live or have lived in Varanasi. Gautama Buddha gave his first sermon at Sarnath, located near Varanasi.
Varanasi is the spiritual capital of India. It is often referred to as "the holy city of India", "the religious capital of India", "the city of Shiva", and "the city of learning". Scholarly books have been written in the city, including the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. Today, there is a temple of his namesake in the city, the Tulsi Manas Mandir. The current temples and religious institutions in the city are dated to the 18th century. One of the largest residential universities of Asia, the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), is located here.
ETYMOLOGY
The name Varanasi possibly originates from the names of the two rivers: Varuna, still flowing in Varanasi, and Asi, a small stream near Assi Ghat. The old city does lie on the north shores of Ganges River bounded by its two tributaries Varuna and Asi. Another speculation is that the city derives its name from the river Varuna, which was called Varanasi in olden times.[11] This is generally disregarded by historians. Through the ages, Varanasi has been known by many names including Kāśī or Kashi (used by pilgrims dating from Buddha's days), Kāśikā (the shining one), Avimukta ("never forsaken" by Shiva), Ānandavana (the forest of bliss), and Rudravāsa (the place where Rudra/Śiva resides).
In the Rigveda, the city is referred to as Kāśī or Kashi, the luminous city as an eminent seat of learning. The name Kāśī is also mentioned in the Skanda Purana. In one verse, Shiva says, "The three worlds form one city of mine, and Kāśī is my royal palace therein." The name Kashi may be translated as "City of Light".
HISTORY
According to legend, Varanasi was founded by the God Shiva. The Pandavas, the heroes of the Hindu epic Mahabharata are also stated to have visited the city in search of Shiva to atone for their sins of fratricide and Brāhmanahatya that they had committed during the climactic Kurukshetra war. It is regarded as one of seven holy cities which can provide Moksha:
The earliest known archaeological evidence suggests that settlement around Varanasi in the Ganga valley (the seat of Vedic religion and philosophy) began in the 11th or 12th century BC, placing it among the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. These archaeological remains suggest that the Varanasi area was populated by Vedic people. However, the Atharvaveda (the oldest known text referencing the city), which dates to approximately the same period, suggests that the area was populated by indigenous tribes. It is possible that archaeological evidence of these previous inhabitants has yet to be discovered. Recent excavations at Aktha and Ramnagar, two sites very near to Varanasi, show them to be from 1800 BC, suggesting Varanasi started to be inhabited by that time too. Varanasi was also home to Parshva, the 23rd Jain Tirthankara and the earliest Tirthankara accepted as a historical figure in the 8th century BC.
Varanasi grew as an important industrial centre, famous for its muslin and silk fabrics, perfumes, ivory works, and sculpture. During the time of Gautama Buddha (born circa 567 BC), Varanasi was the capital of the Kingdom of Kashi. Buddha is believed to have founded Buddhism here around 528 BC when he gave his first sermon, "Turning the Wheel of Law", at nearby Sarnath. The celebrated Chinese traveller Xuanzang, who visited the city around 635 AD, attested that the city was a centre of religious and artistic activities, and that it extended for about 5 kilometres along the western bank of the Ganges. When Xuanzang, also known as Hiuen Tsiang, visited Varanasi in the 7th century, he named it "Polonisse" and wrote that the city had some 30 temples with about 30 monks. The city's religious importance continued to grow in the 8th century, when Adi Shankara established the worship of Shiva as an official sect of Varanasi.
In ancient times, Varanasi was connected by a road starting from Taxila and ending at Pataliputra during the Mauryan Empire. In 1194, the city succumbed to Turkish Muslim rule under Qutb-ud-din Aibak, who ordered the destruction of some one thousand temples in the city. The city went into decline over some three centuries of Muslim occupation, although new temples were erected in the 13th century after the Afghan invasion. Feroz Shah ordered further destruction of Hindu temples in the Varanasi area in 1376. The Afghan ruler Sikander Lodi continued the suppression of Hinduism in the city and destroyed most of the remaining older temples in 1496. Despite the Muslim rule, Varanasi remained the centre of activity for intellectuals and theologians during the Middle Ages, which further contributed to its reputation as a cultural centre of religion and education. Several major figures of the Bhakti movement were born in Varanasi, including Kabir who was born here in 1389 and hailed as "the most outstanding of the saint-poets of Bhakti cult (devotion) and mysticism of 15th-Century India"; and Ravidas, a 15th-century socio-religious reformer, mystic, poet, traveller, and spiritual figure, who was born and lived in the city and employed in the tannery industry. Similarly, numerous eminent scholars and preachers visited the city from across India and south Asia. Guru Nanak Dev visited Varanasi for Shivratri in 1507, a trip that played a large role in the founding of Sikhism.
In the 16th century, Varanasi experienced a cultural revival under the Muslim Mughal emperor Akbar who invested in the city, and built two large temples dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu. The Raja of Poona established the Annapurnamandir and the 200 metres Akbari Bridge was also completed during this period. The earliest tourists began arriving in the city during the 16th century. In 1665, the French traveller Jean Baptiste Tavernier described the architectural beauty of the Vindu Madhava temple on the side of the Ganges. The road infrastructure was also improved during this period and extended from Kolkata to Peshawar by Emperor Sher Shah Suri; later during the British Raj it came to be known as the famous Grand Trunk Road. In 1656, emperor Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of many temples and the building of mosques, causing the city to experience a temporary setback. However, after Aurangazeb's death, most of India was ruled by a confederacy of pro-Hindu kings. Much of modern Varanasi was built during this time by the Rajput and Maratha kings, especially during the 18th century, and most of the important buildings in the city today date to this period. The kings continued to be important through much of the British rule (1775–1947 AD), including the Maharaja of Benares, or Kashi Naresh. The kingdom of Benares was given official status by the Mughals in 1737, and continued as a dynasty-governed area until Indian independence in 1947, during the reign of Dr. Vibhuti Narayan Singh. In the 18th century, Muhammad Shah ordered the construction of an observatory on the Ganges, attached to Man Mandir Ghat, designed to discover imperfections in the calendar in order to revise existing astronomical tables. Tourism in the city began to flourish in the 18th century. In 1791, under the rule of the British Governor-General Warren Hastings, Jonathan Duncan founded a Sanskrit College in Varanasi. In 1867, the establishment of the Varanasi Municipal Board led to significant improvements in the city.
In 1897, Mark Twain, the renowned Indophile, said of Varanasi, "Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." In 1910, the British made Varanasi a new Indian state, with Ramanagar as its headquarters but with no jurisdiction over the city of Varanasi itself. Kashi Naresh still resides in the Ramnagar Fort which is situated to the east of Varanasi, across the Ganges. Ramnagar Fort and its museum are the repository of the history of the kings of Varanasi. Since the 18th century, the fort has been the home of Kashi Naresh, deeply revered by the local people. He is the religious head and some devout inhabitants consider him to be the incarnation of Shiva. He is also the chief cultural patron and an essential part of all religious celebrations.
A massacre by British troops, of the Indian troops stationed here and of the population of the city, took place during the early stages of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Annie Besant worked in Varanasi to promote theosophy and founded the Central Hindu College which later became a foundation for the creation of Banaras Hindu University as a secular university in 1916. Her purpose in founding the Central Hindu College in Varanasi was that she "wanted to bring men of all religions together under the ideal of brotherhood in order to promote Indian cultural values and to remove ill-will among different sections of the Indian population."
Varanasi was ceded to the Union of India on 15 October 1948. After the death of Dr. Vibhuti Narayan Singh in 2000, his son Anant Narayan Singh became the figurehead king, responsible for upholding the traditional duties of a Kashi Naresh.
MAIN SIGHTS
Varanasi's "Old City", the quarter near the banks of the Ganga river, has crowded narrow winding lanes flanked by road-side shops and scores of Hindu temples. As atmospheric as it is confusing, Varanasi's labyrinthine Old City has a rich culture, attracting many travellers and tourists. The main residential areas of Varanasi (especially for the middle and upper classes) are situated in regions far from the ghats; they are more spacious and less polluted.
Museums in and around Varanasi include Jantar Mantar, Sarnath Museum, Bharat Kala Bhawan and Ramnagar Fort.
JANTAR MANTAR
The Jantar Mantar observatory (1737) is located above the ghats on the Ganges, much above the high water level in the Ganges next to the Manmandir Ghat, near to Dasaswamedh Ghat and adjoining the palace of Raja Jai Singh of Jaipur. Compared to the observatories at Jaipur and Delhi, it is less well equipped but has a unique equatorial sundial which is functional and allows measurements to be monitored and recorded by one person.
RAMNAGAR FORT
The Ramnagar Fort located near the Ganges River on its eastern bank, opposite to the Tulsi Ghat, was built in the 18th century by Kashi Naresh Raja Balwant Singh with creamy chunar sandstone. It is in a typically Mughal style of architecture with carved balconies, open courtyards, and scenic pavilions. At present the fort is not in good repair. The fort and its museum are the repository of the history of the kings of Benares. It has been the home of the Kashi Naresh since the 18th century. The current king and the resident of the fort is Anant Narayan Singh who is also known as the Maharaja of Varanasi even though this royal title has been abolished since 1971. Labeled "an eccentric museum", it has a rare collection of American vintage cars, sedan chairs (bejeweled), an impressive weaponry hall and a rare astrological clock. In addition, manuscripts, especially religious writings, are housed in the Saraswati Bhawan. Also included is a precious handwritten manuscript by Goswami Tulsidas. Many books illustrated in the Mughal miniature style, with beautifully designed covers are also part of the collections. Because of its scenic location on the banks of the Ganges, it is frequently used as an outdoor shooting location for films. The film titled Banaras is one of the popular movies shot here. However, only a part of the fort is open for public viewing as the rest of the area is the residence of the Kashi Naresh and his family. It is 14 kilometres from Varanasi.
GHATS
Ghats are embankments made in steps of stone slabs along the river bank where pilgrims perform ritual ablutions. Ghats in Varanasi are an integral complement to the concept of divinity represented in physical, metaphysical and supernatural elements. All the ghats are locations on "the divine cosmic road", indicative of "its manifest transcendental dimension" Varanasi has at least 84 ghats. Steps in the ghats lead to the banks of River Ganges, including the Dashashwamedh Ghat, the Manikarnika Ghat, the Panchganga Ghat and the Harishchandra Ghat (where Hindus cremate their dead). Many ghats are associated with legends and several are now privately owned.
Many of the ghats were built when the city was under Maratha control. Marathas, Shindes (Scindias), Holkars, Bhonsles, and Peshwas stand out as patrons of present-day Varanasi. Most of the ghats are bathing ghats, while others are used as cremation sites. A morning boat ride on the Ganges across the ghats is a popular visitor attraction. The extensive stretches of ghats enhance the river front with a multitude of shrines, temples and palaces built "tier on tier above the water’s edge".
The Dashashwamedh Ghat is the main and probably the oldest ghat of Varansi located on the Ganges, close to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. It is believed that Brahma created it to welcome Shiva and sacrificed ten horses during the Dasa -Ashwamedha yajna performed here. Above the ghat and close to it, there are also temples dedicated to Sulatankesvara, Brahmesvara, Varahesvara, Abhaya Vinayaka, Ganga (the Ganges), and Bandi Devi which are part of important pilgrimage journeys. A group of priests perform "Agni Pooja" (Worship to Fire) daily in the evening at this ghat as a dedication to Shiva, Ganga, Surya (Sun), Agni (Fire), and the whole universe. Special aartis are held on Tuesdays and on religious festivals.
The Manikarnika Ghat is the Mahasmasana (meaning: "great cremation ground") and is the primary site for Hindu cremation in the city. Adjoining the ghat, there are raised platforms that are used for death anniversary rituals. It is said that an ear-ring (Manikarnika) of Shiva or his wife Sati fell here. According to a myth related to the Tarakesvara Temple, a Shiva temple at the ghat, Shiva whispers the Taraka mantra ("Prayer of the crossing") in the ear of the dead. Fourth-century Gupta period inscriptions mention this ghat. However, the current ghat as a permanent riverside embankment was built in 1302 and has been renovated at least three times.
TEMPLES
Among the estimated 23000 temples in Varanasi, the most worshiped are: the Kashi Vishwanath Temple of Shiva; the Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple; and the Durga Temple known for the band of monkeys that reside in the large trees nearby.
Located on the outskirts of the Ganges, the Kashi Vishwanath Temple – dedicated to Varanasi's presiding deity Shiva (Vishwanath – "Lord of the world") – is an important Hindu temple and one of the 12 Jyotirlinga Shiva temples. It is believed that a single view of Vishwanath Jyotirlinga is worth more than that of other jyotirlingas. The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times. The Gyanvapi Mosque, which is adjacent to the temple, is the original site of the temple. The temple, as it exists now, also called Golden Temple, was built in 1780 by Queen Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore. The two pinnacles of the temple are covered in gold, donated in 1839 by Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Punjab and the remaining dome is also planned to be gold plated by the Ministry of Culture & Religious Affairs of Uttar Pradesh. On 28 January 1983, the temple was taken over by the government of Uttar Pradesh and its management was transferred to a trust with then Kashi Naresh, Vibhuti Narayan Singh, as president and an executive committee with a Divisional Commissioner as chairman. Numerous rituals, prayers and aratis are held daily, starting from 2:30 am till 11:00 pm.
The Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple is one of the sacred temples of the Hindu god Hanuman situated by the Assi River, on the way to the Durga and New Vishwanath temples within the Banaras Hindu University campus. The present temple structure was built in early 1900s by the educationist and freedom fighter, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, the founder of Banaras Hindu University. It is believed the temple was built on the very spot where the medieval Hindu saint Tulsidas had a vision of Hanuman. Thousands flock to the temple on Tuesdays and Saturdays, weekdays associated with Hanuman. On 7 March 2006, in a terrorist attack one of the three explosions hit the temple while the Aarti was in progress when numerous devotees and people attending a wedding were present and many were injured. However, normal worship was resumed the next day with devotees visiting the temple and reciting hymns of Hanuman Chalisa (authored by Tulidas) and Sundarkand (a booklet of these hymns is provided free of charge in the temple). After the terrorist incident, a permanent police post was set up inside the temple.
There are two temples named "Durga" in Varanasi, Durga Mandir (built about 500 years ago), and Durga Kund (built in the 18th century). Thousands of Hindu devotees visit Durga Kund during Navratri to worship the goddess Durga. The temple, built in Nagara architectural style, has multi-tiered spires[96] and is stained red with ochre, representing the red colour of Durga. The building has a rectangular tank of water called the Durga Kund ("Kund" meaning a pond or pool). Every year on the occasion of Nag Panchami, the act of depicting the god Vishnu reclining on the serpent Shesha is recreated in the Kund.
While the Annapurna Temple, located close to the Kashi Vishwanath temple, is dedicated to Annapurna, the goddess of food, the Sankatha Temple close to the Sindhia Ghat is dedicated to Sankatha, the goddess of remedy. The Sankatha temple has a large sculpture of a lion and a nine temple cluster dedicated to the nine planets.
Kalabhairav Temple, an ancient temple located near the Head Post Office at Visheshar Ganj, is dedicated to Kala-Bhairava, the guardian (Kotwal) of Varanasi. The Mrithyunjay Mahadev Temple, dedicated to Shiva, is situated on the way to Daranagar to Kalbhairav temple. A well near the temple has some religious significance as its water source is believed to be fed from several underground streams, having curative powers.
The New Vishwanath Temple located in the campus of Banaras Hindu University is a modern temple which was planned by Pandit Malviya and built by the Birlas. The Tulsi Manas Temple, nearby the Durga Temple, is a modern temple dedicated to the god Rama. It is built at the place where Tulsidas authored the Ramcharitmanas, which narrates the life of Rama. Many verses from this epic are inscribed on the temple walls.
The Bharat Mata Temple, dedicated to the national personification of India, was inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936. It has relief maps of India carved in marble. Babu Shiv Prasad Gupta and Durga Prasad Khatri, leading numismatists, antiquarians and nationalist leaders, donated funds for its construction.
RELIGION
HINDUISM
Varanasi is one of the holiest cities and centres of pilgrimage for Hindus of all denominations. It is one of the seven Hindu holiest cities (Sapta Puri), considered the giver of salvation (moksha). Over 50,000 Brahmins live in Varanasi, providing religious services to the masses. Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges remits sins and that dying in Kashi ensures release of a person's soul from the cycle of its transmigrations. Thus, many Hindus arrive here for dying.
As the home to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Jyotirlinga, it is very sacred for Shaivism. Varanasi is also a Shakti Peetha, where the temple to goddess Vishalakshi stands, believed to be the spot where the goddess Sati's earrings fell. Hindus of the Shakti sect make a pilgrimage to the city because they regard the River Ganges itself to be the Goddess Shakti. Adi Shankara wrote his commentaries on Hinduism here, leading to the great Hindu revival.
In 2001, Hindus made up approximately 84% of the population of Varanasi District.
ISLAM
Varanasi is one of the holiest cities and centres of pilgrimage for Hindus of all denominations. It is one of the seven Hindu holiest cities (Sapta Puri), considered the giver of salvation (moksha). Over 50,000 Brahmins live in Varanasi, providing religious services to the masses. Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges remits sins and that dying in Kashi ensures release of a person's soul from the cycle of its transmigrations. Thus, many Hindus arrive here for dying.
As the home to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Jyotirlinga, it is very sacred for Shaivism. Varanasi is also a Shakti Peetha, where the temple to goddess Vishalakshi stands, believed to be the spot where the goddess Sati's earrings fell. Hindus of the Shakti sect make a pilgrimage to the city because they regard the River Ganges itself to be the Goddess Shakti. Adi Shankara wrote his commentaries on Hinduism here, leading to the great Hindu revival.
In 2001, Hindus made up approximately 84% of the population of Varanasi District.
OTHERS
At the 2001 census, persons of other religions or no religion made up 0.4% of the population of Varanasi District.
Varanasi is a pilgrimage site for Jains along with Hindus and Buddhists. It is believed to be the birthplace of Suparshvanath, Shreyansanath, and Parshva, who are respectively the seventh, eleventh, and twenty-third Jain Tirthankars and as such Varanasi is a holy city for Jains. Shree Parshvanath Digambar Jain Tirth Kshetra (Digambar Jain Temple) is situated in Bhelupur, Varanasi. This temple is of great religious importance to the Jain Religion.
Sarnath, a suburb of Varanasi, is a place of Buddhist pilgrimage. It is the site of the deer park where Siddhartha Gautama of Nepal is said to have given his first sermon about the basic principles of Buddhism. The Dhamek Stupa is one of the few pre-Ashokan stupas still in existence, though only its foundation remains. Also remaining is the Chaukhandi Stupa commemorating the spot where Buddha met his first disciples in the 5th century. An octagonal tower was built later there.
Guru Nanak Dev visited Varanasi for Shivratri in 1507 and had an encounter which with other events forms the basis for the story of the founding of Sikhism. Varanasi also hosts the Roman Catholic Diocese of Varanasi, and has an insignificant Jewish expatriate community. Varanasi is home to numerous tribal faiths which are not easily classified.
Dalits are 13% of population Of Varanasi city. Most dalits are followers of Guru Ravidass. So Shri Guru Ravidass Janam Asthan is important place of pilgrimage for Ravidasis from all around India.
RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS
On Mahashivaratri (February) – which is dedicated to Shiva – a procession of Shiva proceeds from the Mahamrityunjaya Temple to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple.
Dhrupad Mela is a five-day musical festival devoted to dhrupad style held at Tulsi Ghat in February–March.
The Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple celebrates Hanuman Jayanti (March–April), the birthday of Hanuman with great fervour. A special puja, aarti, and a public procession is organized. Starting in 1923, the temple organizes a five-day classical music and dance concert festival titled Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh in this period, when iconic artists from all parts of India are invited to perform.
The Ramlila of Ramnagar is a dramatic enactment of Rama's legend, as told in Ramacharitamanasa. The plays, sponsored by Kashi Naresh, are performed in Ramnagar every evening for 31 days. On the last day, the festivities reach a crescendo as Rama vanquishes the demon king Ravana. Kashi Naresh Udit Narayan Singh started this tradition around 1830.
Bharat Milap celebrates the meeting of Rama and his younger brother Bharata after the return of the former after 14 years of exile. It is celebrated during October–November, a day after the festival of Vijayadashami. Kashi Naresh attends this festival in his regal attire resplendent in regal finery. The festival attracts a large number of devotees.
Nag Nathaiya, celebrated on the fourth lunar day of the dark fortnight of the Hindu month of Kartik (October–November), that commemorates the victory of the god Krishna over the serpent Kaliya. On this occasion, a large Kadamba tree (Neolamarckia cadamba) branch is planted on the banks of the Ganges so that a boy acting the role of Krishna can jump into the river on to the effigy representing Kaliya. He stands over the effigy in a dancing pose playing the flute; the effigy and the boy standing on it is given a swirl in front of the audience. People watch the display standing on the banks of the river or from boats.
Ganga Mahotsav is a five-day music festival organized by the Uttar Pradesh Tourism Department, held in November–December culminating a day before Kartik Poornima (Dev Deepawali). On Kartik Poornima also called the Ganges festival, the Ganges is venerated by arti offered by thousands of pilgrims who release lighted lamps to float in the river from the ghats.
Annually Jashne-Eid Miladunnabi is celebrated on the day of Barawafat in huge numbers by Muslims in a huge rally coming from all the parts of the city and meeting up at Beniya Bagh.
I can't avoid to ask myself some questions from time to time. Like 'does God exist?' Or 'is there life after death?' Or how long is eternity? Or, above all, 'will Flickr accounts expire there?' ;)
Sí, parece bastante amenazadora. Es mi punto de vista ;)
For more information about my craft, please visit my profile page.
EYE OF THE TIGER is a 55 carat handcrafted tiger eye pendant that I created swirling and shaping gold toned silver plate wire by hand, adding tiger eye chips and a black agate bead to enhance the natural beauty and shape of the stone. This large dramatic gemstone creates a deep 3-dimensional effect with a soft golden brown color. The combination of the elegant, swirly wire setting, together with the earthy and dramatic gemstone creates a very versatile piece of wearable art that can be worn with a party dress or your favorite casual jeans. Stylish Care More pendants are sure to add a touch of natural drama to your fashion wardrobe.
It measures 1" across and 2" top to tip including the bail.
The bail is designed to be large enough to accommodate your favorite chain, choker or cord. Your gift of a 17" gold plate chain is included.
All purchases are nicely packaged in a gift box.
The following metaphysical healing properties have been collected from various sources. For more specific information please contact an experienced Crystal Therapist.
Tiger Eye healing effects:
Symbol of inner strength. It produces soothing vibrations and allows you to be uninhibited. It has been used to stimulate wealth and the stability required to maintain wealth. Encourages optimism. Enhances creativity. Aids concentration. Anchors subtle changes into the physical body. Increases confidence and reduces nervousness. Prompts admiration for the pure and the beautiful. Can enhance psychic abilities. Helps disorders of the eyes, the throat, the reproductive system and constrictions. Aids night vision. Focuses energy to meet challenges. Balances yin-yang energy. Aids the digestive system, strengthens the alignment of the spinal column and helps with the mending of broken bones.
For more information about my craft, please visit my profile page.
JAMOCHA is a 55 carat handcrafted tiger eye pendant that I created swirling and shaping gold toned silver plate wire by hand, adding a tiger eye chip and black agate beads to enhance the natural beauty and shape of the stone. This large dramatic gemstone creates a deep 3-dimensional effect with a soft golden brown color. The combination of the elegant, swirly wire setting, together with the earthy and dramatic gemstone creates a very versatile piece of wearable art that can be worn with a party dress or your favorite casual jeans. Stylish Care More pendants are sure to add a touch of natural drama to your fashion wardrobe.
It measures 1" across and 2" top to tip including the bail.
The bail is designed to be large enough to accommodate your favorite chain, choker or cord. Your gift of a 17" gold plate chain is included.
All purchases are nicely packaged in a gift box.
The following metaphysical healing properties have been collected from various sources. For more specific information please contact an experienced Crystal Therapist.
Tiger Eye healing effects:
Symbol of inner strength. It produces soothing vibrations and allows you to be uninhibited. It has been used to stimulate wealth and the stability required to maintain wealth. Encourages optimism. Enhances creativity. Aids concentration. Anchors subtle changes into the physical body. Increases confidence and reduces nervousness. Prompts admiration for the pure and the beautiful. Can enhance psychic abilities. Helps disorders of the eyes, the throat, the reproductive system and constrictions. Aids night vision. Focuses energy to meet challenges. Balances yin-yang energy. Aids the digestive system, strengthens the alignment of the spinal column and helps with the mending of broken bones.