Exhibiting Matters

“Peggy Guggenheim Collection”
at the Venice Biennale, 1948 and
“Biennnale di Venezia,” Venice, 1948
When the first post-WW2 Venice Biennale
was organized in 1948, Peggy Guggenheim brought
her collection of modern art to Europe. The organizers
decided to give Peggy the Greek pavilion to show
her collection, since Greece could not participate because
of the civil war. It was the first time that Europeans
had a chance to see the works of the most
important modern artists exhibited together, including
those that had almost been forgotten in Europe
(e.g. Picasso, Miró, Ernst, Mondrian), representatives
of the Russian avant-garde (Malevich and Lissitzky),
and American abstract expressionists (e.g. Pollock,
Motherwell, Gorky).
Both in the catalog and on display, artists
were presented as individuals regardless of their
country of origin. When the first major post-war exhibition
of modern art organized by Europeans (documenta
1, Kassel 1955) it was strictly Western European,
it included neither the Russian avant-garde nor the
Americans. The exhibition of Peggy Guggenheim collection
in Venice 1948 anticipated what would some
ten years later become the modern canon.
In the next few years the collection was
exhibited in several Italian cities (Milano and Florence
1949) and subsequently in Amsterdam, Zurich, and
Brussels (1951). Because Willem Sandberg, the director
of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, helped
Peggy bring her collection to Europe, she decided to
give the Stedelijk five paintings by Jackson Pollock.
These were the first Pollock paintings that entered a
European museum collection.
It is interesting to note that this international
exhibition, based on individualism, modernism,
and internationalism, was presented within another
kind of international exhibition, the Venice Biennale,
which is structured by nationalities and national pavilions
and as such does not represent the modern
canon, as each national pavilion could have its own
interpretation of art.
“International Exhibition of Arts,”
Berlin, 1951
Three years later, in 1951, a major exhibition
titled “Internationale Kunstausstellung” was organized
in Berlin that included artists from 38 countries,
from Denmark and Columbia to Vietnam and
Nigeria. However, the most notable characteristic of
this global exhibition, held in the Soviet zone, was its
anti-modernism. Most of the works were primarily on
social themes or explicitly socialist-realistic. This was
another kind of international exhibition that could be
seen in those early years after the Second World War.
It represented an opposite understanding of art from
the one shown at the Peggy Guggenheim exhibition
in Venice and later at documenta.
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