Utopia Matters: from Brotherhoods to Bauhaus

Utopia Matters: from Brotherhoods to Bauhaus
1 May – 25 July 2010

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
701 Dorsoduro
30123 Venice
ITALY
phone +39 041 2405404/415
fax +39 041 5206885
email press [​at​] guggenheim-venice.it

www.guggenheim-venice.it

www.peggyg.mobi

From May 1 – July 25, 2010 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents the exhibition Utopia Matters: from Brotherhoods to Bauhaus, curated by Vivien Greene, Curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. With more than 70 works of art, encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, decorative art, design, photography, and printed matter, the exhibition examines an international sequence of case studies that reveals some of the faces that utopia can assume when embraced by artistic movements—from the brotherhoods of the 19th century to the avant-gardes of the period immediately following World War I. The groups addressed are the French Primitifs, the German Nazarenes, the English Pre-Raphaelites, English polymath William Morris and the international Arts and Crafts movement, the American Cornish art colony, French Neo-Impressionism, Dutch De Stijl, the German Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. The exhibition includes loans from some of the most important museums in the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Tate Britain, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. This exhibition is organized together with Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin where it was shown from January 22 – April 11, 2010.

Utopia Matters opens in the late 18th century, at a time when artistic groups with articulated utopian goals sprang up as self-proclaimed brotherhoods, with conscious efforts to fashion ideal communities. The exhibition concludes in the early 1930s, when the ascendancy of fascism brought about the close of the Bauhaus in Berlin in 1933 and when Stalinism reframed Russian Constructivist projects in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, utopian experiments persist, from artists’ colonies and collectives to ecologically self-sustaining communities, creating multiple chapters in this history, which leads up to the present day.

The exhibition Utopia Matters: from Brotherhoods to Bauhaus, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by Guggenheim Museum Publications (New York) with essays by curator Vivien Greene, historian Russell Jacoby, and design-history authority Victor Margolin.

The exhibition is supported by the Regione del Veneto and Intrapresae Collezione Guggenheim. Hangar Design Group created the graphic design for communications. Clear Channel, Radio Italia and Corriere della Sera are media partners for the exhibition.

Opening hours: daily 10 am to 6 pm (closed on Tuesday and December 25)

Peggy Guggenheim Collection
701 Dorsoduro
30123 Venice
ITALY

phone +39 041 2405404/415
fax +39 041 5206885
email press@guggenheim-venice.it

www.guggenheim-venice.it

www.peggyg.mobi