The Art of Collecting Art

From Kandinsky to Pollock.

The great art of the Guggenheims

Interesting and engaging, the major exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence examines the art of collecting art through the examination of more than 100 works of modern and contemporary European and American artists. Focused exclusively on works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the exhibition highlights the similarities and differences in the way uncle and niece focused on specific art movements and artists and how they selected specific works of art, thus creating two of the most important art collections in the world. If Solomon was focused on the purist concept of abstraction as the absence of figurative objects, Peggy’s approach was more transgressive and open to the suggestions of the European avant-garde movements including Cubism and Surrealism. Both passionate about modern and contemporary art, Solomon and Peggy brought together, respectively in New York and Venice, some of the works of the best and most representative European and American artists including Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Jean Dubuffet, William de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings created between the 1920’s and the 1960’s, which defined an era and a chapter in the history of art, are together for the first time at the Palazzo Strozzi. Also on show are works of the Italian avant-garde artists, namely Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Emilio Vedova. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, in collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, the exhibition is at Palazzo Strozzi until 24th July 2016.