Teaching

Along with guarding the galleries and helping out with various administrative tasks, the interns here at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection have the tremendous honour of giving a variety of types of public lectures, from ten minute talks on specific pieces in the collection, to talks on the life of Peggy herself, to full tours of the collection, which I gave for the first time yesterday! I focused my tour on both indoor and outdoor sculpture – fortunately the weather pulled through, my adrenaline was pumping, (masking my terrible cold,) and overall my tour was a great success! Since all of you, my favourite people, couldn’t be here for the tour, I thought it’d be nice to run you through three of the six works I discussed. (I promise I’ll share the rest another time!)

I began the tour with Marino Marini’s The Angel of the City (1948), for three reasons: 1) It is a work that is emblematic of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection; people think of this work when they think of the PGC. In fact, often before walking around, tourists ask, “Where’s Marino Marini?” (Marino Marini has become synonymous with The Angel of the City in PGC-Land.) 2) The sculpture is located at the original entrance to the palazzo. The current entrance to the museum was actually the back entrance when Peggy lived there and only when her home became a museum did the onetime back entrance become the main entrance. Thus, this sculpture was the welcoming committee for Peggy’s friends upon their arrival at her home. 3) You guessed it! For obvious reasons it gives everyone a good laugh!

On a serious note, Marino Marini has a tremendous amount of art historical depth. For example, Marini drew on the Northern European tradition of depicting war heroes on horseback, but of course he updated the look! In other words, he parodied a traditional subject matter to make it contemporarily relevant, or at least interesting. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection Guide explains that the sculpture is typical of Marini’s work because it affirms the strength associated with sexual potency. However, I like to think of this sculpture in simpler terms – this guy is a sexual hero!

Now for the juicy details… In Peggy’s autobiography Confessions of an Art Addict, she has a fabulous description of her relationship to the work: “It was a statue of a horse and rider, the latter with his arms spread way out in ecstasy, and to emphasize this, Marino had added a phallus in full erection. But when he had it cast in bronze for me, he had the phallus made separately, so that it could be screwed in and out at leisure. Marino placed the sculpture in my courtyard on the Grand Canal… The best view of it was to be seen in profile from my sitting-room window. Often peaking through it I watched the visitors’ reactions to the statue. I’d always take the phallus off before I had to receive stuffy visitors, but occasionally I forgot, and when confronted with this phallus, I found myself in great embarrassment. The only thing to do in such cases was ignore it. In Venice a legend spread that I had several phalluses of different sizes, like spare parts, which I used on different occasions (130-1).”

After discussing Marino Marini, and being briefly interrupted by the loud sirens of a boat ambulance, which nearly knocked over a gondola boasting extremely loud Italian accordion music, causing the passengers, (and my tour group,) to yell, we headed back inside for a look at Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1932-40).

I began this segment of the tour by explaining why Peggy’s sculptures are so important to the collection: In the late 1930's when Peggy was importing sculptures to London, for a show Marcel Duchamp had coordinated for Peggy’s gallery The Guggenheim Jeune, British Customs stopped the works at the boarder claiming that they were not art but rather raw pieces of bronze, marble, wood, etc. that needed to be taxed. (Mind you, the works were predominantly by artists whom we currently consider to be the most accomplished and famous sculptors of the 20^th century, including Brancusi, Duchamp, Pevsner, Arp, Laurens, and Calder.) Peggy tried to get the director of the Tate to testify that her sculptures were in fact art, but he would not. Ultimately, Peggy took the government to the House of Commons, and won the case, thus legitimizing her objects as art. In her autobiography she notes that this was a great feat for foreign artists trying to send work to England because the case got marvellous publicity and was a great success. But it's important to note that she really helped the entire art world, and not just England; essentially, Peggy’s love for, and commitment to, modern art, was crucial to the 20^th century expansion of the definition of art to include abstraction.

As for some background on Brancusi, he was born in Romania in 1876 and moved to Paris as a young adult to become a sculptor. In Paris he met Duchamp and other important artists, all of whom were friends with Peggy, which is how Peggy learned of Brancusi and became interested in his work. In Peggy’s autobiography she shares a funny detail about Brancusi. She says that when they’d get together, Brancusi would dress up like a homeless person and take her to extremely fancy restaurants where he’d order the most expensive things on the menu. Apparently Brancusi always wanted to be with Peggy, romantically, but she was never interested. Nonetheless, Peggy thought that by befriending him she’d be able to get a sculpture at a discounted price, however she was wrong because ultimately he charged her $4,000 for the work, which Peggy deemed obscene, and he cried as she took it from his studio…

The work itself is supposed to depict a generic bird flying upward. Art historians have suggested that Brancusi was a spiritual person and who longed to transcend the material world and he saw birds as symbolic of that desire. Likewise, he strategically worked with brass because he liked the finely polished product, as its luminosity is reminiscent of heaven, the nonmaterial realm. Ironically, the base on which the sculpture is mounted, seems to aggressively anchor the bird in our world, which makes me think that perhaps Brancusi felt that he could not fulfil his desire to detach from the material world.

Onto Giacometti’s Woman Standing (1947)!

Standing Woman is located in the Nasher Sculpture Garden, (the current front entrance)… After Peggy’s palazzo had already been converted into a museum, the Nasher family donated funds to enable the back courtyard area to be used as a sculpture garden that can house works from Peggy’s own collection, the Nasher collection, as well as works on loan from other institutions and artists. With that said, Giacometti cast Woman Standing, specifically for Peggy…

As for Giacometti, he was born in 1901 in Switzerland. He was a student of Rodin, and if you are familiar with Rodin’s work, you can see the influence, in terms of material and style, as both artists have a sad way of depicting the human body. Woman Standing is typical of Giacometti’s style with its crusty surfaces and just smaller than life size scale, and also because of its complex range of possible interpretations, a few of which I will propose to you:

1. Some believe that Giacometti was influenced by the images of Holocaust survivors and victims, which were just being released at the time this became his token style. As you can see, the figure is physically frail, vulnerable, and alone. However it’s interesting to note that Giacometti himself never admitted to being influenced by the trauma of WWII.

2. Giacometti himself has claimed that his strangely tall and thin figures are supposed to represent a person’s shadow, as apposed to the person himself.

3. Along those lines, Dr. Rylands suggests that Giacometti intends portray his model at the fixed view from which he saw her when sketching.

4. Sartre, the philosopher and art critique, claimed that Giacometti made elongated and emaciated figures because “there is nothing redundant in a living man because everything is functional,” and thus Giacometti simplifies people to their most essential qualities.

5. I believe that Giacometti intended to use his sculpture to remind viewers that humans are not perfect, as classical sculpture suggests. In other words, we are filled with dings and dents, hence the rough texture of Giacometti’s bodies, in contrast to the smooth finish of classical sculpture.

6. My favourite interpretation of Giacometti’s sculpture is from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Guide, which says that Giacometti intends to capture the notion that even as we get older and the body begins to deteriorate, our essences are eternal and will continue to remain a part of this world.

And on that note, for the sake of ensuring that my body and spirit remain a part of this world for some time to come, I’m going to hit the sack at a reasonable hour so that I can recuperate from this cold and prepare for my talk on Peggy’s life which is coming up on Wednesday! Nothing better than being responsible for dispersing knowledge…

1. Marino Marini, The Angel of the City, 1948 (cast 1950?), Bronze, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

2. Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space (L'Oiseau dans l'espace), 1932–40, Polished brass, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

3. Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman ("Leoni"), 1947, cast November 1957, Bronze, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.