It could very well be that artists make better collectors than their full-time counterparts. Less constrained by conventional notions of taste (and, presumably, investment) than the pros, they tend to make more idiosyncratic selections. Take Andy Warhol and his famously prodigious holdings of cookie jars. Martin Wong, who made paintings of life on the rough Read More
Last Friday evening in the Guggenheim’s basement auditorium, Jeff Koons, in his trademark smooth, soothing tone, told a sold-out crowd about something he often does before he goes to sleep. “At night, what I like to do, as an individual, when my wife is getting ready to go to bed and my children are already in bed, I go online,” he said excitedly, “and I just look at Picasso’s work.”
Mr. Koons said that Marcel Duchamp has long been a huge influence on him, but that he has become more impressed with Picasso over the past two decades. In fact, he’s started collecting the artist’s work, and has loaned one of his paintings to the exhibition on view in the Guggenheim’s galleries upstairs, “Picasso Black and White.” A 1969 scene of a bald man aggressively kissing a woman, it hangs near the top of the rotunda. Read More
In June the Guggenheim Museum will present James Turrell’s first solo museum exhibition in New York since 1980, an ambitious project that will close the museum’s ramps and use its architecture to create a mass of shifting color similar to his Skyscapes. The show will also feature studies and drawings for his magnum opus, Roden Crater (1976–). The show is part of a tripartite retrospective that will occur simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Read More
Suzanne Cotter, the curator of the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project, has been selected to lead the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, in Porto, Portugal, Art in America reports. She’ll be taking the place of João Fernandes, who is stepping down after almost a decade as director to become deputy director of Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía. Ms. Cotter had served in her Guggenheim role since 2010. Read More
IN ADDITION to being the most celebrated artist of the 20th century, Picasso is also the most difficult to pin down. So it is not surprising that an austere exhibition of his paintings, sculptures and drawings, ostensibly all in black and white, actually yields smudges of color: jade, olive, lemon-meringue yellow, midnight blue. Less surprising is the fact that the pieces on view—some 118 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, including 38 being shown for the first time in the United States and five displayed for the first time in public—are full of his signature muscular shapes. The show’s curator, Carmen Giménez, brought Richard Serra to the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1999, and her taste for the sculptural is evident in this exhibition. Read More
Tart, Big Foot and Fat and Skinny Anguish are some of the characters that people Pablo Picasso’s play Desire Caught by the Tail, an odd little plotless number written by the painter in 1941 that, according to The New York Times, will be given a fresh dramatic reading at the Guggenheim. The play will be read on Oct. 14 and 15 in conjunction with the exhibition “Picasso: Black and White,” which opens on Oct. 5. Read More
The Guggenheim announced that it will remain open late on most Sundays and Mondays during the run of its upcoming “Picasso Black and White” exhibition, from Oct. 5, 2012, through Jan. 23. Thank you, Richard Armstrong. Thank you.
Instead of closing at 5:45 p.m. on those days, the museum’s doors will remain open until a very civil 8 p.m. (The change will not be in effect on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, and New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31.) The museum currently opens at 10 a.m. every day, is closed on Thursdays and stays open until 7:45 p.m. on Saturdays. Read More
Arriving at the Guggenheim on the evening of July 10 for its “Composing With Patterns: Music At Mid-Century” concert, The Observer was directed to an entrance off of the main rotunda and into the Peter B. Lewis Theatre. Inside, the composer, artist and performer R. Luke DuBois offered a brief and thoroughly engaging lecture on the history of modernist music. Following the presentation, the rotunda became the stage for the main event, a concert of seven works from the 1940s through the 1960s on the ground floor, beneath six floors of abstract art—mostly paintings—from the same era. Read More
Scholar Jeffrey Weiss has been with the Guggenheim since 2010 as lead curator on that institution’s Panza Collection, the trove of Minimalist and Conceptual art donated to the institution by Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Now he has been promoted to the position of senior curator, the Guggenheim announced today. Mr. Panza will continue to lead research on the Panza works. Read More
Should the Guggenheim receive $250,000 to restore its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed doors? Or would money be better spent refurbishing the façade and entryway of the Japan Society, which was designed by Junzo Yoshimura? Read More
