From Van Gogh to Picasso: The Guggenheim at Palazzo Reale, Milan

Lot-Art had the pleasure to visit "Guggenheim. The Thannhauser Collection. From Van Gogh to Picasso" at Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italy. The exhibition enables visitors to appreciate a selection of works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York: a significant part of the collection created during the last century by the German connoisseur Thannhauser and later donated to the Guggenheim Foundation. It is held from 17 October 2019 to 1 March 2020.

The exhibition features works by leading Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and exponents of the early 20th-century avant-gardes, including Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh and a significant number of works by Pablo Picasso.

Left: Pablo Picasso - Woman with Yellow Hair (see full-size image »); Right: Pablo Picasso - Lobster and Cat (see full-size image »)

Pablo Picasso was first drawn from his native Spain to Paris, which had become the international nexus of the art world, for the 1900 World´s Fair, and he ultimately would establish his studio in France. The artist's more naturalistic style rapidly evolved into his melancholic Blue Period and following Rose Period, before he came to pioneer with Georges Braque the faced forms and flattened spatial planes associated with Cubism. This movement, emerging around 1907, is regarded as one of the most innovative and influential aesthetic developments of the twentieth century. Picasso subsequently experimented with neoclassicism, and in his work of the interwar period, he once again turned to drawing and figurative representation.

Lobster and Cat, a wedding present from the artist to the Thannhausers has a slightly comic effect in its depiction of a tense confrontation whereby the cat's back is arched, his tail is straight, and his fur is standing up on end, while the lobster, represented from above, appears to be swaying on his many spindly legs. Lobster and Cat is also a reference to eighteen-century still lifes.

Left: Pablo Picasso - Woman in an Armchair (see full-size image »); Right: Pablo Picasso - Fernande with a Black Mantilla (see full-size image »)

Woman in an Armchair, Fernande with a Black Mantilla and Woman with Yellow Hair correspond to very distinctive periods in Picasso's oeuvre and demonstrate the evolution of his pictorial style as he liberally drew inspiration from sources as varied as ancient and modern art. Despite its almost monochromatic palette, Fernande with a Black Mantilla (c.1905) attests to the influence of Fauvism with its unconstrained drawing, while classical statuary from antiquity inspired the sculptural aspects of Woman in an Armchair (1922). In Woman with Yellow Hair (1931), Picasso's portrait of his then-muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, curvilinear contours and flat areas of bright hues signal a renewed interest in surface treatment and colour.

Left: Vasily Kandinsky - Blue Mountain (see full-size image »); Right: Franz Marc - Yellow Cow (see full-size image »)

In the years preceding the Great War, the support that the Thannhausers gave to emerging artists played an important role in the proliferation of avant-garde styles. In1909 and 1910, two exhibitions established the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM, or New Artists' Association of Munich), which was opposed to conservatism in society and in the contemporary German art market. Led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the group drew inspiration from sources as diverse as French Fauvism, Art Nouveau, Bavarian popular culture, and Russian folklore. They sought to create art that was free of any figurative constraints and that experimented with lyrical, symbolic, and spiritual expression. In addition to presenting paintings by the movement's founding members, the Thannhausers introduced the German public to French artists such as Robert Delaunay and Henri Rousseau. In 1914 the Thannhausers also mounted the first major exhibition in Germany devoted to Paul Klee.

Left: Henri Rousseau - Artillerymen (see full-size image »); Right: Henri Rousseau - The Football Players (see full-size image »)

Rousseau only began to paint seriously in his forties. Critics Iambasted the untrained artist's unsentimental images of faraway places (he never traveled outside France), yet the Parisian avant-garde celebrated his unique style. In The Football Players, he attempted to depict modern times with a new sport, rugby. Partly due to English influence, interest in open-air sporting activities had been revived in France, with rugby among the new ball games reserved for the elite. Rousseau's players clearly carry a rugby ball, yet the title of the painting references European football, or soccer, which had become more accessible to the working classes and flourished in urban centers. The painting has a militaristic bent as well; sports were not only seen as a means of focusing youthful energy but also coincided with a nationalist revival in France in the 1910s.

Left: Claude Monet - The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore (see full-size image »); Right: Vincent van Gogh - Mountains at Saint-Rémy (see full-size image »)

Among some of the highpoints in the program at Thannhauser's Berlin gallery was an exhibition held in tribute to Claude Monet in 1928. The Thannhauser purchased Monet's The Palazzo Ducale, Seen from San Giorgio Maggiore. Monet painted six variations of this view in fall 1908 during his only visit to Venice. "I wanted to paint the atmosphere of Venice", he wrote. The present work is essentially a study of light and air, with the sun's sparkling iridescence reflecting off the water and the palace's marble facade that shimmers in the distance.

Berlin in the 1920s was a cultural center where unconventional art movements and lifestyles were embraced. The Thannhausers hoped it would prove an ideal place to develop their art business, and in 1927 Justin opened a special exhibition that the public and critics alike greeted with enthusiasm. Featuring 263 works, the show included Mountains at Saint-Rémy by Vincent van Gogh. Painted during Van Gogh's recovery from an attack of mental distress in 1889, Mountains at Saint-Rémy evokes the artist's subjective state through its thick application of paint and animated brushstrokes.

Left: Francis Picabia - Portrait of Mistinguett (see full-size image »); Right: Pablo Picasso - Two Doves with Wings Spread (see full-size image »)

Around 1908 -11, Picabia painted this portrait of Mistinguett ( née Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois), a singer, actress, and revue artist in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The woman's features are simplified, as are her hat and coat. Although this canvas is characterised by a late Impressionist style, the simplification of the forms, accentuated by the graphic quality of the black lines of the drawing, hints at new styles, which the painter would subsequently develop.

Left: Paul Gauguin - Haere Mai (see full-size image »); Right: Paul Cézanne - The Neighborhood of Jas de Bouffan (see full-size image »)

In 1891 Paul Gauguin first traveled to Tahiti in pursuit of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration. He painted the phrase "Haere Mai" which means "Come here!" in Tahitian, onto the lower right corner, but it does not appear to coincide with the content of the painting. The artist who spoke little of the indigenous language at that time often combined disparate Tahitian phrases with images in an effort to evoke the foreign and the mystical. However, the 'Haere Mai' tradition is connected with the hospitality of the Haitians, who welcome visitors with flowers and kisses, further enhancing the idealization of this desirable place, far removed from European customs and conventions.

A major figure whose work is represented in depth in the Thannhauser Collection today is Paul Cézanne. This artist broke away conventional representations of space in the still lives and landscapes that he painted near his birthplace of Aix-en-Provence, and his work increasingly approached geometric abstraction.

Left: Édouard Manet - Before the Mirror (see full-size image »); Right: Paul Cézanne - Man with Crossed Arms (see full-size image »)

In 1954 the first work by Paul Cézanne to enter the collection, Man with Crossed Arms (c.1899), caused a sensation in the press when the Guggenheim acquired it for $97,000, which was an exceptional amount of money to pay for a painting at the time. Some ten years later, the Thannhauser Collection greatly enriched the museum's holdings, adding significant paintings by artists associated with French Impressionism. Édouard Manet's and Pierre - Auguste Renoir's female figures, painted in a novel and spontaneous manner, attest to the attention paid by these artists to the changing moral values and social structures in France at the turn of the century. With regard to the ensemble promised to the museum, donor Justin Thannhauser stated: " I feel strongly that these 75 pictures represent a unity you do not find in other museums. They cover 75 to 100 years and I see one coming from the other."

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