Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983

PETER LAWSON-JOHNSTON Well, this is a real thrill, all these friendly faces. (applause) So often I look out over a sea of faces that I don’t know. And it’s fun to have friends here. Deedee and I really have been looking forward to today. And I want to thank Denise for hostessing here at the museum. Thank Deedee for hostessing at our apartment.

And I’m here only to introduce to you our director. I think if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re very privileged to have the master of ceremonies par excellence show you through the Thannhauser and give you the chance to see Peggy’s collection, which is here from Venice very briefly. [00:01:00] Tom came here in January 1961, longer than he or — longer than he wants to remember. I wasn’t here yet. And he’s just done a fabulous job. And just several years ago he was president of the museum directors association of the world, which gives you some idea of how he is thought of by his peers. I know you’re going to enjoy Tom. And Tom? (applause)

THOMAS M. MESSER I increasingly worry about Peter’s introductions, because it’s impossible to live up to it. But I do thank him very much.

I understand, ladies, that you have come here [00:02:00] to familiarize yourself with two collections in particular. With the Justin K. Thannhauser collection on the one hand and the Peggy Guggenheim collection on the other. And I’ll be happy to tell you about it as much as one can in the absence of the works themselves. But do I take it that you will afterwards go up and look at it a little bit? Fine. That’s good. (laughter) It’s good. Because in the end, of course, in a museum and with works of art, verbiage is at best an accompanying commentary. And the only thing that really counts is the contact of a particular pair of eyes with a particular surface of a painting. Anything one says about it is merely framework and possibly [00:03:00] useful information.

So let me speak about those two collections, which in so doing, I’m almost reviewing the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim for you. Because both of these collections, which came to us in the last two decades have importantly and decisively affected the course of the museum development. You probably know that it is as long as — as far back as 1937 that Peter Lawson- Johnston’s grandfather, Solomon R. Guggenheim, endowed the foundation that now bears his name, and thereby launched [00:04:00] an important contemporary museum. With the help of a German baroness named Hilla Rebay, who was the first director of the museum, which then was called the Museum of Contemporary — the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. With her help, Solomon R. Guggenheim acquires an important collection of abstract art. This is what non- objective meant at the time. Of abstract art which was enhanced and enriched by subsequent administrations. So that when in 1959 the Frank Lloyd Wright building was completed and the collection that had been on public view before now became the center of the attention in New York and really throughout [00:05:00] the world, we were in a position in which we already had an interesting — a very fine group of paintings. But really no space that was specifically reserved for it. The ramps were serving our temporary exhibition needs, needs which gave the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983 high visibility to our institution and that could not be interrupted more than occasionally for a temporary airing of part of the collection.

So in the 1960s then appears — not exactly out of the blue sky, because a certain amount of preparatory scheming has gone into this — but nevertheless, Justin K. Thannhauser, a German- born dealer, appears on the scene and [00:06:00] offers us an important choice of impressionist and post-impressionist painting if we found ways to house it and to exhibit it permanently. So a great deal of scurrying followed this offer. Because even then it was a multi, multi, multimillion dollar collection, which had great intrinsic value and which certainly we didn’t want to lose to our friendly competitors. And so we decided to dispense for the time being with a restaurant that we had, move the library into the restaurant. And in the space previously occupied by the library and by offices, [00:07:00] we agreed to receive and welcome Mr. Thannhauser’s gift. Well, Mr. Thannhauser couldn’t resist that either. And so in 1965, the Thannhauser Collection came to us first as a loan and eventually as a bequest.

However, had you been there during that famous opening in 1965 — and I wish sometimes that there could be a flashback to just place before yours and before my eyes the way it looked then and the way it looks now — and saying what I’m about to say without in the slightest diminishing Mr. Thannhauser’s credit or understating our great debt and gratitude to him. But Mr. Thannhauser [00:08:00] was essentially a nineteenth-century type, and his idea of how to present a collection like this was rather different from the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright’s futuristic architecture. And so were you able to see it for a moment again, you would see it against a rather overpowering wall of red [fortune?] tapestry and each painting framed in heavy gold, bringing you back to a time which certainly the Guggenheim museum even at that time had long put behind itself. But gradually, and always with the welcome help of now Mr. Thannhauser’s widow, we persuaded him that this should be changed. [00:09:00] And after his death in 1972, with Hilda Thannhauser’s blessing we converted it more or less into what you see today.

Now what you see in the Thannhauser wing is much more than the Thannhauser Collection. The wing will always bear his name. And there will always be works from the original gift. But we have in the meantime persuaded the donor and his heirs to mingle the gift with our own works of the same period, so that our permanent collection of early twentieth-century art could be related to what Mr. Thannhauser has generously bequeathed to us.

So as you enter on the second ramp the Thannhauser [00:10:00] wing, you will find three rooms. The three rooms that have some chronological meaning, with one devoted primarily to impressionism, one to post-impressionism, and one to early twentieth-century art. And I would love to linger here and in my mind’s eye wander with you from painting to painting and let you imagine some of these great works. But it’s difficult to do. And as I said before, this is really up to you. So let me merely orient you about the sequences contained in the wing. If you were to view this chronologically, you should begin, not in the first room as you enter, but east of that room. You just passed [00:11:00] through an open space. And you will find there the great names of Manet, and Renoir, and Degas next to Bonnard and [Villar?], the great names of impressionism, which is somewhat outside of our regular institutional compass, but which serves

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983 as a point of departure from which you then move into the crucial latest years of post- impressionism and toward the twentieth century itself. So that the chronology would be to go from that east room to the curved area in the north of the building where the post-impressionists are arranged in more or less chronological order. Seurat, Cézanne, [00:12:00] Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Rousseau, the prime names. And you will find top examples by all of these accompanied by a sequence of drawings by Seurat and Van Gogh that alone would be worth a permanent exhibit. So I don’t worry about the impression that the quality of these works will make upon you. But would like for you to also see how this related to the total so that when you move from impressionism to post-impressionism as I just described, you should in the end arrive in the gallery that greets you first.

Why, you might ask, did you do it in such a complicated way? Why did you not arrange the sequence [00:13:00] in keeping with the chronology? The answer is that historic chronology and architecture do not always mesh. The post-impressionist paintings are small. And the room, the curved area would not be suitable for paintings of larger dimensions. So there are technical reasons for this.

But you shouldn’t be bothered by this too much as you view, then, primarily the magnificent evolution of Picasso’s art from the time in which you would hardly recognize him as Picasso, the time in which he himself was still influenced — if you can imagine Picasso being influenced by anyone — by Toulouse-Lautrec and by Munch, doing melancholy blue and rose period paintings, which only gradually lead towards the [00:14:00] grand invention of cubism, an invention in which Braque accompanied him. So that you will see a few paintings of Braque mingled in. And then see the whole evolution of cubism until the later mode. So that, in effect, you have a mini-retrospective of what is probably the most influential painter of our century. So as you will agree, I hope, there’s much that we owe to Mr. Thannhauser. And it is particularly gratifying that we were allowed, eventually, to combine the Thannhauser paintings with our own in a permanent wing.

Before I leave this area, I must tell you that there is a recent addition there, which is a sensation by itself. [00:15:00] It’s a painting of a model named Laurette by Henri Matisse. And that’s a saga of its own, because Matisse has always eluded us for some reason. The original collection gathered by Hilla Rebay did not contain Matisse, because he was not non-objective enough. Mr. Thannhauser did not have a Matisse of high quality to give us. And of course, gradually it was impossible to buy Matisse, because he is just about as expensive and inaccessible as any modern painter would be. So in despair, we arranged ourselves with the Museum of Modern Art here in New York whose particular jinx was not Matisse, but Kandinsky. And here we were with more than 100 Kandinskys in our [00:16:00] permanent collection and not one Matisse, and they eyeing enviously our holdings in this respect. So after much negotiation, much secrecy, and then sudden blaze of publicity, we agreed to trade among ourselves by us giving them two very important Kandinskys, and they giving us one Picasso that you will see, a Picasso still life in the Thannhauser Collection of 1931, and the great Matisse of Laurette, so that this most painful of all embarrassing gaps has been closed. (laughter)

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983

Now I have to see whether I’m too loquacious here. But let’s assume that this is half time. And I’ll move on to Peggy Guggenheim, which again is a story of its own. [00:17:00] Peggy was the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim. Her father, Benjamin, was Solomon’s brother and went down with the Titanic. And Peggy somewhat exiled from the central Guggenheim family line started very much in her own name, became interested in art in the ’30s, and toward the end of the decade had moved toward the contemporary scene. Had an idea of establishing a museum in London and started to buy for this museum at a time in which everybody else was running other way, because the Germans were advancing [00:18:00] toward Paris. And Peggy was sitting there. And as she puts it, I think, in her book, every morning for breakfast already somebody came with a painting, offering it to her at relatively favorable terms. Because people normally were not buying, but selling and running.

And in this manner, following a list that was prepared for her by no lesser capacity than Sir Herbert Read, the art historian Marcel Duchamp, the great revolutionary artist of our time. Following a list of that kind, she assembled a remarkable collection, again, of classical modern art. That is to say of Picasso, and Braque, and Mondrian, and Kandinsky, and Duchamp, and Picabia, and the surrealist painters. Everyone from [00:19:00] De Chirico, to Tanguy, Dali, to Brauner, [Delgo?], Max Ernst, etc. She then managed to get this collection first to Vichy France, and then together with Max Ernst himself, whom she married for the purpose, to the United States.

The stay of Peggy in New York during the war saw her in a different incarnation. She became an art dealer at the time and established something that called itself Art of This Century. The assumption that we can draw from the available transactions, that she didn’t sell very much. But on the other hand she bought quite a bit, because she felt sorry for all those artists whom she gave exhibitions and nobody wanted to buy them. And these artists then were [00:20:00] Pollock, and De Kooning, and Rothko, and Clyfford Still, the new generation of the then- emerging abstract expressionist school.

Shortly after the war, she felt that she had enough of New York, picked herself up with her whole collection, both the earlier and the later American part, bought the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice, and established her own foundation there, which she showed to the public under restricted terms. Just enough to justify the tax status of her foundation. We, of course, watched her with attention [00:21:00] and wondered what is going to happen to this collection. But our hopes were not too great, because there were some wounds left from a generation preceding Peggy, wounds within the family body. And particularly Peggy liked the first director here, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, about as much as Hilla Rebay liked her. And there are some fairly aggressive, epistolary exchanges on record. So that we were not really greatly welcomed when we arrived on the scene, that is to say, about 15 years ago.

I made my first visit at that time as an emissary of Harry Guggenheim, [00:22:00] Peggy’s cousin. And it took some doing before Peggy could be dissuaded from giving the collection either to the Commune in Venice or to the Tate Gallery in London. I might say that both of those competitors of ours made it a little easier for us by incurring liabilities that in Peggy’s mind loomed very large. When she proposed to give the collection to the Commune in Venice, the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983

Commune was prepared to accept it but charged her with a tax. And Peggy, who was not known for inattentiveness to her fortune, argued rightly that they must be out of their minds if they wish to accept [00:23:00] a multimillion collection and on top of this charge her with a minimal but symbolically unacceptable fee. So she withdrew this and then moved toward the Tate in London — moved in the company of her many dogs, which always surrounded her. Didn’t get further than the border, because dogs were not allowed into Albion. And so for the second time, we were saved by the bell, because [laughter] Peggy said, “No dogs, no collection.” And so in the meantime, we worked. At that time, Peter Lawson-Johnston was on the scene and established a very warm and trustful relationship with Peggy. And Peggy referred fewer and fewer times to my uncle’s garage when she referred to the Guggenheim Museum. (laughter) And so [00:24:00] eventually in the ’70s the collection was actually deeded to us. And Peggy then died in ’79, from which moment on we took physical possession of it.

And her foundation yielded into the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, became our charge, and our responsibility, and of course our privilege to administer in her name in Venice. So you might ask then how is it that you are seeing it here? And the answer is that Peggy’s requirement was that the collection stay in Venice during the Venetian season. During her lifetime, it was always open between April and October. [00:25:00] And afterwards, the Palazzo was simply closed. It was not suited for winter presentation, nor was there enough tourism to justify it. So we are benefitting from the clause that allows us to use the collection outside of the season, which, after all, amounts to four, five months. And it’s for that reason that it appears, again, in a space that was carved out of the existing museum building requiring displacement of other activities, but which nevertheless lends itself very nicely to the presentation of a sequence of works that is particularly strong in surrealism, in cubism and the satellite movements of cubism, and then in the American and European postwar movements. [00:26:00]

I already mentioned the names of the surrealists to you before, but can only add the observation that there is probably no place in the world that could match the series of Max Ernst, her exquisite murals and individual works, fewer works by other artists of the same period. The cubist segment of her collection contains top examples, not only by the original cubists, Picasso and Braque, but by those who, using the analytical cubist phase as a point of departure, then moved toward synthetic cubist forms, toward futurism and orphism, and eventually, of course, from that to Mondrian and his neoplasticist [00:27:00] colleagues. So that these sequences that one may say begin with Picasso and end with Mondrian, a sequence with a particularly interesting morphological development is there for you to see and study. In addition to this, Kandinsky, though only two works — but two important ones — relates to the postwar artists, particularly to the Americans. So that you can verify for yourself the debt that the American expressionists of the postwar era incurred toward the first non-objective painters that appeared a couple of decades before them.

Well, I should say that what you are going to see there is of course not the whole Peggy Guggenheim [00:28:00] Collection. The whole collection consists of about 350 works. I would say that more than 100 are of comparable quality to those that you will be seeing. And what is actually on view, 50 paintings in one gallery. And then if you have time, take the elevator to the top gallery to see 15 very fine works on paper. The works on paper have to be separately

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Thomas M. Messer on the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum, 1983 installed, not only because there wouldn’t be space in the main gallery, but also because the light intensity has to be reduced not to endanger their texture.

Well, I’m, I think, at the end of my remarks about the two collections. I might tell you that the addition of the Thannhauser and the Peggy collection [00:29:00] has strengthened our resolve to be not merely a museum with a strong record of temporary exhibitions, but one that more and more inclines toward the collection itself as the basis for its raison d’être. I hope that if you come back here a few years hence, we will have found the means to enlarge the permanent gallery space and to include the other part of our still hidden treasures, which now come to the surface only from time to time. So may I wish you a happy visit here. And should you find yourself in Venice, say this next April when we [00:30:00] are ceremoniously reopening a reconstructed Palazzo — but anytime thereafter you could see the difference in context between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection shown here and one in its presentation in its Italian domicile. So I’m ending with an invitation to you. And thank you for having heard me out. (applause)

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On the Justin K. Thannhauser and Peggy Guggenheim Collections at the Princeton Art Museum / Peter Lawson- Johnston, Thomas M. Messer. 1983/1/27. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York