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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

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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 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 Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 6 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, multi- million 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 Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 6 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.
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