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Press Release FIRST EUROPEAN Palazzo Venier dei Leoni 701 Dorsoduro 30123 Venezia, Italy Telephone 041 2405 411 Telefax 041 5206885 Press release FIRST EUROPEAN EXHIBITION OF AMERICAN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST WILLIAM BAZIOTES 5 September 2004 – 9 January 2005 4 September 10 am: Press Conference William Baziotes (1912-63), American Abstract Expressionist painter and member of the 1951 ‘Irascibles’ group of New York School artists, will be the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 5 September 2004 - 9 January 2005. Organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate and widow Ethel Baziotes, the exhibition will be the first ever to be presented in Europe. The opening date, 4 September 2004, comes almost exactly 60 years after the first solo show of William Baziotes’ work was held, in October 1944, at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York museum/gallery Art of This Century. This new exhibition will bring together some 37 paintings and 20 watercolor drawings, including many of the 24 works from that début exhibition. Selected and curated by Michael Preble, a leading scholar and author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, it will close on 9 January 2005. Important loans have been made available by private collectors and public institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The National Gallery of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among many others. Born of Greek ancestry in America in 1912, William Baziotes was a leading protagonist of what is now recognized as one of the most original and creative struggles for artistic expression in modern times. Where many artists of the 1930s and 1940s shared a somewhat regionalist viewpoint, Baziotes and a small number of artists, mostly centered in New York City, looked instead to European sources. As with many of his contemporaries, Baziotes first experimented with Cubist and Surrealist styles, absorbing the formal lessons and psychological sensibilities in the work of a wide range of artists from Old Masters to avant-garde painters such as Jean Arp, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Sebastian Matta. In 1943, William Baziotes participated in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. The following year he was the second of almost a dozen artists – including Jackson Pollock, David Hare, Clyfford Still, and his good friend Robert Motherwell -- to be given a début exhibition at the gallery. Clement Greenberg’s review, published in The Nation on 11 November 1944, was full of praise: “All credit is due to Peggy Guggenheim for her enterprise in presenting young and unrecognized artists at her Art of This Century gallery. But even more to her credit is her acumen. Two of the abstract painters she has recently introduced – Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes – reveal more than promise: on the strength of their first one-man shows they have already placed themselves among the six or seven best painters we possess.” As Philip Rylands, Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, has remarked: “Baziotes’ stands out from the group of his New York contemporaries as the maker of paintings of outstanding chromatic beauty in which the ‘biomorphic’ THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION Surrealist component survives long after it had been purged from the paintings of artists such as Motherwell, Rothko and Still. Baziotes has long deserved recognition of his genius and individuality in the Abstract Expressionist movement.” This exhibition provides a timely opportunity to re-examine the work of a prodigiously gifted painter who has received less international attention than many of his contemporaries and whose historic importance now deserves review. A fully-illustrated catalogue, in English and Italian editions, will accompany the exhibition, presenting a synopsis of scholarly research and including essays by Michael Preble and Jasper Sharp and short texts by Baziotes’ widow Ethel and friends Jimmy Ernst and Charles Seliger. Institutional Patrons: Banca del Gottardo, Regione del Veneto The programs of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board and __________________________________________ INTRAPRESÆ COLLEZIONE GUGGENHEIM Alitalia Leo Burnett Arclinea Listone Giordano Automotive Products Italia Nicoletti Barbero 1891 Palladio Finanziaria Bisazza Rex Built-In Corriere della Sera Rubelli Fitt Salvatore Ferragamo Gruppo 3M Italia Swatch Hangar Design Group Wella Hausbrandt #156, September 2004 THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION .
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