Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
January 2019
In 2012, Hannelore B. Schulhof (1922–2012), who collected with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof (1912–1999), bequeathed eighty works of postwar European and American art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to be housed at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. This exhibition is an opportunity to view the Schulhof Collection nearly in its entirety. Privileging formal artistic developments, this presentation provides insights into the art movements and styles that evolved and matured toward the end of World War II to the 1980s. Abstract imagery, as a quest into issues of color, form, and space as well as their interrelationships, characterized the postwar decades, becoming the foundation of the Schulhof Collection. The display reflects this overarching abstract crescendo of minimalism and refinement, opening with works by artists such as Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly, and eventually arriving at the paintings and sculptures by Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol, among others. The works are grouped and arranged according to style, theme, and affinity, exploring notions that include but are not limited to gestural abstraction, materiality, the monochrome, the mark and the grid, hard-edged geometries and elemental form. This exhibition celebrates how, crossing continents and traversing cultures, the Schulhof Collection reflects a multitude of postwar artistic tendencies and a polyphony of voices. Living artists from both sides of the North Atlantic were the focus of these collectors, in the words of Mrs. Schulhof, with “equal commitment, throughout” (letter to James Wilder Green, director, The American Federation of Arts, New York, April 26, 1984, The Schulhof Collection Archives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice).