From March 3 to June 10 the Arca in Vercelli hosts the exhibition The Giants of the Avant- Garde: Miró, Mondrian, Calder and the Guggenheim Collection, the fifth of a successful series conceived by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, for the Comune of Vercelli. This exhibition includes over 30 works, of both painting and sculpture, chosen to survey the careers of these three giants of the avant-garde: Miró, Mondrian, and Calder.

The two Guggenheim collectors, Peggy and Solomon, were both farsighted, with an acute eye for the avant-garde. They took risks on artists that would prove to be major figures in the history of 20th century art, collecting works that are now considered cornerstones of the avant-garde movements. Miró, Mondrian, and Calder represent a spectrum— with the poetic Surrealism of Miró at one end, the pure abstraction of Mondrian at the other, and the sculpture of Calder, with Surrealist and abstract components sympathetic to the imagery of both painters, at the center.

The exhibition is enriched by loans from the Calder Foundation, New York, the Gemeentemuseum, Hague, the Palazzo Collicola of Visual Arts – Carandente Museum, Spoleto, and the Foundation Beyeler, Rihen Basel, in addition to the works of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. This exhibition is an opportunity to discover heights of poetic fantasy that traversed the 20th century.

Joan Miró (1893-1983), born in Barcelona, Spain, was a founding member of Surrealism. He was defined by André Breton - leader and originator of the movement - as “the most surrealist of us all,” while for William S. Rubin he was “unquestionably the finest painter to have participated in Surrealism.” From 1924 to 1929 he was the principle exponent of the symbolic tendency in Surrealism that developed imagery of stylized, suspended, often abstract marks and formations that nonetheless evoke their origin in reality around us. He himself remarked: “For me form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something. It is always a man, a bird, or something else. For me, painting is never form for form’s sake.” In 1942 paintings by Miró were exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, in the debut presentation of her recently formed collection of European contemporary art, alongside works by Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and René Magritte.

When Miró was awarded the Grand Prix for graphics at the Venice Biennale in 1954, Gillo Dorfles described him as “the great painter that is able to construct a painting with a few dark lines, a few bold tones, and without any figurative pretext or concession to caricature.” With a vocabulary of fluid backgrounds and floating figures, his language became a point of reference for generations to come. He is still widely considered one of the undisputed giants of the 20th century.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands, is a name from which abstraction in visual art, which had a strong influence on the imagery of both Miró and Calder, is inseparable. He was a founding member of the De Stijl movement in 1917, and one of the leading exponents and theorists of abstraction of the first half of the 20th century. Both Solomon and Peggy Guggenheim acquired works that chart his development from figuration to pure abstraction. Mondrian shared the idea of a spiritual and metaphysical basis for artistic creation with Kandinsky, and pursued the construction of a language that translates subjective lyrical expression onto the grid of a cosmic order. He challenged himself to render visible the relationship between individual freedom and the powerful resolve of the universe; in doing so he gave expression to a personalized, ‘neoplastic’, abstract style in which figuration is reduced to vertical and horizontal lines evoking the fundamental natural order. Inserted in the grid are blocks of the primary colors—blue, yellow and red. What emerges is a pictorial world that is both rigid and without limits, from the image to the dynamics of the universe, from the micro to the macrocosm. Mondrian passed his life in Holland, Paris, London, and New York, where he moved in 1940 to join the group of American abstract artists and where the rhythms of the city had a strong impact on his final works. Peggy Guggenheim befriended Mondrian in England in 1938 and he was to remain a member of her circle until his death in 1944. In 1971, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York organized an important retrospective exhibition to celebrate the centenary of his birth, confirming the pivotal role he played in the history of Abstraction.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania USA. Calder was “the first American of the twentieth century to win and hold a European reputation” (George Heard Hamilton). He traveled to Paris in 1926, where he soon became a close friend of Miró, with whom he was to share his formal humor, a preference for vegetal shapes, and expressive lines that drew patterns in space. In addition, a visit to the studio of Mondrian made an impact on his work. Like Mondrian, he limited his palette to primary colors and composed his works in lines and planes. Calder developed his visual language in three dimensions, and from the early 1930s, with his ‘mobiles’, caused his suspended sculptures to move in space. (Calder’s first portraits of acquaintances and sculptures in space were named mobiles by Marcel Duchamp because of their slow and continuous movement.)

The exhibition offers a full repertoire of Calder’s work: his Mobiles and Stabiles (floor standing works), table pieces with ‘mobile’ parts, wire portraiture, wall pieces (Constellations—a title linking his work to Miró’s), jewelry, and paintings on paper. Both Peggy and Solomon Guggenheim had enduring friendships with Calder, recognizing the originality of his new conception as to how sculpture can be made. Peggy wore an earring by Calder at the opening of Art of This Century, her museum-gallery, in 1942, and subsequently commissioned a bed-head from him. She wrote: “Not only am I the only woman in the world to sleep in a Calder bed, but I am also the only woman to wear his enormous mobile earrings.” Both of these works are included in the exhibition. The clever mastery of mechanics (Calder trained as an engineer), the wonder of the movement of celestial bodies, and a childlike love for the circus are among the factors that give life to Calder’s unpredictable, fluctuating, and suspended sculptures.

The Giants of the Avant-Garde: Miró, Mondrian, Calder and the Guggenheim Collection. Arca, Chiesa di San Marco, Vercelli, March 3 to June 10 2012. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. Promoted by Regione Piemonte and the City of Vercelli. In collaboration with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. With the support of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Vercelli. Organization and production Sistema Museo. Catalogue Editorial Silvana.

Opening** :**
Monday to friday 8:00am to 7:00pm
Saturdays and holidays: 8:00am to 8:00pm

tickets:
€ 9
Reduced working groups (min. 15 - max 25 pax) € 6
Holidays reduced groups (min. 15 - max 25 pax) € 8
Reduced individual (+ 65 years) € 7
Reduced Schools and individuals under 18 years € 4
Gift for children under 3 years old and disabled
Booking fee (not including school groups and the province of Vercelli) € 1.50
Free audio guide and guidance

Information and reservations:
phone 199.151.123
callcenter@sistemamuseo.it