Last night attended a member’s only party and showing at the Guggenheim of their new exhibit called The Great Upheaval, referring to European painting from 1910-1918, when a radical turn in art took place. Those years were the beginning of abstraction in art. This was also a period of tremendous turmoil and change in world history that rather culminated in WW I. The exhibit traces the development of abstraction, during those 8 years, by over 100 works by 48 artists including Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Vasily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich, and Pablo Picasso.
The majority of the paintings didn’t seem to be from A-list painters, although I did enjoy some of the paintings that I had never seen before from painters whom I had never heard of before.
The few Picasso’s were his very early cubist paintings that aren’t his most outstanding. They put together a new show out of old pictures from their collection. It didn’t seem very innovative. The Guggenheim doesn’t allow people to photograph their paintings or exhibits, so one has to be content with what one can photograph from the outside of the building or from the ground floor. Fortunately, that is mostly the magnificent Frank Lloyd Wright building, which is the main reason everyone goes to the Guggenheim in the first place. The only reason the Guggenheim is a famous art museum is because of the building. However, when a security guard wasn’t looking, I managed to take a photo from above the ground floor, as you can see in one of the photos below.
You might be interested in reading a post I did on my other blog “One American Mind” called “the Guggenheim Museum Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.”