Art in Focus Lecture June 5th

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Chris Kretz

Writings on Peggy Guggenheim.

We are gearing up for next Tuesday’s lecture on Jackson Pollock’s Mural for Peggy Guggenheim. If you’re unfamiliar with the back story, we luckily have reference books from the Pollock-Krasner Study Center collection at Southampton to help set the scene.

Peggy Guggenheim had already established herself as a prominent patron of modern art by the time she signed a contract with Jackson Pollock in 1943. The arrangement, which led to a number of solo shows for Pollock in New York, also resulted in an 8 x 20-foot painting, Mural, that was unfurled inside Guggenheim’s apartment on East Sixty-First St. It was the largest piece Pollock had created up til that time and it helped establish his name as the major star in modern art.

Guggenheim, who left New York for Venice in 1947, sold Mural to the University of Iowa. The painting eventually underwent conservation treatment at the J. Paul Getty Museum from 2012-2014. It is currently at the National Gallery of Art and will travel to the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina before returning to Iowa sometime in 2019.

But that’s all prelude to Tuesday night when Dr. Elliot Bostwick Davis of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will dive deeper. Her talk will focus on the indigenous Native American influences on Pollock as he created his mural for Guggenheim. Please join us at 7:00 pm in Library Room 201 to hear more.

The Art in Focus lecture series is co-sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and made possible by support from the John H. Marburger III Fund of Stony Brook University. The lectures are free and open to the public. Our final talk be on June 19th and will focus on Auguste Rodin’s influence on Asian aesthetics over the last century.