Discovering Marino Marini
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Venice
Months in advance of our April trip to Italy, we made an arrangement for a guided tour of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. We had read about Guggenheim’s famed residence, housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace overlooking the Grand Canal. Guggenheim had lived there for three decades, all the while building her extraordinary collection of contemporary art.
Our guide was intern Anja Ivic, an art historian who knew the history of every work in the collection which was renowned for the breadth and depth of its Cubist and Futurist art. It was our good fortune to catch Ms. Ivic since she was about to leave for a new position in Brussels as a trainee in the Office of a Member of the European Parliament representing the Republic of Croatia.
As we walked through the first galleries, Ms. Ivic recounted a brief history of Guggenheim’s career as a serious art collector. She began with a couple of nuggets of infamous Guggenheim lore. There was the famous anecdote (allegedly true) that Guggenheim bought one piece of art a day only stopping because the Nazis invaded France. There was the story of Guggenheim’s contacting artists who were teaching at the Bauhaus to purchase their artwork.
It all started officially in 1919 when Guggenheim turned 21 and inherited $2.5 million. She decided to use her stipend to buy and sponsor art. She moved to France one year later and quickly befriended many members of the bohemian artistic community in Montparnasse. In 1938, she opened Guggenheim Jeune, a gallery for modern art in London. Her first exhibit there featured the drawings of Jean Cocteau.
Returning to New York City in the summer of 1941, Guggenheim opened The Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th Street. Its focus was Cubist, Abstract, Surrealist, and Kinetic art. One of her most important shows there was 31 Women Artists. “It was one too many,” said Ivic, who explained that Guggenheim’s second husband, the artist Max Ernst, fell in love with one of the artists, resulting in their divorce.
Guggenheim loved the Futurists, especially the Italian Futurists (1909–1944) and the Venice collection today abounds in stunning examples of their work. There’s Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses (1915) and Fernand Leger’s Men in the City (Les Hommes dans la ville) (1919), a work which marks the beginning of the artist’s mechanical period. Many critics dubbed Leger’s work Tubism because of the tube-like structures in his paintings. There’s Georgio de Chirico’s The Red Tower, where the door in the tower is taller than the adjacent house; Salvador Dali’s The Birth of Liquid Desire (1931–2), a Surrealist painting where bread replaces the traditional apple; and Max Ernst’s The Antipope (1941–2), displayed in the museum despite Ernst’s infidelity.
We pause by a case with two pairs of earrings, one by Alexander Calder and the other by Yves Tanguy. Guggenheim wore one from each pair at the opening of the Art of This Century gallery on October 20, 1941. “It was her way of showing her love for both Surrealist and Abstract Art,” Ivic said.
We walk through the recently re-installed Jackson Pollock gallery where all of the big Pollocks are now displayed in one room. Peggy Guggenheim discovered Pollock when he was a carpenter in the Solomon Guggenheim (her uncle’s) Museum, subsequently establishing his reputation. Ivic points to several thicker lines in one of Pollock’s paintings: “That is where he is going slower,” she said, knowingly.
On display in the temporary galleries at the Peggy Guggenheim in April was Marino Marini. Visual Passions, the first retrospective of the artist (1901–1980) whom Ivic describes as “the best Italian sculptor of the 20th century.” Designed by the curators to contextualize Marini’s work within the art canon, the exhibit creates a dialogue between 50 of Marini’s sculptures and 20 other works ranging from antiquity to the 20th century.
Renowned for his horses and riders — in plaster, wood, and bronze — reflecting, perhaps, Marini’s deep understanding of human tragedy and his uneasiness with man’s fate, the show includes Miracle, a polychromed wood horse from 1955 and Icarus (1933), a male nude fixed to the wall and made out of wood. There is a room with nude figures — a boxer, and a swimmer where “We see young male nudes as anti-heroes,” Ivic said.
The highlight of the exhibit was Marini’s Pomonas or female nudes, symbolizing fertility. Reflecting Marini’s rethinking/reinterpretation of Rodin’s sculpture, the nudes seem to take on an abstract dimension. They are shown together with nudes of Ernesto De Fiori and Aristide Maillol. Marini’s Pomonas are powerful women, women who were they alive today, would have joined the activism and advocacy of the #metoo feminists.
I returned to New York City with the Pomonas very much on my mind and was surprised to find an invitation for a conversation about an upcoming Marino Marini exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in SoHo. The October 2018 exhibit will focus on his large female nudes, created between 1938 and 1949, placed alongside smaller bronze nudes created by the artist in Switzerland in the late years of the war, from 1943–1945. The installation, which will include select drawings by Willem de Kooning, will be curated by Dr. Flavio Fergonzi of Pisa’s Scuola Normale Superiore.
Leading the conversation was CIMA President Laura Mattioli and 2014–2015 CIMA Fellow Francesco Guzzetti, currently the Lauro De Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Guzzetti contributed an essay to the Marini catalogue that accompanied the Peggy Guggenheim exhibit.
Mattioli began by speaking about CIMA’s unusual design: a nine-month long exhibit, paired with a fellowship program for art historians. “It’s sort of a lab for research projects,” she explained, adding that four fellows will be coming to CIMA in the 2018–2019 season.
Guzzetti spoke about Marini’s life, his training as a painter and sculptor, and his exposure to Rodin-like ideas of sculpture that were dominant in the late 19th century. Marini was included in the big MoMA survey of 20th century Italian Art in 1949, establishing his reputation in the United States. Most probably Willem de Kooning would have seen Marini’s work in the exhibit. Marini’s last solo show was in 1955. After that, his reputation declined in the United States. “He started to be considered an out-of-fashion great master,” Guzzetti said.
Laura Mattioli reached into her bag and drew out an object carefully wrapped in grey fabric. It was, she explained, a replica of the Venus of Willendorf, a 4.4 inch Venus figurine carved in limestone and believed to have been made in 30,000 BCE. It was found in 1908 at a Paleolithic site near Willendorf, in Austria. The figurine is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.
“This replica of the Venus of Willendorf belonged to Marino Marini,” Mattioli explained as she placed the figure on a cork so that it could sit upright. “It was given to my father, a prominent Italian art collector, by Marini’s wife after he died. According to Marini’s wife, he used to hold the piece in his hand when he worked,” Mattioli said.
The figurine reminded me of Marini’s Pomonas: full, fleshy, and, somehow, abstract.
