Venice celebrates Jackson Pollock's splattered art
Venice exhibition charts career of Jackson Pollock and how he spattered his way to fame
In a black-and-white photograph taken in about 1946, they pose together awkwardly before a vast, swirling, abstract painting. She clutches pampered little dogs in each arm. He wears a suit, for once, as he looks at Peggy's pooches with a shadowed face.
Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock were not lovers. They were not even friends. But the encounter between these two very different people changed art.
At the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, at the grandest end of Venice's Grand Canal, where Guggenheim settled in the late 1940s and which is today a museum of her compelling art collection, that encounter has just been recreated. Last month, a barge made its way up the Grand Canal carrying a very large and very precious item. Boxed up and bouncing on the waves came Pollock's painting - the canvas in that photograph.
More than six metres wide and almost 2.5 metres tall, this epic canvas is the painting that made Pollock and gave birth to the art of our time. At last, it has been reunited with the spirit of the woman whose bold passion for art brought it into being, as part of a remarkable exploration by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Pollock's legend and achievement.
At the start of the second world war, Guggenheim, a member of one of New York's wealthiest families, whose sheltered childhood had been emotionally shattered when her father died on the Titanic, went on a spending spree, buying modern art from artists who were desperately planning their escapes from the Nazis. She set sail from Nazi-occupied France in 1941 with a surreal cargo. Literally. She not only took crates full of surrealist art but an actual surrealist, Max Ernst, whom she saved from the Gestapo and married, only to separate from him in 1943.
