July 2015 – Celeste Sterling

Some Winter inspiration.

I was fortunate to see a screening of a documentary this week as part of the film festival. Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict, a good documentary about one of the most noted and important art patrons of the twentieth century. The first time I tried to visit the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice it was disappointingly shut. So it was very satisfying to return to Venice many years later and visit her museum in 2013 during the Venice Biennale. The photographs below are from the first trip to Venice, and the colour ones are from the 2013 visit.

Unlike the big art museums of the world this is the collection of one woman and it has a very different feel to it. The spaces are smaller and one gets a sense of what the palazzo must have been like when it was Peggy’s home.

Peggy Guggenheim was right at the forefront of modern art, supporting and promoting artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Wassily Kandinsky. She was briefly married to the surrealist Max Ernst and assisted artists fleeing Europe due to World War II. She credits Marcel Duchamp as her guide to the art world. Interestingly in this documentary there was footage of the degenerate art show organised by the Nazi’s, something I wrote about recently in my art history blog in relation to Paul Klee. http://thearcadiafiles.blogspot.co.nz/ I have decided to resurrect my art history blog and write about some of the exhibitions I have visited over the years.

Luckily for the art world and the many tourists that now visit Peggy’s museum, she was able to ship all the works she had amassed from Paris to New York before the occupation of Paris in World War II. The Peggy Guggenheim collection is impressive but not overwhelming. Peggy in her personal life overcome personal setbacks and tragedies, and her art collection is a lasting legacy of a very determined and unusual woman.

In the studio this month I have been continuing to sketch with a limited range of soft, mellow colours. The recent foggy mornings have provided interesting inspiration, a miasma of muted colours and softened forms. A recent trip to Rotorua and some time wandering around the steaming mud pools has also influenced my work this month. I use lots of photography for reference and as an art form in it’s own right.