The main advantage of traveling solo is that you can do whatever you want, at your own pace. Sometimes that means hitting three museums on a single day. I found "my people" at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection but the others had plenty to offer, too.
Gallerie dell'Accademia
An early morning reservation at the Accademia, across the Grand Canal in Dorsoduro, exposed me to the delights of Venice minus the crowds and felt like a quick seminar in the Venetian School of Renaissance painting.
The Sala dell’Albergo houses the only remaining painted wooden ceiling in Venice from that period. It's the product of a competition that included Veronese and Tintoretto after Titian failed to deliver on his promise. The latter artist got the jump by actually installing a piece of his work instead of showing only sketches to the judges, thus winning the commission.
While attending Columbia, I had a work/study job at the College Library's reserve desk, where books on various professors' syllabi could be checked out overnight. Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari was among the most requested, perhaps because all students were required to take a course in art humanities, part of the "core curriculum." Until I visited the Accademia, I had no idea that Vasari was an extraordinary painter as well as a biographer of his contemporaries. Truly a very productive Renaissance man.
It's a good thing Venetian museums are pretty relaxed about timed admission. I showed up at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, a short walk from the Accademia, nearly two hours early and was allowed to enter. I took this shot of the exterior from a vaporetto the following afternoon.
Peggy was my kind of gal. She picked men with the same discriminating eye as she collected art (sometimes at the same time) while living in Europe prior to World War II, and she maintained a (relatively) modest Venetian lifestyle afterwards in a comfortable home surrounded by pretty things. What's not to emulate?
Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979)
She's buried on the premises, right beside 14 pooches, her "beloved babies." Surprisingly, many were short-lived, lasting not much longer than her affairs.
No wonder Peggy had so many unfamiliar works by Max Ernst: she married the surrealist, not long after rescuing him from the Gestapo in France. He painted this eerie, unsettling work after they arrived in America. Their marriage didn't survive World War II, suggesting that concern for Ernst's personal safety may have been a bigger consideration than romance.
"The Antipope" (1941-42)
Two tragedies marked Peggy's life: her father went down with the Titanic when she was 12, and she lost her daughter late in life. A small gallery showcases some of her daughter's "naive" art, a characterization that diminishes Pegeen Vail's considerable talent IMHO.
"Girls in the Arches" (ca 1936)
The cheerfulness of the scene she captured outside the window of her mother's low-slung home belies the depression that may have killed her at the age of 41.
Sidebar: Apple Photos recently introduced "Clean-Up," an option that INSISTENTLY tries to remove human beings from pictures, an almost-too-on-the-nose metaphor for the feared future agenda of artificial intelligence. I used it only because there always were at least a couple of giggling people surrounding this priapic sculpture. You know it's not bronze; otherwise the penis would be as shiny as the testicles on the Wall Street bull!
Following an afternoon siesta in my comfy closet at the Hotel da Bruno, I had a hankering--as one does--for some "modern" Italian art, an entirely relative term in a city as saturated with it as long as Venice has been. Also because I had purchased a rather expensive museum pass, and Ca' Pesaro, one of ten included, was just a short walk over the Rialto Bridge in the San Polo neighborhood. Here's another vaporetto shot, this time from the morning of my arrival.
Like the Revoltella Museum, the late 17th-century palazzo was the gift of a civic philanthropist, although not the family for which it was named. In 1898, a duchess bequeathed it to the city of Venice to exhibit modern art. But unlike Trieste's patron, her image isn't plastered all over the place. I spotted only a bust on the staircase near the entrance.
Duchess Felicita Bevilacqua La Masa (1822-1899)
If I had to pick my favorite painting of the day, it probably would be this one. Unlike the current leadership of Israel, it looks as if he is praying for peace.
Seeing a Warhol work was like running into an old friend who you didn't feel like spending a lot of time with at the moment.
"White Brillo Boxes" & "Del Monte Boxes" (1964)
Making the acquaintance of Milan-born Adolfo Wildt, however, was exactly what I had in mind. Rarely has the work of an unfamiliar artist struck me with such force. His distinctive, haunting sculpture resonates even more after reading his Wikipedia entry, which suffers from a lack of cited sources. Despite his obvious talent, he seems destined to remain under-the-radar in perpetuity. I couldn't get enough.
"Larass" (1903)
"Mask of Pain" (1909)
"Vir Temporis Acti" (1911)
Portrait of Franz Rose (1913)
"A Rosary-MCMXV" (1915)
"The Mother of Christianity" (1917)
More cheerful glass work like this was on tomorrow's itinerary in Murano, the glass capital of western civilization.
This painting is a kind of Italian foreshadowing of Edward Hopper.
"The Christmas of Those Left Behind" by Angelo Morbelli (1903)
Despite my interest in some aspects of the collection, I mostly found it wanting in the area I had come to see. I'm guessing that's because the city of Venice relies primarily on donations for new acquisitions--including the Wildt sculptures--and has invested more in its Biennale as a vehicle for maintaining relevance in the contemporary art world.
"Cortege of the Princesses" by Vittorio Zecchin (1914)
Coincidentally, the huge gallery reserved for temporary shows juxtaposed "The Thinker" by Auguste Rodin (1880-1904) with "The Poem of Human Life," a pictorial cycle created by Giulio Aristide Sartorio for the 1907 Biennale. At that time, ironically, the Bevilacqua La Masa exhibitions, as they were then known, had a reputation for celebrating younger, less established artists.
A pigeon joined me for a Dolomiti beer and some complimentary (!) potato chips in the museum cafe which faced the Grand Canal.
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