'A determining factor in 20th century art': Brussels show pays tribute to the Guggenheims

A new exhibition in Brussels presents 60 paintings celebrating the influence of American art collectors Peggy and Solomon Guggenheim. Spanning two continents, three decades and loads of different styles, these works bear witness to a revolution in European and American art.

The show presents an impressive set of works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Solomon Guggenheim Collection in New York - with pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst (Peggy's second husband), Jean DuBuffet, Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Robert Motherell, Cy Twombly and others.

As well as the works of art, the show features a rich timeline documented with archive pictures, documents, film fragments and more, to enable the visitor to fully understand the impact that these two main collectors of 20th century art had in both the US and Europe.

"It's kind of a game, it's telling us a story about Peggy and Solomon's art collections," says curator Luca Massimo Barbero. "But I also thought: Brussels, surrealism, a kind of origin through Magritte (his museum is across from the Art Centre), and I thought even Peggy had surrealist beginnings - so when you enter the show the first thing you see is the Boîte à Valise by Marcel Duchamp.

"This show is a kind of voyage and the starting point of Peggy's collection when she moved to Europe in the 1920s was a photograph by Man Ray, so surrealism and avant-garde have always been her first step into the world of art."

'Extraordinary character'

But surrealism is only the starting point. "Peggy Guggenheim was an extraordinary character," according to Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, speaking at the opening of Guggenheim: Full Abstraction at the ING Art Centre.

"The fact that Peggy collected cubist, abstract and surrealist art with equal determination is one of the remarkable features of her collection: it endows it with a comprehensiveness, an encompassing quality that no other collection at the time has.

"There is a historical moment when she took an almost fully formed collection of European art to New York at the outbreak of the second world war. She commissioned émigré Austrian architect Frederik Kiesler to design her gallery which she called Art of this Century - and in this way she created an environment between the works of art and the sponsorship of artists which helped bring about what we now know as abstract expressionism.

"She's a determining factor in 20th century art. However one must not forget that her uncle Solomon had his way too, as a pioneer collector of pure abstraction, Solomon is also responsible for bringing to America great modernists of European art and then developing that into one of the leading museums of modern contemporary art in the United States."

The show's focus is on immediate post-war American and European art, and Solomon's penchant for full abstraction and how it evolved. Abstract art can be coldly intellectual, but even Piet Mondrian, a master of cool abstraction was not always what he seemed.

"When Peggy met Mondrian she was nervous," says Rylands. "She thought that he would want to speak about neo-plasticism or the fourth dimension or mystical things but what he did ask her was where they could go to dance."

Guggenheim: Full Abstraction, ING Art Centre, Brussels, until 12 February