ART OF THIS CENTURY
OBJECTS, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURE, COLLAGE 1910-1942

Peggy Guggenheim

7.75 x 10.5 hardcover book with 160 pages profusely illustrated with b/w plates. Foreword by Peggy Guggenheim. Prefaces By Andre Breton, [Hans] Arp, and Piet Mondrian. Debut publication of the legendary art gallery that showcased works by established European artists with an emphasis on Surrealism, and also exhibited the works of lesser known American artists, often for the first time.

ART OF THIS CENTURY includes portraits, statements and work by Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Giorgio De Chirico, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Robert Delauney, Fernand Leger, Juan Gris, Alexander Archipenko, Albert Gleizes, Louis Marcoussis, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, Jacques Villon, Amedee Ozenfant, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzkly, Theo Van Doesburg, Georges Vantongerloo, Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo, Cesar Domela-Nieuwenhuis, Ben Nicholson, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Jean Helion, Alexander Calder, John Ferren, John Tunnard, Charles Howard, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Masson, Jopan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte. Andre Breton, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Lawrence Vail, Henry Moore, Victor Brauner, Wolfgang Paalen, Oscar Dominguez, Leonor Fini, Paul Delvaux, Leonora Carrington, Roberto Matta, and Morris Hirschfield.

From the March 1, 1987 New York Times: "When Peggy Guggenheim started her gallery, ''Art of This Century,'' in the wartime year of 1942, no one was standing on line to buy avant-garde art. But that didn't faze this flamboyant apostle of the new, who at the gallery's opening wore one earring by Calder and one by Tanguy to demonstrate her equal regard for abstraction and Surrealism.

"In the dramatically innovative arena on West 57th Street, created by the architect Frederic Kiesler, she counterpointed the work of such European stars as Arp, di Chirico, Giacometti and Picasso with that of then unknown American talents: Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. She was the first and prime patron of the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, and her gallery thus played a key role in New York's displacement of Paris as the capital of modern art.

"It's not easy to realize today the impact of the gallery - and Peggy's donations - on the public acceptance of modern art in this country. At a time when - despite the inroads made by the Museum of Modern Art - the avant garde was still considered suspect by most right-thinking people, even in Manhattan, ''Art of This Century'' was a vigorous outpost for the new and controversial. Harboring a rich mix of refugee artists from Europe and ambitious local vanguardsmen, its ''erratic setting'' - recalls Fred Licht, adjunct curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice - provided ''a recklessly liberal point of encounter and discussion. One never knew which artist would be arguing loudly with what other artist or critic.'' The idea was conveyed, he adds, ''that contemporary and indeed all art was not simply to be enjoyed, respected, admired and studied. It could and should give rise to further adventures, to polemics, to the expression of still more, still newer ideas.''

"When she unveiled ''Art of This Century'' here in 1942, Peggy was in effect a wartime refugee from Europe, where she had cavorted wildly for more than 20 years. Rebelling against the longueurs of life amid New York's Jewish upper crust she fled to Europe in 1921, a well-heeled Bohemian ripe for love and adventure. She fell in with such glamorous expatriates as Djuna Barnes and Man Ray - who took a famous photograph of her - and married a tempestuous young painter, Laurence Vail, by whom she had two children.

"Several liaisons later, in the late 1930's, Peggy was in London, free for the moment of husbands and lovers, and rather bored. Neither ''creative'' nor terribly intellectual herself, but surrounded by people who were, she took up a friend's suggestion that she open a gallery of modern art. She was undaunted by her minimal knowledge of the subject, since she had as a mentor no less than the artist Marcel Duchamp, whom she had met in Paris. Though the London gallery - called Guggenheim Jeune - only lasted for a brief time, it mounted some vivid shows, among them the first presentations in England of Kandinsky and the Surrealist Yves Tanguy.

"Concerned over the gallery's money losses, Peggy opted out, after a year and a half, to involve herself in a far more ambitious project - a museum of modern art. She asked Herbert Read to become its director. ''He treated me the way Disraeli treated Queen Victoria,'' Peggy reported. Together, the two drew up an ideal list of artists whose works they would try to borrow for an opening show. The project came to a halt with England's entry into World War II. But Peggy kept Sir Herbert's list (later revised by herself, Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, widow of the Dutch abstractionist Theo). With the money she'd set aside to establish the museum, she embarked on an art-shopping spree in Paris. ''My motto was, 'Buy a picture a day,' and I lived up to it,'' she wrote.

"In 1940, as the Nazis marched toward France, Peggy realized that her acquisitions would be regarded as ''degenerate'' art. In the spring of 1941, packed as ''household goods,'' they were shipped to New York. Their owner arrived shortly after, on a Pan American clipper with an entourage of 10 fellow refugees, including the painter Max Ernst, with whom she was shortly to share a brief and tumultuous marriage. "With Ernst, his son Jimmy, and her daughter Pegeen, she traveled all over the country trying to find a proper place for the Peggy Guggenheim museum. Disappointed, the party came back to New York, where in 1942 she commissioned Kiesler to design ''Art of This Century,'' a combination ''museum'' and commercial gallery which would display her collection as well as temporary shows of European and American art. The results were suitably spectacular.

"She saw the gallery, she wrote in its first press release, as ''a center where artists will be welcome and where they can feel that they are cooperating in establishing a research laboratory for new ideas.'' And as New York became the temporary home for such creative refugees as Breton, Tanguy, Mondrian, Duchamp, Lipchitz, Ernst, Chagall, Matta, Archipenko, Masson and others, ''Art of This Century'' became a magnet for the avant garde.

"Although she was a pioneer, her efforts did not go unheralded at the time. Reviewing Peggy's closing show in 1947, the burgeoning critic Clement Greenberg wrote: ''In the three or four years of her career as a New York gallery director, she gave first showings to more serious new artists than anyone else in the country. I am convinced that Peggy Guggenheim's place in the history of American art will grow larger as time passes and as the artists she encouraged mature.'' He was not wrong."

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