Art of This Century gallery


The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Helena Rubinstein's New Art Center, and numerous commercial galleries. The gallery exhibited important modern art until it closed in 1947, when Guggenheim returned to Europe. The gallery was designed by architect, artist, and visionary Frederick Kiesler.

The gallery

The gallery 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. The space became both a meeting place and exhibition nexus for exiled European artists and young emerging Americans and as such was one of the major crucibles for the emergence of the New York School.
The European artists that were exhibited at the Art of This Century Gallery included Leonora Carrington, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Victor Brauner, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Yves Tanguy.
The American artists shown at the gallery included William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Gerome Kamrowski, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Charles Seliger, Clyfford Still, Janet Sobel and Robert De Niro Sr.

Avant-garde during World War II

Abstract Art was not new to the New York artists. The group called the American Abstract Artists was established in 1937. Many of its members left New York in 1942 during World War II, to join the US Armed Forces. During the war years there were few male vanguard American artists remaining in New York. Generally the only artists or critics who did not participate in World War II were those exempt from military service or conscientious objectors. These male artists along with a few female artists captured the few galleries who were willing to show their work along with European modernists. This group of artists was called the Uptown Group.

Uptown Group prior to 1945

Barnett Newman, a well-respected writer and critic who also organized exhibitions and wrote catalogs became only later a member of the Uptown Group. Jackson Pollock had his first solo show in 1943 at the Art of This Century Gallery, which provided him with a yearly stipend. He together with his wife the painter Lee Krasner, left New York City in 1945 and moved to the Springs, East Hampton, Long Island. Clyfford Still, a Californian who at the end of 1945 moved to New York, soon joined the Uptown Group and became associated with the prestigious uptown gallery: The Art of This Century.
Thomas B. Hess, managing director of Art News described the Uptown Group:

''Exhibition by 31 Women''

From January 5 to February 6, 1943, the gallery hosted the first of two exhibitions with exclusively women artists, one of the first times an exclusively female exhibition had happened. Exhibition by 31 Women was juried, an unusual practice outside of Europe at the time, by a group that included prominent surrealists André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others, including Guggenheim herself. Georgia O'Keeffe declined to participate, noting in a letter that she did not want to show as a "woman artist".
The group of artists selected represented sixteen nationalities: Xenia Cage, Djuna Barnes, Leonora Carrington, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, Eyre de Lanux, Leonor Fini, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Suzy Frelinghysen, Meraud Guinness, Anne Harvey, Valentine Hugo, Buffie Johnson, Frida Kahlo, Jacqueline Lamba, Gypsy Rose Lee, Aline Meyer Liebman, Hazel McKinley, Milena Pavlović-Barilli, Louise Nevelson, Meret Oppenheim, Barbara Poe Levee, Irene Rice Pereira, Kay Sage, Sonja Sekula, Gretchen Schoeninger, Esphyr Slobodkina, Hedda Sterne, Muriel Streeter, Dorothea Tanning, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Julia Thecla, and Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, Peggy's daughter.
Though not a commercial success, the exhibition was positively reviewed, but not devoid of chauvinism: a reviewer from Time magazine refused to cover the show because, he claimed, there were no worthy women artists.
The second exhibition, "The Women", was on view June 12 – July 7, 1945, featuring thirty-three women artists, some of whom had also taken part in the previous show. New artists included Nell Blaine, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Peter (Henrietta) Miller, Janet Sobel, Charmion von Wiegand, and Catherine Yarrow.
The exhibition's impact has been far-reaching: a new exhibition in 1997, Art of This Century: The Women; two perfumes named for the gallery and the exhibition, released by J. Crew; and a 2017 clothing collection by designer Jenny Packham that cited the concept as an inspiration.

Closure

Guggenheim closed the doors of The Art of This Century Gallery in May 1947. The representation of her artists was taken over by Betty Parsons, an artist and a prominent New York socialite.

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