Guggenheim Museum celebrates immigrant roots in age of Trump

NEW YORK: The Guggenheim Museum is highlighting the work of some of the visionaries who shaped its collection, using the occasion to note immigrants’s contributions to American art weeks after President Donald Trump signed a travel ban.

A show opening Friday in New York features works collected by founder Solomon R Guggenheim’s niece Peggy Guggenheim, who along with art dealer Justin K Tannhauser came to the United State to flee Nazi Germany.

Paintings and sculpture acquisitions by immigrant art dealer Karl Nierendorf, as well as those of two other Guggenheim contemporaries – German-born artist Hilla Rebay and Katherine Dreier – are on display for this tribute to the Guggenheim Foundation’s eight decades of support for radical experimentation in art.

These collectors held many works by European artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Vasily Kandinsky, the Russian painter whose art is at the heart of the Guggenheim collection, which holds 150 pieces.

There are also works by Americans like Alexander Calder, who created a series of beloved moving sculptures known as ‘mobiles,’ Jackson Pollock, Irene Rice Pereira and Claire Falkenstein.

“It’s no secret that we’re going through times with fundamental principles like tolerance and critical thinking being challenged,” said Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, in previewing the exhibit.

“Many similar challenges faced some of the visionaries of creative expression... We find inspiration in individuals whose beliefs was that art can change human behavior.” His comments were a clear reference to Trump’s conservative immigration policy.

The show is also a reminder of a time when “artists and also dealers fled an earlier war... and found refuge, home and freedom in the United States,” Armstrong added.

Ever since Trump’s election, the art world has expressed its unease in various forms, be it fashion, song, video or photography. — AFP