The Art of This Century gallery

The Art of This Century gallery was a short-lived but seminal Peggy Guggenheim-founded exhibition space in New York City that operated during the 1940s and played a pivotal role in the careers of European and American modernists. The gallery hosted avant-garde shows and salons that connected émigré artists and critics from Paris, London, and Milan to the burgeoning postwar scenes in SoHo and Greenwich Village, helping to shift the center of modern art toward the United States. Directors, patrons, and participants included leading figures from the Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism movements, and the gallery's programs intersected with institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

History

Peggy Guggenheim opened the gallery in 1942 after earlier activity with the Art of This Century salon, bringing together émigrés fleeing Vichy France and the Nazi occupation with Americans associated with the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Art Project. Early exhibitions featured artists who had been part of the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d'Automne, and the Salon de Mai alongside members of the American Abstract Artists group and figures connected to the New York School. The gallery's wartime activities overlapped with the comings and goings of collectors and dealers such as Julien Levy, Curt Valentin, and Alexander Iolas, and critics including Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and John Canaday. After Peggy Guggenheim's departure from active curation, the space's legacy continued through loans, retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, and scholarly work at universities like Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University.

Architecture and Interior Design

The gallery's interior was redesigned by artists and designers influenced by Surrealist staging and Bauhaus-inspired display techniques, combining theatrical lighting and innovative hanging systems to stage immersive environments. Installations evoked design ideas from figures associated with the Bauhaus, the De Stijl movement, and the International Style, and the spatial planning echoed contemporary work in galleries such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Fabricators and scenic artists who worked with the gallery drew on precedents set by designers like Stage Designers from the Théâtre de l'Atelier and the technical resources of New York theaters on Broadway, while collaborations with photographers such as Man Ray informed the use of mirrors, glass, and reflective surfaces.

Exhibitions and Programs

Programming at the gallery mixed one-person shows, group surveys, and experimental evenings featuring readings and performances linked to Surrealist journals and émigré publications from Paris and Zurich. Major exhibitions introduced American audiences to artists from the School of Paris, the Czech avant-garde, and the Italian Futurists' émigré successors, and the gallery organized events that brought together poets, composers, and choreographers associated with T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, John Cage, and Martha Graham. The gallery hosted panels and lectures attended by critics and curators from the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it collaborated with periodicals such as View (magazine), Broom, and Transition.

Artists and Notable Works

Artists who exhibited included émigrés and Americans now central to 20th‑century narratives: Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Stuart Davis, Joseph Cornell, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Kurt Schwitters, Fernand Léger, Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, Man Ray, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Lucio Fontana, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg, Constantin Brâncuși, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, Arp, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson, Giorgio Morandi, Alfred Stieglitz, John Sloan, Edward Hopper, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler, Alexander Calder, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Morris Louis, Kurt Seligmann, Dorothea Tanning, Isamu Noguchi, Eero Saarinen — many of whose works were bought, loaned, shown, or discussed in relation to the gallery's program.

Reception and Influence

Contemporary press coverage came from publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, ARTnews, Time (magazine), and Life (magazine), and commentary by critics such as H.L. Mencken and Allen Tate framed debates about modernism that reached institutions including the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. The gallery influenced curators at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art and informed postwar scholarship at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Long-term effects are visible in later exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, and retrospective catalogues published by the Guggenheim Museum, while its network advanced careers that culminated in awards such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Turner Prize, the Praemium Imperiale, and the National Medal of Arts.

Category:Art galleries in New York City