A culminating achievement of James Johnson Sweeney’s tenure as director of the Guggenheim was Inaugural Selection (October 21, 1959–June 19, 1960). This exhibition presented Sweeney’s vision for the Guggenheim collection, one that integrated nonobjective painting and other modernist works along with contemporary art. Art of Another Kind curator Tracey Bashkoff discusses the show and its reception by Sweeney’s predecessor, Hilla Rebay.
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Tracey Bashkoff, Curator,
Collections and Exhibitions:
When the Frank Lloyd Wright building opened in 1959,
a project that [Guggenheim director James Johnson] Sweeney had shepherded
along, the first exhibition exhibited works that were integral to our history
as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, but [also] an equal number of works
that were contemporary works that Sweeney had just recently purchased. And so
Sweeney was putting forth his mark at this time when the museum was very much
in the public eye to show that the museum was a growing and living collection
engaged in contemporary art but also had a history in modernism. Sweeney showed
both works from the history of the collection—the [Vasily] Kandinskys and
[Robert] Delaunays and [Marc] Chagalls—but also an equal number, really, of
works from the ’50s—Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, alongside Pierre
Soulages and Georges Mathieu, both American and European artists of his day
that he was actively collecting.
When
the building opened and [former Guggenheim director] Hilla [Rebay] realized
that Sweeney had chosen works for the first exhibition of the new Guggenheim
museum that were not only coming from Solomon [R. Guggenheim]’s original gift
and purchases for the museum, but also included works that he was actively
buying in the 1950s, she was very disappointed and upset about the first
exhibition, about his selection. And she let him know so in a telegram that she
sent shortly after the opening in 1959, where she referred to these works that
he added to the collection as “aftermath trash.”