Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

One hundred years after the publication in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909, of the Futurist Manifesto, signed by the “jeune poète Italien” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates this revolutionary avant-garde movement with the exhibition Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, curated by Philip Rylands, director of the museum. The exhibition also serves as an homage to the foresight of Gianni Mattioli, one of the great collectors of 20th-century art, who accumulated a comprehensive presence of Futurism in his collection. This includes works by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Ottone Rosai, Mario Sironi, and Ardengo Soffici.

Masterpieces of Futurism at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents key paintings of the movement, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Mercury Passing Before the Sun by Balla, The Galleria of Milan by Carrà, Blue Dancer by Severini, three works from Peggy Guggenheim’s collection (Severini’s Sea = Dancer, Balla’s Abstract Speed + Sound, and Boccioni’s sculpture Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses), as well as loans from private collections by Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, and Sironi. This will also be the debut of a recent gift to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Sironi’s early masterpiece The Cyclist (1916). The exhibition includes three of Boccioni’s four extant sculptures: in addition to the mixed media Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, a bronze cast of his celebrated Development of a Bottle in Space, and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. An introductory section of paintings, sculptures, and drawings contextualizes the Futurist movement with works of other historical avant-garde movements, such as Divisionism, Cubism, Orphism, and Vorticism.