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Guggenheim Hosts Abstract Art Exhibit Featuring Mid-Century Artists

By Mary Johnson | May 29, 2012 6:42pm
Jackson Pollock's "Ocean Greyness," 1953. Oil on canvas.
Jackson Pollock's "Ocean Greyness," 1953. Oil on canvas.
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The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society

MANHATTAN — The Guggenheim is preparing to launch a new exhibit next week, featuring roughly 100 works from 70 abstract artists including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

The exhibit, “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960,” focuses on the decade immediately preceding the grand opening of the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue in 1959.

The works will be on display from June 8 to Sept. 12.

“Art of Another Kind” centers on the post-war decade in which both American and international artists pioneered new styles such as abstract expressionism, Cobra and Art Informel, said Megan Fontanella, who is curating the show along with Tracey Bashkoff.

“We were interested in the 1950s as a period of a renewed interest in artists moving and an open dialogue,” Fontanella said of the exhibition, which consists entirely of pieces from the Guggenheim’s collection.

“We’re also very interested in seeing a kind of stretching of the definition of abstraction,” she added.

In addition to Pollock and de Kooning, the exhibition will also feature works from Karel Appel, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, Grace Hartigan, Georges Mathieu, Takeo Yamaguchi and others who experimented with some form of abstraction.

In the 1950s, New York was becoming an international nexus for avant garde art, Fontanella explained. So the collection includes works from many artists, both American and international, who spent time in New York during that post-war experimental decade.

In fact, she added, the exhibition will hang some artists’ work together to highlight “wonderful moments” of artists working outside their native countries in collaboration with those they encountered abroad.

Cost of admission to the exhibit is $22 for adults. Students and seniors must pay $18, and both members and children under 12 can enter the museum for free.

For a full listing of events associated with the exhibition, visit the Guggenheim’s website.