ETHNO PASSION - GALLERIA GOTTARDO LUGANO

28 May – 23 August 2008 

Ethnopassion 

Peggy Guggenheim's ethnic art collection. 

From 28 May to 23 August, the Galleria Gottardo in Lugano will be holding the world's first exhibition of the ethnic artworks collected by one of the twentieth century's greatest art patrons: Peggy Guggenheim. The idea behind the exhibition is to display the "exotic objects" that embellished the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni during the collector's lifetime. Since her death, they have been carefully restored and examined by scientific researchers. The restoration project was jointly launched by Galleria Gottardo, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Museum of Cultures in Lugano with the aim of rediscovering the specific meaning of each object in itself and in the context in which it was purchased. 

Peggy Guggenheim's passion for ethnic art dated back to the period of her tempestuous relationship with Max Ernst, who was a keen collector of this kind of art. When their relationship broke down in 1943, the artist left with all the works in his collection. After settling permanently in Venice and opening her collection to the general public, Peggy rekindled her interest in ethnic art, and, from 1959, she began to acquire works and exhibit them in her home, mixing them with contemporary artworks as she felt inclined. She developed a genuine passion, an involuntary, unconscious attraction for these objects, which was rooted in purely phenomenal interest: she never felt a great need to find out more about their meaning and value. She appreciated their decorative nature, using them as a means of enhancing her interior design and keeping up with the latest fashions. 

Based on photographs from the period and the scarce information available on the subject, it is thought that her private collection consisted of around 50 artworks, mainly from Africa and Oceania; 35 of these remained in the estate of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, where they have been conserved in the museum’s art storage. 

The exotic artefacts had always been considered valuable as part of Peggy's collection, but with uncertainty about the intrinsic value of the items in question when examined outside the classical canons of conventionally understood art in the West. 

One of the aims of the “Ethnopassion” exhibition is to transform this view, giving these objects not just the value that they have in the intellectual context that fanned Peggy Guggenheim's interest for ethnic art, but also an anthropological value arising from the study of the objects and their links with various periods and cultures.