The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Windows on the City: The School of Paris, 1900 –1945

From April 22 to October 23, 2016, t he Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presentsWindows on the City: The  School of Paris, 1900  –1945,  an exhibition  of more than 50 masterpieces from the collection of the Solomon  R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This exhibition isthe firstsince the renewal of the management  agreement with the Guggenheim Foundation, signed in December 2014 and valid for 20 years. The  agreementprovides for a range of new initiatives that will broaden the partnershipand emphasizestheSolomon R. Guggenheim  Museum’s commitment to present  an exhibition ofkey, iconic works from its collection every two years  at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.   

Windows on the City: The School of Paris, 1900  –1945  includes some of the most influential paintings and  sculptures of the last century, created by artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Robert  Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.  In the early twentieth century, Paris was the capital of the avant-garde. Artists from around the world  settled in the City of Light, where they created new forms of art and literature and responded to the rapid  economic, social, and technological developments that were fundamentally transforming city  life.  It was in Paris thatPicasso and Braque radically overturned the conventions of painting, Delaunay composed  harmonious  visions of color, Kandinsky pursued new directions in abstraction, and Brancusi reimagined how sculptures could be present in space. 

The title of the exhibition, which refers  to a series by Delaunay,  illustrates  how the modern city became a backdrop and  an inspiration for artistic production. Spanning from the first years of the twentieth century through World War II , the exhibition chartsthe key movements of modernism  —from Cubism to Orphism to Surrealism—and the artists who came to be known  as the École de Paris  (School of Paris). 

Among the masterpieces featured are 



Picasso’s Le Moulin de la  Galette (1900,


Modigliani’sNude(1917),  


and Marc Chagall’s Green  Violinist (1923  –24).

Though diverse,the artistic visions represented in this exhibition manifest a common impulse to eschew  conservative  aesthetics and transform perceptions of everyday life in a modern city.  The rise of Fascism and the occupation  of France  during  World War  II ultimately ended the School of Paris, as the artists who had once sought political, spiritual, and creative refuge in the city were forced to leave.  

A tour through the exhibition

Cubism  was  one of the most important artistic innovations that emerged in Paris  in the  first  half of the  twentieth  century. This  revolutionary approach to painting, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1914, challenged  the conventions of visual art and the very nature ofrepresentation.  This gallery includes key works that exemplifyAnalytic Cubism, an intellectual style in which  form and space are “broken  down  ;”  




Braque’s  Piano and Mandola(1909–10)  




 and Picasso’s Bottles andGlasses(1911–12)  

feature many characteristics of this approach, including a muted palette. While  still  recognizable in these paintings, objectare fractured into multiple planes, as is the  background.  

In the years leading up to and following World War  I, artists used the visual vocabulary of Cubism to achieve various ends, such as exploringpure abstraction and  modern science, and  infusing contemporary  experience with the  spiritualityof folk traditions.





Robert Delaunay
Red Eiffel Tower (La tour rouge), 1911–12
Oil on canvas
125 x 90.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 46.1036



Robert Delaunay
Circular Forms (Formes circulaires), 1930
Oil on canvas
128.9 x 194.9 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, 49.1184

Robert Delaunay’s depictions of Parisian life andlandmarks,  are exemplified in works such as Red Eiffel Tower (1911-  12), while his later abstract painting,Circular Forms(1930)  showcases his interest in contemporary developments in optics.

In this gallery, visitors can also observe Green Violinist (1923) (above) by Russian  artist  Marc Chagall, who produced this painting upon his return to Paris after having spent much of World War  I in his home  country. The work merges the  Cubist fragmentation of  space with colorful imagery inspired by Russian and  Jewish folklore, conveying the artist’s nostalgia for the religious festivals and popular celebrations of hisyouth.  

The work of Constantin Brancusi, who traveled from his native Romania to settle in Paris  in 1904, rejectsthetheatrical, narrativeimpulse of much nineteenth centurysculpturein favor of radically simplified,  abstract formsand the unadorned presentation of wood, metal, and other  materials.  Brancusi  never identified the specificsources or meanings of his works, but  The Sorceress(1916–24) might relateto asupernatural figure from  Romanian legends.  

Gallery  307  

After the First World War, Paris once again became a  center of  cultural  production. During that time, the  adherents of Surrealism—a movement inaugurated  with André Breton’s1924  manifesto  —were  also  counted  as part of the School of Paris. Drawing on the theories of Sigmund Freud, these writers and artists  attempted  to  articulate and  give form to repressed desires, dream imagery, and other  elements of the  unconscious. Some, like YvesTanguy  juxtaposed  incongruous images and objects;  others,like Jean Arp and Joan Miró, experimented with automatism, creating drawings without a premeditated composition orsubject  in order to bypass the conscious mind. Infl  uenced by Arp and Miró, American  sculptor Alexander  Calder created a language of  movement  and balance with his famous mobiles and wire sculptures includingRomulus and Remus  (1928).  

Vasily Kandinsky, who made significant advances in abstract painting while living in Germany and Russia during the 1910s and ‘20s, settled in  Paris in 1934. In his works fromthisperiod, including  




Yellow Painting(1938) and  



Around the Circle(1940),

Kandinsky combines  free-playing  forms  similar to those from his  earliest  abstractions  withthe more geometric and biomorphic shapes he  developed while teachingat the Bauhaus.  

Didaktika