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Indepth Arts News:
"GUGGENHEIM AND HERMITAGE MUSEUMS ANNOUNCE JOINT
INITIATIVE AT THE VENETIAN IN LAS VEGAS"
2000-10-31 until 2001-03-01
Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY,
USA
Dr. Mikhail
Shwydkoi, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation;
Thomas Krens, Director, The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation; Peter B. Lewis, Chairman of the Board, The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Sheldon Adelson,
Chairman, The Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino; and Rob
Goldstein, President, The Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino,
today announced at a press conference in Las Vegas plans
to create a cooperative exhibition space in The Venetian.
The new 7,660-square-foot structure, to be called the
Hermitage-Guggenheim Museum, has been designed by
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas. The museum
will open in Spring 2001 with the exhibition Masterpieces
from the Hermitage and Guggenheim Collections. Dr. Mikhail
Piotrovski, Director of the State Hermitage Museum, the
co-designer of the collaboration with Thomas Krens, was
unable to attend the press conference in person, but
participated in presenting the project through a telephone
link-up with St. Petersburg.
The Las Vegas cooperation between the Hermitage and the
Guggenheim is one of the first concrete projects to result
from a larger, long-term collaboration agreement between
the Hermitage and the Guggenheim that was signed and
announced this past June in St. Petersburg. The strategic
objectives of the alliance include making each museum's
respective collections accessible to a broader audience. The
cooperation agreement was co-signed by Dr. Mikhail
Shwydkoi, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, who
spoke at today's press conference in Las Vegas, and was
strongly endorsed by Vladimir Putin, President of the Russia
Federation, during a visit to the Guggenheim on September
7 with Drs. Piotrovski and Shwydkoi to open an exhibition of
early 20th century Russian avant-garde art. At the opening
ceremony President Putin specifically acclaimed the unique
and innovative character of this cooperation between the
State Hermitage and the Guggenheim. Dr. Shwydkoi said
that The significance of the Hermitage-Guggenheim
Museum is exceptional for Russian-American cultural
relations. With its establishment, we are reaching one of our
long-term goals: to introduce masterpieces from Russian
and American museum collections into worldwide cultural
circulation.
Thomas Krens, Director, The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, said of the new Las Vegas museum: The
Hermitage is one of the greatest museums in the world. Its
collections are equivalent to those of the Louvre or the
Metropolitan, but they stop at the beginning of the 20th
century. The Guggenheim collections range from the
late-19th century to the present, with a strong
representation of postwar modern and contemporary art;
the Guggenheim also has one of the most active special
exhibition programs of any museum in the world. By
combining our expertise and drawing from two great
collections and programs, the Hermitage and the
Guggenheim working together can create both a brand new
range of superb cultural narratives and exhibitions, as well
as new facilities and institutions.
Dr. Piotrovski and I believe that Las Vegas presents a
unique opportunity to communicate with millions of people
from all over the world that visit this extraordinary city. The
curatorial staffs of the Guggenheim and Hermitage will
create small, focused special exhibitions, largely if not
exclusively drawn from our combined collections. These
exhibitions will also be shown in St. Petersburg, New York,
Bilbao and Venice as part of an international tour, increasing
awareness between our two cultures, providing significant
benefits to the public at large.
Dr. Piotrovski stressed the importance of the curatorial and
scholarly integrity of the exhibitions program for Las Vegas.
We are not entering into this project anticipating anything
other than the most exacting and demanding standards of
quality, both with the exhibitions and the design of the
building. By selecting a Pritzker Prize-winning architect to
design the new Hermitage Guggenheim Museum Las Vegas,
we are emphasizing the importance of architecture. We are
also working on a series of exhibitions that will easily be
appropriate for presentation in any of the greatest
museums in the world.
Sheldon Adelson, Chairman of The Venetian said that Las
Vegas receives an astonishing 35 million visitors a year. The
Hermitage-Guggenheim Museum will be a tremendous
attraction for those visitors. By collaborating with the
Guggenheim and Hermitage museums, The Venetian will
bring some of the greatest masterpieces ever created to a
city that is rapidly being transformed into a world-class
travel destination.
In keeping with the cooperative nature of the collaboration,
the new museum will be known both as the
Hermitage-Guggenheim Museum Las Vegas, and the
Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum Las Vegas. At a meeting
in St. Petersburg in September, Dr. Piotrovski and Mr. Krens
decided that the major exterior signage on the building
would identify the museum as Hermitage-Guggenheim
Museum, and that the major interior signage would say
Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum.
Exhibition Space:
The Hermitage-Guggenheim Museum has been designed
within The Venetian by Rem Koolhaas. This intimate, jewel
box-like space will present masterworks in a uniquely
contemporary setting. Its walls are constructed of Cor-Ten
steel, a material associated with the large-scale sculpture of
such artists as Richard Serra–it has never before been used
in this way in a museum gallery. Mr. Koolhaas is considered
one of the most important forces in contemporary
architecture. The winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize for
2000, he has completed a number of projects in Europe that
have won high praise from critics, including the Kunsthal in
Rotterdam (1992) and the Eura-Lille Masterplan and Grand
Palais (1994). Currently in progress are a series of major
commissions including the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin,
and the new Public Library in Seattle. Mr. Koolhaas is equally
known for his theoretical and academic work, which has
influenced a generation of architects. His books Delirious
New York (1978) and S, M, L, XL (1995) established
Koolhaas as a leading thinker in contemporary architecture.
He has held teaching positions at various institutions
worldwide since 1975 and is currently a professor at Harvard
University.
Opening Exhibition:
The inaugural exhibition, Masterpieces from the Hermitage
and Guggenheim Collections, will be a selection of 40 works
representing Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and early
Modernism drawn equally from both institutions' holdings.
The exhibition builds on the distinct but highly
complementary strengths of the two collections. The
exhibition begins chronologically and features important
works by Bonnard, Cézanne, Chagall, Kandinsky, Léger,
Matisse, Modigliani, Monet, Picasso, and Renoir, among
others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully
illustrated catalogue published by the Guggenheim, with an
introduction by Thomas Krens, Director, The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation, and Mikhail Piotrovski, Director,
State Hermitage Museum.
Several of the Guggenheim's contributions to the exhibition
are works from the Thannhauser Collection, an extensive
suite of early Modern masterpieces donated to the museum
by the German-born dealer and collector Justin K.
Thannhauser (1892-1976) and his wife Hilde. Other works
are gifts from Solomon R. Guggenheim's private collection,
or later museum purchases, exchanges, and donations.
Most of the Hermitage paintings in the exhibition were
originally part of the private collections of Sergei Shchukin
(1854-1936) and Ivan Morosov (1871-1921), two prominent
Russian businessmen who at an early stage developed
world-class collections of French paintings.
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