The exhibition in Las Vegas, which will last until 27 April 2008, presents 37 works of art the first half of the twentieth century from the collections of the New York Guggenheim Museum Solomon

The exhibition in Las Vegas, which will last until 27 April 2008, presents 37 works of art the first half of the twentieth century from the collections of the New York Museum of Solomon Guggenheim. The concept of the exhibition is that of the works of contemporary artists selected those which demonstrate new and sometimes unexpected interpretation of academic subjects - landscape, still life, portraits and genre scenes.

French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648 as an educational institution for the education of professional artists, recognized in the art of only five kinds, each of which was allotted a place in a clear hierarchy. The most preferred was a historical painting, followed by domestic genre, portrait, still life, and finally landscape. During the XVIII century in many European countries have their Academy borrowed the French system of genres, and the tradition of the official salons, where artists were exhibited and were evaluated in accordance with the canon.

Robert Delaunay. Eiffel Tower and the trees. 1910

In the middle of the XIX century impressionist abandoned that system, in particular the practice of image nudity only in the mythological or biblical subjects. Because of this painting by Edward Manet «Breakfast on the grass», where the naked girl was pictured next to the men, dressed in fashionable black frock-coat, was not adopted at the Paris Salon in 1863. It is the refusal of the exhibition organizers to take this picture at the Salon and the resulting scandal has become one of the reasons for this revolution in the art produced by impressionists. It is them we owe the formation of a new artistic tradition, when the artist is not limited in his work or a set of formal methods, nor the subject of the picture. However, despite the expansion of those paintings, the artists continued their work in traditional genres of portraiture, genre painting, landscape and still life.

The objective of the exhibition in Las Vegas was to compare the work performed within a single genre or a theme masters, who are considered to impressionist, post, Cubists, expressionist and surrealist. This exhibit allows the viewer to trace the evolution of style over a short (about a hundred years), but a very dynamic period, and at the same time stresses the timeless nature of these themes and topics.

Source: http://www.guggenheimlasvegas.org