Art Gallery sights in Venice
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Peggy Guggenheim Collection
After tragically losing her father on the Titanic, heiress Peggy Guggenheim befriended Dadaists, dodged Nazis and amassed avant-garde works by 200 modern artists at her palatial home on the Grand Canal. Peggy's Palazzo Venier dei Leoni became a modernist shrine, chronicling surrealism, Italian futurism and abstract expressionism, with a subtext of Peggy's romantic pursuits – the collection includes key works by Peggy's ex-husband Max Ernst as well as Jackson Pollock, who was among Peggy's many rumoured lovers. Peggy collected according to her own convictions rather than for prestige or style, so her collection includes folk art and lesser-known artists alongside…
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Gallerie dell'Accademia
Don't be fooled by Palladio's serene expansions for the former Santa Maria della Carità convent: these galleries contain more murderous intrigue, forbidden romance, shameless politicking and near-riots than the most outrageous Venetian parties. To guide you through the ocular onslaught, visits are loosely organised by style, theme and painter from the 14th to the 18th centuries, though recent restorations have temporarily shuffled round some of the masterpieces.
Rooms 1–5
Early collection highlights include Paolo Veneziano's c 1350 Coronation of Mary (room 1), which shows Jesus bestowing the crown on his mother with a gentle pat on the head. For sheer, shimmering gore,…
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Palazzo Grassi
Rounding a Grand Canal bend, gondola riders gasp with the shock of the new: installations by contemporary artists like Richard Prince and Jeff Koons docked at Giorgio Masari's 1749 neoclassical palace. French billionaire François Pinault installed his provocative contemporary art collectionat the Palazzo Grassi in 2005, providing Venice with sensation and scandal between Biennales. Postmodern architect Gae Aulenti peeled back twee rococo decor to reveal Masari's muscular classicism in 1985–86, and minimalist Tadao Ando heightened the palace's stage-set drama with backlit scrims and spotlighting in 2003–05. Don't miss the cafe overlooking the Grand Canal, with interiors…
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Punta della Dogana
Fortuna, the weathervane atop Punta della Dogana, swung Venice's way in 2005, when bureaucratic hassles in Paris convinced billionaire art collector François Pinault to showcase his art works at Palazzo Grassi and create an installation art gallery in long-abandoned customs warehouses at Punta della Dogana. Architect Tadao Ando opened interiors to the elements outside, flooding exposed-brick galleries with light through windows in water gates and polished-concrete channels – astute homages to Carlo Scarpa's designs for Negozio Olivetti.
Rotating installations here invade personal space and address personal fixations: Chen Zhen's landscape made from pure crystal versions…
reviewed