U.S museum to expand in Venice

By Frederick M. Winship

NEW YORK (UPI): New York's Guggenheim Museum, the only American museum that maintains a branch overseas, is planning to open three new museum sites in Venice, where its Peggy Guggenheim Collection is already a major tourist attraction.

Thomas Krens, director of the museum, detailed plans for the new galleries recently. He called the expansion of the Guggenheim in Venice part of the "important theme of making a strong link between Italy and the United States," noting that the city of Venice is covering most of the project's costs.

"This is a collaboration in the best sense of the word," he added. "Venice is providing the space. We are providing the art. Even though we expanded our Fifth Avenue building in 1992, the reality is that we have little space in which to show our permanent collection."

No date has been set for opening the three new sites, Krens said.

The museum director said he has been negotiating for seven years for space to open a Guggenheim Museum Venice, a major exhibition space for art from the Guggenheim's 6,500-work collection, 80 percent of which is kept in storage.

When he failed to lease from the Italian government an old custom house at the eastern end of the Grand Canal, Venice came up with an abandoned 16th century salt factory on the Giudecca Canal, only a short walk from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Krens said the transformed factory will be used for in-depth exhibitions of artists represented in the Guggenheim's permanent collection as well as traveling exhibitions. Turning the factory into the Guggenheim Museum Venice will cost the city about US$3 million.

In addition, the Guggenheim will convert two of the 41 national Venice Beinnale pavilions in the Castello Gardens into year-round exhibition spaces at a cost to the city of $6.7 million. Most of the pavilions are used only from June through mid-October in the years when the world-renowned international biennial art show is presented.

The Guggenheim already owns the American pavilion, and it will run the Italian pavilion on a year-round basis. Both pavilions will exhibit contemporary art.

The Italian pavilion will be used to show works from the private collections of Dakis Joannou of Athens and Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who has sold or loaned hundreds of works of contemporary art to the Guggenheim. The American pavilion will show works created by invited artists specifically for the space.

The Guggenheim has another overseas project negotiated by Krens in Bilbao, a port city in northern Spain. It will manage a $100 million museum, designed by American architect Frank Gehry and currently under construction, and will exhibit works from the Guggenheim's permanent collection and by contemporary artists.

Krens also attempted to open a branch of the Guggenheim in Salzburg, Austria, in 1988, but the project never came to fruition.

The Guggenheim was founded by copper tycoon Solomon R. Guggenheim and is housed in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in New York. The modern art collection amassed by his niece, Peggy, and bequeathed to the museum is housed in her former Venice residence, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.