connecting museums

This summer, the co-operation agreed in 2001 between the Kunshistorisches Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg will be presented to the public in a synchronised event. Each of the three museums will present a simultaneous exhibition of a loaned painting from the other two participating museums together with a work from its own permanent collection. Among the numerous possibilities which the co-operation of three such outstanding and at the same time very different museums offers, the exchange of exhibits is particulary important. Thus these loans will become accessible to numerous visitors in St. Petersburg, New York, and Vienna.

The exhibition held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum will bring together a masterpiece from the collections of the Hermitage by Jacopo Tintoretto, the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, a seminal work by Max Ernst, The Attirement of the Bride, on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and a painting from the Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Esther and Ahasver by Paolo Veronese. Thus Venice forms the link uniting the three masterpieces. The paintings by Tintoretto and Veronese - with Titian the most important 16th century Venetian painters - document the wealth of colour that is so characteristic of Venetian art and that differentiates it from the art produced in other Italian centres. The paining by Max Ernst was painted sixty years ago in the South of France, and combines his colour with a visionary scene, motivated by associations from his subconcious. It is now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, housed since 1949 in the unfinished Palazzo Venier de Leoni on the Canal Grande. Max Ernst himself called the work La toilette de la mariée. It is one of the last paintings he executed before fleeing to America in 1941, during a period of personal danger and private upheavals, after Leonora Carrington had left him and Peggy Guggenheim had become his mistress. In Veronese´s Esther and Ahasver, Max Ernst´s mysterious "bride" and her escort will be confronted with one of the most impressive women in the Bible.

At the same time, the Kunsthistorisches Museum will loan the Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Pink Gown by Diego Velazquez to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the The Vision of the Blessed Hermann Joseph by Anthony van Dyck to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.