Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus

by Vivien Greene

Catalog of the exhibition held at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Jan. 23-April 11, 2010 and at Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, May 1-July 25, 2010.

Utopia has long been a subject of investigation for artists, as well as a model for artistic collectives. In the early 1800s, artistic brotherhoods inspired by the medieval guild emerged. These brotherhoods pursued the utopian tenets of communal work from within ideal communities they established. By the end of the nineteenth century, utopian groups flourished, as artists, architects, designers, and writers embraced aestheticized experience and artisanal traditions in reaction to the unsightliness and commercialism of urban life.
Following World War I, avant-gardes turned to the utopian notion of harmony they saw in abstraction and optimistically endeavored to ameliorate society through art and design. Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus examines a sequence of international case studies from the early nineteenth century through 1933, when the Bauhaus closed in Berlin and the ascendancy of Fascism and Stalinism curbed or negatively reframed artistic endeavors, and investigates the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice. It addresses the movements of Primitivism, the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Arts and Crafts, the Cornish Colony, Neo-Impressionism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. This exhibition is organized by Vivien Greene, Curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Greene, noted historian Russell Jacoby, and design historian Victor Margolin will also accompany the exhibition.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2010

About the author

Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th- and early 20th-century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). Among her other exhibition projects are The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–18 (coorganized with Mark Antliff; 2010–11); Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus (2010); and Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy (2007).

In addition to the catalogues associated with her exhibitions, Greene’s latest publications include “John Quinn and Vorticist Painting: The Eye (and Purse) of an American Collector,” in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); “Bizantium and Emporium: Fine Secolo Magazines in Rome and Milan,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3, Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); “The ‘Other’ Africa: Giuseppe Pitrè’s Mostra Etnografica Siciliana (1891–92),” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17, no. 3 (June 2012); and “Utopia/Dystopia,” American Art Journal 25, no. 2 (Summer 2011).

Greene was the recipient of a Bogliasco Fellowship in 2009, and in 2003 received a Fulbright Travel Grant to Italy and a predoctoral Rome Prize Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome. She regularly organizes and presents papers at scholarly symposia, and has cochaired sessions at the annual College Art Association conference and other events. She serves on the Center for Italian Modern Art’s Advisory Committee and the Bogliasco Foundation’s Selection Committee, and was a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators (2006–11). She has a Ph.D. in art history, and focused on 19th-century European art.