The story of how Peggy Guggenheim encouraged the youthful William Baziotes in the early 1940s is told in this catalogue. Sixty years have passed since she gave him his first one-man exhibition, at Art of This Century,New York. He is an artist to whom the history of art has still to do full justice, perhaps because his contemplative and lyrical muse sets his work apart from the gestural,expressionist images of his fellow New York School "Irascibles"-- images that so captured the international imagination in the post-war period.

 The story of how Peggy Guggenheim encouraged the youthful William Baziotes in the early 1940s is told in this catalogue. Sixty years have passed since she gave him his first one-man exhibition, at Art of This Century,New York. He is an artist to whom the history of art has still to do full justice, perhaps because his contemplative and lyrical muse sets his work apart from the gestural,expressionist images of his fellow New York School "Irascibles"-- images that so captured the international imagination in the post-war period. Nevertheless Baziotes was a front rank avantguardist when his youth-ful work was shown in Breton"s and Duchamp"s "First Papers of Surrealism" exhibition in 1942. He died much too young, at the height of his powers, aged 50.In 1965 Lawrence Alloway was charged by Thomas Messer, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with curating a memorial exhibition for Baziotes. In 2000 Diane Waldman, former deputy director of the Guggenheim, proposed that the Peggy Guggenheim Collection present an exhibition of his paintings and drawings that she was curating for The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. This set things in motion. Four years later, with the full support of ]oseph Helman, whose gallery represents the Baziotes Estate, and of Ethel, William Baziotes" widow,with Michael Preble (who has embarked on the Baziotes catalogue raisonne) as curator, the Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation is proud to present what I believe to be the largest retrospective of Baziotes"paintings and drawings ever assembled.

William Baziotes: Passages

Michael Preble

Natural Painter and All Painter -- The Emergence

of William Baziotes

Jasper Sharp

On the Occasion of the Venice Exhibition

of the Art of William Baziotes

Ethel Baziotes

Remembrance

Jimmy Ernst

Remembering William Baziotes

Charles Seliger

Catalogue of the Works

William Baziotes: Chronology

Tatiana Cuevas Guevara

Selected Bibliography