Blog Post - Venice 1- Baziotes

14th October 23

My first blog entry comes just as we return from a trip to Venice. My third visit, but first without a school party so more relaxed, and with a greater emphasis on seeking out good food. From an art perspective we visited The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Fortuny and Negozio Olivetti. We also went to Murano and Burano to see the islands of glass, lace and coloured houses.

Someone wiser than I once told me that you take something away from every exhibition which will resonate and inspire; that is certainly true of the places we visited in Venice.

It struck me that Peggy Guggenheim appears to have rarely acquired the work of women artists and hence the big guns such as Picasso and Pollock dominate the displays. However my ‘take-aways’ were two modest works by an artist called William Baziotes, an American abstract expressionist who frequented the NY scene with the likes of Rothko, Motherwell and Newman. The two small abstract, untitled gouache paintings on display possess a patchwork of layered shapes and distressed marks with bold use of black, demonstrating textile qualities which clearly drew me in. Not a lot is documented about Baziotes perhaps because he died young but his influences come from poetry and the art of Ancient Greece, home of his ancestors.