Museum unveils modern art classics

NEW YORK -- A hidden treasure -- a mural by Spanish artist Joan Miro -- is on display for the first time since 1990 as part of a new show at the Guggenheim Museum highlighting classics of modern art.\nThe 20-foot-long mural comprises 190 ceramic tiles, with the name "Alice" in huge exuberant letters surrounded by Miro's characteristic celestial shapes.\nThe artwork was permanently installed in 1967, but it is usually hidden behind a false wall to accommodate the museum's revolving array of special exhibitions.\nIt fits in perfectly, however, with the Guggenheim's new exhibit: "From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art," which opened last week and continues through Sept. 28.\nAlong with Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock, the show features 130 paintings and sculptures by 48 artists, including Vasily Kadinsky, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall and Piet Mondrian.\nThe mural is on the first wall visitors see as they begin to ascend the Guggenheim's spiral ramp. It was commissioned in 1963 by Harry F. Guggenheim -- then president of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation -- as a memorial to his wife, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, the founder and publisher of Newsday who died unexpectedly that year at the age of 56.\nThree great-grandchildren of Solomon Guggenheim, the museum's founder, were present at the mural's unveiling July 8. They recounted stories they had heard of the controversy caused when Miro mysteriously refused suggestions to change the spelling of the name in the mural from "Alice" to "Alicia."\n"When Harry first saw this spelling he asked Miro if he could possibly fix it. And Miro apparently said, 'Absolutely not. This is my interpretation of her name and it's beautiful this way and it's staying as is," said Wendy McNeil. "And it stayed the way he originally created it."\nAfter the mural, visitors to the exhibit are treated to four early works by Picasso as they begin a chronological tour of highlights of the aesthetic vanguard from cubism to abstract expressionism.\nThey pass by Chagall's "Green Violinist" -- in which a man with green hands and face plays the instrument while appearing to stand on top of two houses -- and Franz Marc's "Yellow Cow," featuring a cow with blue spots kicking up its hind legs amid intensely colored mountains and valleys.\nMondrian's three works in the exhibit balance gridlike compositions of horizontal and vertical stripes with blocks of color, while Pollock's two paintings illustrate his famous style of pouring and squeezing paint directly onto the canvas from cans and tubes.\nUsually, the open rotunda of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building is reserved for special exhibitions, while portions of the permanent collection are displayed in smaller side galleries off the ramp.\nDuring those special exhibitions, the Guggenheim can take on a whole new atmosphere: During the recent "Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle" show, blue artificial turf was placed on the ground and the skylight covered. For other exhibits, the walls have been painted black and the curving bays where paintings can be hung filled with false walls.\nBut with "Picasso to Pollock," the building is used as Wright intended -- in his words, "a space in which to view the painter's creation truthfully."\nThe curvy walls are again painted ivory. Sunlight streams through the skylight. And many of the larger paintings get a whole bay to themselves.\n"It's always nice to get back to Frank Lloyd Wright," said Tracey Bashkoff, associate curator for collections and exhibitions. "It's nice to see the work in the building in the way it was intended to be seen"