Drawn from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's extensive holdings, A Century of Painting: From Renoir to Rothko highlights the history of the aesthetic vanguard from Impressionism through Abstract Expressionism. Bringing together the major artists and developments of Modern art by highlighting significant examples of representational and abstract painting, this focused but comprehensive selection provides a unique opportunity to view many of the classics of the Guggenheim's permanent collection

In 1937, when Solomon R. Guggenheim created the foundation that bears his name, he did so largely to educate the public about a very particular kind of painting: the "non-objective," a term signifying pure artistic invention. Guided by his advisor, Hilla Rebay—who served for almost 15 years as the museum's first director—Guggenheim collected magnificent examples of abstract art by Vasily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger, among others. While the collections of the Guggenheim Museum have grown to encompass a wide range of Modern and contemporary art, it is masterpieces such as those in From Renoir to Rothko that remain at the heart of the collection.

Expanding the collection's chronology to include seminal works from the 1860s through the early 1900s, the Thannhauser collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art provides an appropriate introduction to the Guggenheim's holdings of 20th–century modernism. The original 1978 bequest came from German-born gallerist and collector Justin K. Thannhauser, and was augmented by additional gifts from his widow Hilde in 1981 and 1991. Together, these donations comprise an extensive suite of masterpieces that broadened the collection's historical and stylistic range, adding works by late–19th– and early–20th–century innovators such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, and Vincent van Gogh.

Rarely traveled, works from the Guggenheim's Thannhauser collection begin this exhibition. Renoir's Woman with Parrot (1871) and Cézanne's Still Life: Flask, Glass, and Jug (ca. 1877) are two masterpieces in the collection that demonstrate Impressionism and Post-Impressionism's key influence on subsequent art. The Impressionists' liberation of painting from age-old academic genres and rote techniques was a pivotal moment in art history, later seen as the beginning of art's Modern era. With a sphere of influence centered in the flourishing artistic capital of Paris, the emergence of this rebellious avant garde in the 1860s and '70s made many groundbreaking 20th-century developments possible, such as Cubism and the purely abstract, or "non-objective," painting in which the Guggenheim collection is particularly rich.

Formulated by Picasso and his Parisian colleague Georges Braque, Cubism offered new possibilities for rendering three-dimensional objects on the two-dimensional picture plane; images are fractured in myriad small facets and depicted as if seen from several viewpoints simultaneously. Cubist compositions question the concreteness of space and volume, as well as the concept of the existence of objects within time. Analytic Cubist works—including Braque's Violin and Palette (autumn 1909) and Picasso's Accordionist (summer 1911)—are the results of an "analysis," or "breaking down," of form and space. Such early Cubist paintings employ a limited palette of ochers, browns, greens, grays, and blacks. Later, Picasso's monumental Mandolin and Guitar (1924) is executed in a bold Synthetic Cubist style of overlapping and contiguous forms. Incorporating the rounded, organic shapes and saturated hues of Surrealist painting, this still life foreshadows the emergence of a fully evolved biomorphic style in Picasso's art.

Delauney, Legér, and Albert Gleizes elaborated on Picasso and Braque's vocabulary of Cubism, tailoring it to their own sensibilities. Through the evolving experiments of these painters, including Picasso and Braque, Cubism became more expressive in its range of subject matter and color. Some of the formal devices of Cubism were also utilized by Russian-born Marc Chagall, who moved to Paris in 1910. Chagall integrated personal fantasy and narrative elements from Russian folk art into an advanced formal vocabulary indebted to the French artists, as is evident in his The Soldier Drinks (1911–12). Associated with the School of Paris, Chagall and a number of other figurative artists—for example, Italian-born Amedeo Modigliani—had diverse stylistic approaches to representational subjects but were united in their rejection of academicism.

While Cubism was at the forefront of a new art in France, equally radical approaches to painting were taking place in Germany, Italy, and Russia. Italian Futurists integrated some of the principles of Cubism and Divisionism in images that glorified the energy and speed of modern life. In Red Cross Train Passing a Village (summer 1915), for example, Gino Severini's split landscape captures our fractured perception of a locomotive speeding thorugh the countryside. Artists of the Russian avant-garde such as Kazimir Malevich combined political and social concerns with their stylistic innovations. In works characterized by potent and unnatural color, German Expressionists drew on the work of the Symbolists, linking often extreme emotional sentiments with images derived from the visible world.

Russian-born Kandinsky made important contributions to German Expressionism while working in Munich during the early part of his career, as can be seen in canvases such as Group in Crinolines (1909), but it is his formulation of a completely nonreferential mode of painting that is most significant to the history of the Guggenheim Museum. Kandinsky's vision of a pure painterly abstraction was shared fully by Hilla Rebay. In his 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky connected abstract painting to music and an "inner necessity" rather than to the external world. This aesthetic served as the catalyst for the formation of Solomon R. Guggenheim's remarkable collection of largely non-objective art. In Improvisation 28 (second version) of 1912, Kandinsky uses an absracted vocabulary to convey an apocalyptic vision inspired by the Revelations of Saint John the Divine. As if to echo his ideas about how art could spiritually uplift society from its materialist focus, the canvas contains scenes of both upheaval and salvation.

During the postwar years, the focus of the avant-garde shifted from Europe to America. New York became the center of Modern art, inheriting from Paris the position of artistic capital. The chief protagonists in this succession were the painters of the New York School—the Abstract Expressionists—including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. The expressive aspect of their work has been linked to the subjective heroism of earlier forms of Expressionism as well as to the Surrealist technique of automatism. Although the Abstract Expressionists were not united by a single style, they shared an interest in self-expression, the process and essentials of making art, and a desire to unite form and emotion.

Seen as a whole, and through each individual painting, From Renoir to Rothko offers a short course in the history of Modern art. It is also a narrative of collecting in a modern age, demonstrating how passionate visions, a discriminating eye, and sustained commitment to the artistic vanguard have shaped a collection of works of the highest possible integrity and quality.