The Peggy Guggenheim Museum Gardens in Venice

 

The gardens with sculpture surrounding the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy are actually called the Nasher Sculpture Garden. The building itself is referrred to as the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, built in the 1750s. If you are ever in Venice, the Museum should surely be one of your stops. 

This is the entrance courtyard,
where you purchase tickets.

Once Peggy Guggenheim's home, it's now a museum with a world-class collection of European and American art from the first half of the 20th century. The permanent collection is made up of works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Brancusi, de Chirco, Mondrain, Kandinsky, Miro, Klee, Magrtitte, Polack Gorky, Calder and Peggy Guggenheim's husband, Max Earnst. Many of these artists more significant works I can see just a short walk from my house here in Buffalo, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, I might add.

The Nasher Garden and other outdoor spaces including the entrance to the Museum and a patio/balcony overlooking the grand canal have works by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Giacometti, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Moore, and even Yoko Ono.

This sculpture garden is more about the sculpture than the garden, bu the garden was designed to highlight the sculpture. It looked "bespoke," with very manicured plantings, immaculate beds and overall very handsome and restrained.

It's a nice place to stop and get some visual "peace" from touring Venice - which is bustling with tourists at every turn. And there's nary any green space throughout most of the city. Green space is there, but much of it is behind fences, or part of residential buildings or courtyards that are blocked off from street view. You can actually see more gardens from the vaporetto (water buses) than from walking the streets.

Again the entrance courtyard with a Eduardo Chillida's Estela a Millares, 1960-72 in the distance.

Don't know the artists' name or work title, but he's cute!

I liked these iron gates with large chunks of "gemstones" embedded.

Alexander Calder, The Cow, 1970

The Mueeum is right on the Grand Canal and you can sit outside for a while just watching the boats go by.
Looks like there's a nice garden across the way.

Mario Merz, If the Form Vanishes Its Root Is Eternal, 1982–89

Can you imagine having neon in your hedge? How do you trim it? Carefully, I would imagine.

Luciano Minguzzi, Two Figures, 1950–52

Loved this table/bench tree canopy thingy. It was hard to photograph without people sitting around it.

Here is Where Peggy "rests."

And right here, next to her, is where her pets rest. The strangest dog name is Pegeen.
It's only odd because it was also her daughter's name!

Anish Kapoor, Untitled , 2007

Mirko, Roaring Lion II, 1956

Mirko, Architectural Element, 1953

Mimmo Paladino, The Cloven Viscount , 1998

Jenny Holzer, Survival, 2003

The Museum as see from the the canal. The statue you can see (just barely) is of a man on a horse, with, um, a rather prominent, um, erection. If you know the Canadian band, Spirit of the West, the statue is immortalized in their song, And if Venice is Sinking - "In a room that had a postcard on the door of Marini's little man
With an erection on a horse, it always leaves me laughing..."