Georges Vantongerloo’s American Friends and Allies Georges Vantongerloo was one of the members of the cosmopolitan artists’ group Abstraction-Création in Paris in 1931, later becoming its vice president. Max Bill joined in December 1933. The loose affiliation of artists included the American Alexander Calder and Josef Albers, Piet Mondrian, and László Moholy-Nagy, who one by one would all flee Europe over the coming years. Other members included Otto Freundlich, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, Jean Hélion, Vasily Kandinsky, and Marlow Moss, to name just a few. Georges Vantongerloo first met Peggy Guggenheim in the early 1930s. In 1939, she acquired a cement sculpture from him directly while making a studio visit. The work now stands in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, home to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In 1940, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Vantongerloo to redesign and refurbish an apartment on the Place Vendôme to house her Parisian collection and convert it into a gallery. The project was never completed, however. Being Jewish, she was forced to flee Paris on June 11, 1940, shortly before the German Wehrmacht took the French capital by force. Even if she had stayed, the kind of modern art she intended to show there9 had already been declared “degenerate” and removed from public display by the Nazis on their home soil.
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