William Baziotes, noted American Abstract Expressionist painter, exhibited for the first time in 1936 in a group show at the Municipal Art Gallery, New York.

Sixty years after Peggy Guggenheim first dedicated a solo exhibition to William Baziotes, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Venice is mounting the first Baziotes retrospective ever to be presented in Europe. The exhibition catalogue, published in conjunction with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, brings together 45 paintings and 20 watercolor drawings from important private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Detroit Institute of Arts, Tate Modern, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Baziotes met the Surrealist émigrés in New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and by 1940 knew Jimmy Ernst, Matta, and Gordon Onslow-Ford. In 1941, Matta introduced Baziotes to Robert Motherwell, with whom he formed a close friendship. André Masson invited Baziotes to participate with Motherwell, David Hare, and others in the 1942 exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in New York. In 1943, he took part in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, New York, where his first solo exhibition was held the following year. With Hare, Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, Baziotes founded the Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948.

Exhibition venue: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, September 4, 2004 – January 9, 2005