Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict
This edition does not include illustrations.Please note that due to the level of detail, the family tree is best viewed on a tablet.The wayward life (1898–1979) of the voracious art collector and great female patron of world-famous artists.‘Mrs Guggenheim, how many husbands have you had?’ ‘Do you mean my own, or other people’s?’ Peggy Guggenheim was an American millionairess art collector and legendary lover, whose father died on the Titanic returning from installing the lift machinery in the Eiffel Tower. She lived in Paris in the 1930s and got to know all the major artists – especially the Surrealists. (Later she bullied Max Ernst into marrying her, but was snubbed by Picasso.) When the Second World War broke out, she bought great numbers of paintings from artists fleeing to America; as a Jew she escaped from Vichy France and set up in New York, where in the 1940s and 50s she befriended and encouraged the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Rothko, etc.)Her emotional life was in constant turmoil – a life of booze, bed and bohemia (mostly rich bohemia). Her favourite husband was a drunken English dilettante writer called Lawrence Vail, but she bedded many others, including Samuel Beckett. Later she moved to Venice, where her memory is enshrined in the world-famous palazzo that houses her Guggenheim Collection.
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PEGGY GUGGENHEIM
The Life of an Art Addict
ANTON GILL
To Marji Campi (who started all this)
with admiration, gratitude and love
London, New York, Paris, Venice; 1997â2001
Contents
8: Laurence, Motherhood and âBohemiaâ
Intermezzo: Max and Another Departure: Marseilles and Lisbon
This book is made up of material derived from private and public archives and collections, published works, unpublished works, letters, diaries, interviews, gossip, e-mails, telephone conversations, videotapes, faxes, websites and so on. Despite the fact that the subject is recent, a number of discrepancies of spelling have cropped up in proper names. Where that has happened, I have used the version most commonly used by others.
I have not tampered with usage, grammar or spelling in direct quotations from original material such as letters, though I have tidied up typographical errors â for many years Peggy Guggenheim used an ancient typewriter with a faded blue ribbon, and her typing was not accurate. I have left eccentricities of spelling alone (Peggy habitually spelt âthoughtâ âthotâ, and âboughtâ âbotâ), and have provided an explanation only if the level of obscurity seemed great enough to warrant one. Round brackets in quoted passages belong to the passage; glosses within such passages are in square brackets.
Titles of artworks in Peggyâs collection are generally the same as those used by Angelica Z. Rudenstine in her catalogue of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Other paintings and sculptures are given the names theyâre most commonly known by.
Iâd like to express my thanks here at the outset to all who helped. A lot of people had a profound personal contact with Peggy, and shared their memories of her with me generously. I am most grateful to them â their names are in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. I have had to be selective in the use of some tangential detail for reasons of both focus and of space. Readers interested in further exploration of the background to this book are referred to the bibliography. Inevitably what I have written will lead to a certain amount of disagreement. Some of the material conflicted, and some was clogged with gossip and rumour. I can only say that to the best of my ability I have checked all the matter I have used for correctness, and that I have tried to keep speculation to a minimum. I thank Marji Campi, Barbara Shukman and Karole Vail for looking over the manuscript, but I alone am accountable for any errors. I have not, however, consciously sought to mislead or offend anyone in this record of the life of a complex, anarchic, remarkable woman.
Anton Gill
London, 2001
A Party
âHer obduracy in contention and her warmth in friendship, her generosity and her stinginess, her plunges into gloom and wholehearted abandonment to laughter, her puritan streak and her reckless addiction to the erotic were all contradictions of the essence of her personality.â
MAURICE CARDIFF, Friends Abroad
The rain, which had not stopped for a week, ceased in the late afternoon of 29 September 1998, so that by the evening the flagstones in the garden were dry. The heat and the humidity relented too, so that as the crowd gathered the atmosphere and the temperature were perfect.
The garden was that of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an eighteenth-century pile in Dorsoduro, on the Accademia bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, between the Accademia Bridge and Santa Maria della Salute, close to where the Canal Grande debouches into the Canale di San Marco. The palazzo is exotic. It was never finished. It only has a sub-basement and one storey, with a flat roof that doubles as a terrace; but the garden is one of the largest in Venice. The trees are huge. When Peggy Guggenheim owned and lived in the palace, the garden was muddy and overgrown, and the sculptures planted in it â the bronze trolls of Max Ernst, the minimalist, organic forms of Arp and Brancusi â inhabited it as mysterious beings might lurk in a wood, waiting for the traveller to come upon them unaware.
Several hundred guests were gathering that Tuesday evening twenty years after her death in a more manicured space: neatly flagged and gravelled, with the sculptures openly displayed. Not all of the sculptures now belong to the art collection which Peggy Guggenheim brought here in the late 1940s. Many are part of the collection of the Texan collectors Patsy and Raymond Nasher.
