Peggy Guggenheim: The Art Patron
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, born as Marguerite Guggenheim in 1898, was an art collector and art patron, a bohemian, a socialite and a memoirist who chafed against society’s restrictions.
She grew up in an elegant townhouse on East 72nd Street in New York, the middle of three daughters in a rich German-Jewish family. She felt her family expected very little from her and escaping their narrow expectations required being the black sheep of the family, the enfant terrible. But she didn’t rebel enough to be disinherited and when she turned 21, in 1919, she came into 2.5 million dollars, which would be close to 40 million dollars today.
Peggy’s mother, Florette, was a Seligman, with a number of eccentric siblings who became Peggy’s uncles and aunts and had a strong effect on Peggy, of an ambiguous kind. There was The Soprano; there was the Apothecary’s Lover; there was The Uncle Who Gave Away Fur Coats; there was The Uncle Who Didn’t Eat; and there was that staple figure in rich, eccentric families: The Compulsive Miser.
Peggy had a sweet relationship with her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, a flailing businessman and unfaithful husband who frittered away so much of the family’s money that he left his three daughters “only” $450,000 each when he went down with the Titanic in 1912. His body was never recovered, and Peggy was deeply traumatized by his death.
Peggy had nurses and tutors and governesses, and learned a lot traveling abroad with her family, but she never went to school until she was 15 years old. She felt restricted, judged, stranded and unloved by her mother. She felt ugly compared to her sisters Benita and Hazel. Peggy recalled her childhood as full of horrid horseback riding accidents, botched dental procedures, and loneliness. She was 38 years old before she could enjoy being alone.
Her older sister Benita was a great friend and comfort and Peggy always felt safe with her.
World War One was awful but when it was finally over, someone told Peggy that the best way to prevent war was to spread the love of art, which may or may not be true, but she never forgot it.
She found work at a bohemian bookstore in Manhattan, and then in 1920 moved to Paris, drinking in its painting, poetry, ballet and theater. She considered starting a publishing house but decided instead to open an art gallery. Another friend and lover, the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, urged her to move beyond her love of Renaissance art and the Old Masters, and to embrace modern art, the art of her own time.
The Dada movement resonated with Peggy as a reaction to the senseless mass killing of World War One, and to its bald propaganda. She also wanted to be art collector and realized that modern art would be much cheaper to collect. In the late 1930’s she opened a modern art gallery in London.
Her first marriage from 1922–1938, was with Laurence Vail, a handsome blond bohemian writer and sculptor who drank too much, and was apt to fly into a rage at strange times. Vail once rubbed jam in Peggy’s hair and knocked her down in the street. Laurence and Peggy had two children together, Sindbad and Pegeen. When Laurence and Peggy split up, Sindbad lived with his father and Pegeen with her mother.
Peggy became known as “the mistress of modernism” — and it was for more than her passion for art. Once asked how many husbands she’d had, she replied “D’you mean my own, or other people’s?”
Her second marriage, from 1941 to about 1945, was to the painter Max Ernst, and didn’t work out, either. But solitary happiness was a revelation for Peggy when it finally came.
In 1942, on West 57th Street in New York, she opened The Art of This Century Gallery. She knew how much it meant to a young artist to get their own solo show and for the next few years, the years of World War Two, she helped artists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell get their own shows, often at her gallery. She called Rothko and Pollock and Motherwell her “war babies.”
She’d often quietly pay an aspiring artist $10,000 a year, and encourage them with visits and introductions to other artists and gallery owners.
In 1947 she returned to Europe and by 1949, her life was centered on the cobbled streets and winding canals of Venice, where she had a palazzo on the Grand Canal. She never stopped trying to buy good art, to keep her artwork in excellent condition, to show her art so that others could marvel at it, too.
Peggy Guggenheim not only collected paintings, she collected people: friends, artists, lovers. She enjoyed the quirks and foibles in people. Her lover Roland Penrose could be tiresome in his insistence on binding Peggy’s wrists when they spent the night together, but Roland had a superb collection of surrealist art, and she put up with his stranger habits.
When Laurence Vail went shoe shopping there were almost always fireworks, he would blow up and they’d have to run out of the store, but it was amusing to see Laurence, so noble a bohemian, go a little mad over the purchase of a pair of shoes.
She was likewise amused when stern modernists who claimed only to like abstract art had a relapse and showed a sheepish interest in the work of Cezanne or Matisse.
Peggy spoke quickly, with little sidelong glances. She was not tactful and couldn’t keep a secret, partly because she didn’t believe in secrets.
Yet she loved silence, could be quite calm, and often asked the simple question that went right to the heart of the matter. Or she’d make a brief comment that deflated the pompous. When a man dazzled a party with a string of his ideas, Peggy might say that if you have too many ideas you get nothing accomplished.
She could be overbearing in her opinions. For instance, Peggy was surprised when the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian asked Peggy what nightclub he might go to dance. Mondrian was 66 years old, and Peggy didn’t see him as a dancer. Later she danced with him at several clubs and was impressed by his vigor and spirit. But, she told her friends, Mondrian doesn’t know how to talk.
Perhaps if you spoke better Dutch or French, you might communicate better with him, her friends replied. No, said Peggy, Mondrian doesn’t know how to talk in any language. Her friends let the subject drop.
When Peggy describes a man as deaf in her memoir, you wonder if maybe he’d just grown tired of her questions. But she could also float through rooms of people, watchful but apart, a guest at her own party.
Here are some things that Peggy loved: walks in the woods in early spring, when the irises and wild garlic were out; surrealist art of the 1920’s; minds that were brilliant but detached; and eyes that were keen, but without negative judgment.
Peggy DIDN’T like: people who’d lost a sense of proportion in life; people who became boring by applying Grand Theories to every situation; leftists who attended Communist summer schools and awaited marching orders from Moscow; and people who bought art purely for tax purposes.
She also didn’t care for bowlegged men, stuffy traditions, and English cooking. At a certain point in her life, she vowed to never again eat roast pheasant and Yorkshire pudding. She was also taken aback to learn that her beloved Venice had restrictions of its own; no one in Venice could legally cut down a tree, not even a single tree on her own property.
She’d dealt with more than her share of early death: her father on the Titanic; her beloved older sister Benita died in childbirth; Peggy’s lover John Holms died during “minor” wrist surgery; Peggy’s daughter Pegeen died of a drug overdose.
She’d always felt sad about people who cherish their antagonisms and come armed to resist sympathy from their enemies, and she vowed to be gracious and appreciative to all who visited her during her last months. Peggy had also noticed that many people don’t know how to console themselves when they feel death’s approach. She worked at this and consoled herself well.
It gave her pleasure to reflect that she’d surprised her family by what a force in the art world she’d become. She smiled to remember when the writer Paul Bowles invited her to his private island in Ceylon in 1954 and there was no bridge, no ferry… you just picked up your skirts and waded through the Indian Ocean. She made arrangements for her palazzo and its 326 art works to be left to her uncle Solomon’s foundation.
In 1979, when she was quite near the end, someone asked her how she felt. After a silence she said, “For someone dying, not bad.” She was also known to say, “We move through life in a kind of dream.”