Peggy Guggenheim

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American art collector Peggy Guggenheim (1898 - 1979) was instrumental in the promotion of modern art in the twentieth century. Independently wealthy, she lived most of her life in Europe; she had a particular affection for Venice and her longtime home there is now a renowned museum for art dating from the first half of the twentieth century. Today, her name remains associated with the avant-garde, Cubist, Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist movements in art.

A Child of Wealth

Marguerite Guggenheim, known throughout her life as Peggy, was born into the massively wealthy Guggenheim family on August 26, 1898. Her father, Benjamin, was the fifth of Meyer Guggenheim's seven children and her mother, Floretta Seligman, came from a New York banking family. The Guggenheims were among the most prominent of New York's Jewish families, and the young Guggenheim had a privileged upbringing. When she was barely a teenager, however, personal tragedy struck the family when Benjamin Guggenheim died as a passenger on the Titanic; famously, he and his valet sat on the deck in formal evening wear, drinking brandy and smoking cigars while the liner sank. Foregoing college, Guggenheim first worked in support of the war effort and later at a radical bookstore, the Sunwise Turn. At the age of 21, Guggenheim came into her inheritance and shortly thereafter moved to Paris.

Marriage, Divorce, and Other Loves

In Paris, Guggenheim became fascinated with the growing Post-World War I avant-garde movement among artists and writers. One of these writers, Laurence Vail - known as the "King of Bohemia" - attracted Guggenheim's attention; quickly, the two were romantically involved and soon married in March 1922. The marriage produced two children: son Michael, called Sindbad, in 1923 and daughter Pegeen in 1925. The family settled in the south of France where Guggenheim recollected in her memoirs that "we had a wonderful life," enjoying the picturesque rural atmosphere and the company of friends such as radical activist Emma Goldman and dancer Isadora Duncan. The "wonderful life" was however marred by frequent fighting between Guggenheim and her husband; in 1928, Guggenheim, in the throes of an affair with writer John Holms, left Vail. The two did not officially divorce for two more years and remained lifelong friends.

Guggenheim and Holms carried on an intense love affair for several years, traveling throughout Europe and finally settling in London after Holms suffered a painful wrist injury. Five months after dislocating his wrist, Holms underwent an operation to repair it; during the operation, his heart stopped and he died. After his death, Guggenheim, as she said in her memoirs entitled Out of this Century, "was in perpetual terror of losing [her] soul." For the rest of her days, she continued to consider Holms to be her great love. Guggenheim found some comfort with Douglas Garman, the English publisher with whom she began an affair shortly after Holms' passing. The two lived together at rural Yew Tree Cottage, where Guggenheim had a rather isolated life. This continued for three years, until 1936, when three events which foreshadowed the rest of Guggenheim's life occurred: first, French Surrealists held a wildly successful show in London, although Guggenheim declined to attend, at that time considering Surrealism over; second, Guggenheim spent ten delightful days vacationing alone in Venice; and lastly, she and Garman separated.

The First Gallery

After ending her relationship with Garman, Guggenheim found herself at loose ends. Looking for an occupation, she followed the suggestion of a friend and opened a London art gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in January 1938. The gallery's first show, featuring works by eccentric French artist and poet Jean Cocteau and curated by famed Modernist Marcel Duchamp, was a success. Later shows by notable Surrealist, Cubist and other contemporary artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore, and Max Ernst, among others, made the gallery one of the most important in the modern art movement; however, the gallery was not financially successful - Guggenheim took to buying something from each artist she exhibited so they would have at least one sale, a sympathetic move that became the genesis of her art collection - and decided to exchange her gallery for ownership of a modern art museum. However, with the onset of World War II in 1939, plans for the museum were indefinitely delayed and Guggenheim settled again in Paris.

There, often advised by Duchamp, she began actively purchasing art. Guggenheim spent the next two years building her art collection at a terrific rate before the German occupation of France finally drove her to return to the United States in 1941, accompanied by her ex-husband Laurence Vail, his current wife, painter Max Ernst, and the seven children associated with the adults. The last few weeks Guggenheim spent in France, at times, terrified her; a Jew, she was questioned by the authorities and only by repeatedly insisting that she was an American and not admitting her religion was she able to go free. Ernst and Guggenheim took up a romantic relationship around the time of their journey to America; the couple married in 1942. This marriage was, like Guggenheim's first, a particularly stormy one marked by quarrels and occasionally physical violence.

Return to New York City

Guggenheim's second gallery, Art of this Century, opened in New York City in October 1942 even as her marriage to Ernst was rapidly deteriorating. The gallery's interior was designed by architect Frederick Kiesler to present the paintings in a setting as surreal as they were; the initial exhibition, featuring Guggenheim's entire personal collection of 171 pieces, was greatly successful. At the opening night of the gallery, Guggenheim famously wore one earring by Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy and another by Abstract artist Alexander Calder to show that she supported both movements equally. More exhibitions followed, including the first American show devoted entirely to works by women artists and one dedicated to artists under the age of 35.

Art of This Century was one of the first galleries to show modern American artists alongside their European predecessors and contemporaries, lending them a credibility that may otherwise have eluded them; the gallery particularly helped Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, both of whom held their first shows at Guggenheim's New York gallery, gain notoriety. In 1943, she commissioned a mural from Pollock which was the largest work he had executed to date; putting the piece off for several months, Pollock eventually turned out the over twenty-foot long, six-foot high painting in one long day. Upon delivering the piece to Guggenheim's home, he discovered the painting was eight inches too long and at the advice of Marcel Duchamp, simply cut the extra length from one end. Guggenheim would later donate this work to the University of Iowa. Art of This Century continued to show works by an increasingly all-American group of artists until financial losses caused its closure in 1947.

Naturally, Guggenheim's life was not entirely confined to art during the mid-1940s. Her marriage to Ernst had officially ended in divorce in 1946, the same year that marked the publishing of the first volume of her memoirs. Entitled Out of this Century, - a suggestion of Laurence Vail's - the book was written in 1944 and 1945 after Guggenheim was approached by a publishing house. A deeply personal work, and for the era quite scandalous, Out of this Century describes Guggenheim's love life in great detail. While many speculate that Guggenheim somewhat exaggerated the tales of her many lovers in her book, her thinly-veiled pseudonyms did nothing to disguise the identities of those she discussed. In his biography Art Lover Anton Gill commented that "those maligned would find no protection under their noms à clef, since they were so close everyone would immediately make the connection … if anyone failed to, the photographs included in the book left no room for doubt." Most critics attacked the book as being stylistically and morally lacking, but the memoirs sold reasonably well.

Life in Venice

The end of World War II also marked the end of the art world as it had been. The originators of the modern art movements were aging or dying; their heyday was over. The European artists who had moved to the United States during the war slowly returned to Europe. A return visit to Venice in summer 1946 convinced Guggenheim to head back to Europe as well. After her New York gallery's closure in 1947, she settled in Venice, finding a permanent home there, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, in 1948. That year, she also exhibited her collection in Venice, suitably shocking a populace accustomed to Renaissance art. By this time, her collection had very nearly reached its final form. Over the remaining decades of her life, Guggenheim bought only a few pieces as her interest in the changing contemporary art lessened and prices on all art rose. (Despite her personal wealth, Guggenheim was notoriously thrifty - in some cases, outright thrift turned to outright stinginess.)

Both locally and internationally known artists and writers as diverse as artist Marc Chagall, Hollywood actor Paul Newman, and American Southern author Truman Capote continued to visit Guggenheim in Venice. Sometimes feeling overwhelmed with visitors, Guggenheim became increasingly concerned for her privacy, although in the early 1950s she opened her home with its collection to the general public on three afternoons a week. "Some people," she noted in her memoirs "think that I should be included as a sight." However, Guggenheim lived remarkably quietly in Venice, dedicating herself more and more to the care of her collection, daily gondola trips through her adopted hometown, and her brood of Lhasa Apsos dogs. In 1960, she published a second and less scandalous volume of her memoirs, entitled Confessions of an Art Collector.

Guggenheim's collection left her palazzo for two major exhibitions in the 1960s, the first in 1965 at London's Tate Museum and the second in 1969 at New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At the time of the 1969 exhibition, Guggenheim agreed to donate her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation upon her death on the condition that the collection would remain intact in Venice and would be recognized as hers. The Foundation assumed responsibility for both the collection and for Guggenheim's palazzo.

Final Years and Legacy

In the early 1970s, Guggenheim, by then nearly 75, truly began her withdrawal from the world. Her art collecting ceased, her social circle dwindled as friends aged and died, and even the numbers of her dogs declined as she quit replacing pets that died. In 1974, her collection was shown at Paris's Louvre to great success. As the decade progressed, Guggenheim's health faded; she at last died on December 23, 1979 at the age of 86. She was cremated shortly thereafter and her ashes buried in her palazzo's garden near those of her beloved dogs. Within days, her palazzo was again opened to the public as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. To this day, the collection can be seen in her former home, still complete as it was at the time of her death.

Books

Dearborn, Mary V., Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Gill, Anton, Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim, HarperCollins, 2002.

Guggenheim, Peggy, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, Anchor Books, 1980.

Unger, Irwin and Debi Unger, The Guggenheims: A Family History, HarperCollins, 2005.

Online

"American National Biography Online: Peggy Guggenheim," http:www.anb.org (January 7, 2006).

"Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Peggy's Biography" http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/English/ (January 7, 2006).

(1898-1979), art dealer and collector. Born into one of New York's elite Jewish families, Guggenheim spent her life embracing the avant-garde in art and literature.

In the 1920s Guggenheim became acquainted in expatriate Paris with the leading literary figures of her generation including James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1938 she opened the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery on London's Cork Street, enlisting Marcel Duchamp to help her outline the course her gallery should take and to introduce her to the artists she should exhibit. In the two years she ran Guggenheim Jeune, she exhibited such artists as Jean Cocteau, Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, and Henry Moore. Guggenheim made it a point to buy one work from each exhibition.

Although the gallery was losing money, she decided to start a museum for modern art in London. Her adviser in this venture was the art historian Herbert Read. But with the outbreak of World War II in 1939 her plans for the museum were abandoned. Finding herself in Paris, however, she declared her intention of buying a "picture a day." Because of the war, many artists were eager to sell their works even at bargain prices in order to leave France. Between September of 1939 and the fall of France in 1940 Guggenheim bought the bulk of what would become the Peggy Guggenheim Collection including works by Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Duchamp, and Max Ernst, all for approximately forty thousand dollars.

As the situation in Europe worsened, Guggenheim, too, was forced to return to America. In October 1942, she opened her gallery, Art of This Century, in New York. This was to be her greatest achievement. Designed by the Viennese architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery had curved gumwood walls and pictures mounted on baseball bats. Here Guggenheim exhibited her newly acquired collection of modern masters and, more important, promoted the work of undiscovered talents--this at a time when only a handful of New York galleries showed any modern art, let alone modern American art.

At Art of This Century, Guggenheim gave solo shows and first exhibitions to many of the artists known today as the New York school--Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, and others who changed the face of American art. She particularly promoted the career of Jackson Pollock. In her house and gallery Guggenheim played hostess to the European artists who made New York their wartime home, including André Breton, Salvador Dali, Tanguy, and Duchamp.

When the war ended, Guggenheim returned to Europe. She made Venice her new home, buying the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, where she installed her fabulous modern art collection. There she continued to play hostess to the illustrious and to exhibit her now priceless collection to a growing public for modern art. When she died, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation took over the collection.

Guggenheim appears to have been lucky in everything but love. She had two failed marriages--to Ernst and to the writer Laurence Vail--and many celebrated affairs including ones with Tanguy and Samuel Beckett.

Guggenheim's exhibition and promotion of abstract expressionism and the New York school energized the movement. Without her flair for publicity and her championship of Jackson Pollock the New York school would not have been the same.

Bibliography:

Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century (1979); Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (1986).

Author:

Jacqueline Bograd Weld

See also Abstract Expressionism; Painting and Sculpture; Pollock, Jackson.

Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim (August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy's father was of Swiss-German Jewish origin, and her mother Jewish, German, and Dutch.

Contents 1 Inheritance, involvement in the art/writing community 2 Collecting, before World War II 3 Plans for a museum 4 The collection, after World War II 5 Private life / gossip 6 Portrayals 7 See also 8 References 8.1 Footnotes

Inheritance, involvement in the art/writing community

At the age of 21 Peggy Guggenheim inherited a small fortune, but as the less-wealthy branch of the family, it was an amount far less than the vast wealth of her father's siblings.

She was a clerk in an avant-garde bookstore when she first became enamored with the members of the bohemian artistic community. In 1920 she went to live in Paris, France. Once there, she became friendly with avant-garde writers and artists, many of whom were living in poverty in the Montparnasse quarter of the city. Man Ray photographed her, [1] and was, along with Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp, a friend whose art she promoted.

She became close friends with writer Natalie Barney and artist Romaine Brooks, and was a regular at Barney's stylish salon. She met Djuna Barnes during this time, and in time became her friend and patron. Barnes wrote her best-known novel, Nightwood, while staying at the Devonshire country manor, 'Hayford Hall', that Guggenheim had rented for two summers.

Collecting, before World War II

In 1938 she opened a gallery for modern art in London featuring Jean Cocteau and began to collect works of art. After the outbreak of World War II, she purchased as much abstract and Surrealist art as possible.

Peggy Guggenheim opened the gallery Guggenheim Jeune in London in January 1938 — the name being quite ingeniously chosen to associate the epitome of a gallery, the French Bernheim Jeune, with the name of her own well known family. The gallery on 30 Cork Street, next to Roland Penrose's and E. L. T. Mesens' show-case for the Surrealist movement, the London Gallery, proved to be quite successful, thanks to many friends who gave advice and who helped run the gallery. Marcel Duchamp, whom she had known since the early 1920s, when she lived in Paris with her first husband Laurence Vail, was taken on to introduce Peggy Guggenheim to the art world; it was through him that she met many artists during her frequent visits to Paris. He taught her about contemporary art and styles, and he conceived several of the exhibitions held at Guggenheim Jeune.

The gallery's opening show was dedicated to Jean Cocteau. It was followed by exhibitions on Wassily Kandinsky (his first one-man-show in England), Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen and several other well known and some lesser-known artists. Peggy Guggenheim also held group exhibitions of sculpture and collage, with the participation of the now classic moderns Antoine Pevsner, Henry Moore, Henri Laurens, Alexander Calder, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Kurt Schwitters. She also greatly admired the work of John Tunnard (1900-1971) and is credited with his discovery in mainstream international modernism.

Plans for a museum

When Peggy Guggenheim realised that her gallery, although well received had made an actual loss of £600 in the first year, she decided to take up this idea and spend the money in a much more practical way. A museum for contemporary arts was exactly the institution she could see herself supporting. Most certainly on her mind were also the adventures of her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, who, with the help and encouragement of Hilla Rebay, had created the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation two years earlier. The main aim of this foundation had been to collect and to further the production of abstract art, resulting in the opening of the Museum of Non-objective Painting (from 1952: The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum) earlier in 1939 on East 54th Street in Manhattan. Peggy Guggenheim closed Guggenheim Jeune with a farewell party on 22 June 1939, at which colour portrait photographs by Gisèle Freund were projected on the walls. She started making plans for a Museum of Modern Art in London together with the English art historian and art critic Herbert Read. She set aside $40,000 for the museum's running costs. However, these funds were soon overstretched with the organisers' ambitions.

In August 1939, Peggy Guggenheim left for Paris to negotiate loans for the first exhibition. In her luggage was a list drawn up by Herbert Read for this occasion. Shortly after her departure the Second World War broke out, and the events following 1 September 1939 made her abandon the scheme, willingly or not.

She then "decided now to buy paintings by all the painters who were on Herbert Read's list. Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day."^[1] When finished, she had acquired ten Picassos, forty Ernsts, eight Mirós, four Magrittes, three Man Rays, three Dalís, one Klee, one Wolfgang Paalen and one Chagall among others. In the meantime, she had also made new plans and in April 1940 had rented a large space in the Place Vendôme as a new home for her museum.

A few days before the Germans reached Paris, Peggy Guggenheim had to abandon her plans for a Paris museum, and fled to the south of France, from where, after months of safeguarding her collection and artist friends, she left Europe for New York in the summer of 1941. There, in the following year, she opened a new gallery which actually was in part a museum. It was called The Art of This Century Gallery. Two of the three galleries were dedicated to Cubism and Surrealism, with only the third, the front room, being a commercial gallery.

As a result of her interest in new artists she was instrumental in advancing the careers of many important modern artists, including the American painter Jackson Pollock, the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, the sound poet Ada Verdun Howell and the German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in 1942.

The collection, after World War II

Following World War II — and her 1946 divorce from Max Ernst — she closed The Art of This Century Gallery in 1947, and returned to Europe; deciding to live in Venice, Italy. In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale and eventually established herself in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal.

Her collection became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant amount of works by Americans.

By the early 1960s, Peggy Guggenheim had stopped collecting art and began to concentrate on presenting what she already owned. She loaned out her collection to museums throughout Europe and America, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was named after her uncle. Eventually, she decided to donate her large home and her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on her death.^[2]

Grave of Peggy Guggenheim, next to a plaque remembering her dogs

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is one of the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century. Pieces in her collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Peggy Guggenheim lived in Venice until her death in Padua, Italy. She is interred in the garden (later: Nasher Sculpture Garden) of her home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (Inside the Peggy Guggenheim Museum), next to her beloved dogs.

Private life / gossip

Starting in late December 1937, she and Samuel Beckett had a brief affair.^[3]

Peggy Guggenheim's first marriage was to Laurence Vail, a Dada sculptor and writer with whom she had two children, Michael Sindbad and Pegeen Vail. They divorced following his affair with writer Kay Boyle, whom he later married.

She married her second husband, Max Ernst, in 1942 and divorced him in 1946.

In her autobiography, she claims to have had affairs with numerous artists and in return many others, including artists, have claimed affairs with her. She is even mentioned as having had affairs with fictional characters, for example William Boyd's Nat Tate. ^[4]

She has eight grandchildren: Clovis, Mark, Karole and Julia Vail, from her son, and Fabrice, David and Nicolas Hélion and Sandro Rumney from her daughter.

She also has seven great nieces and nephews: Gabrielle, Chantal, Maya, Daniel, Michael, and John.

Portrayals

Peggy Guggenheim is portrayed by Amy Madigan in the movie Pollock (2000), directed by Ed Harris, based on the life of Jackson Pollock.

A play by Lanie Robertson based on Peggy Guggenheim's life, Woman Before a Glass, opened at the Promenade Theatre on Broadway, New York on March 10, 2005. It is a one woman show, which focuses on Peggy Guggenheim's later life. Mercedes Ruehl plays Peggy Guggenheim. Ruehl received an Obie award for her performance.

See also

• The Art of This Century Gallery
• Surrealism
• Abstract expressionism
• Max Ernst
• Wolfgang Paalen

References

• Mary V. Dearborn, Affairs of the Art: Mistress of Modernism, The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, ISBN 0618128069)
• Anton Gill. Art Lover : A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim (New York, NY: Perennial. ISBN 0-06-095681-X)
• Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy, the Wayward Guggenheim (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986)
• Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands, eds. (2005). "Peggy Guggenheim & Fredrick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century" (exhibition catalogue), Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection | ISBN 0-89207-320-9

Footnotes

1. ^ Peggy Guggenheim: Confessions of an Art Addict: 69.
2. ^ Go Go Guggenheim - The New York Review of Books
3. ^ Anton Gill. Art Lover : A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim. New York, NY: Perennial. ISBN 0-06-095681-X. 
4. ^ William Boyd: Nat Tate: American Artist, 1928–1960, 21 Publishing Ltd, 1998

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