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.
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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, 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]
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. 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
- Peggy Guggenheim: Confessions of an Art Addict: 69.
- Go Go Guggenheim - The New York Review of Books
- Art Lover : A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim
- William Boyd: Nat Tate: American Artist, 1928–1960, 21 Publishing Ltd, 1998