Guggenheim, Peggy (1898–1979)

views updated

Guggenheim, Peggy (1898–1979)

American art patron and collector. Born Marguerite Guggenheim in 1898 in New York City; died on December 23, 1979, in Venice, Italy; middle child and one of three daughters of Benjamin Guggenheim (partner in family-owned American Smelting and Refining Company) and Florette (Seligman) Guggenheim ; niece of Irene Guggenheim and Solomon R. Guggenheim of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; educated by private tutors until age 15; graduated from the Jacobi School, New York City, 1915; married Laurence Vail (a writer), in May 1922 (divorced July 1930); married Max Ernst (an artist), in December 1941 (divorced 1946); children: (first marriage) Sindbad Vail (1923–1986); Pegeen Vail (1925–1967, who married Jean Helion and Ralph Rumney).

Celebrated for amassing one of the world's foremost collections of 20th-century art and for subsidizing artists Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, among others, Peggy Guggenheim was also renowned for her flamboyant and colorful lifestyle. Born into wealth in 1898 in New York City (her father made his fortune in the family-owned American Smelting and Refining Company), she described her "gilt-edged childhood" as lonely and unhappy despite the company of an older and younger sister. "I have no pleasant memories of any kind," she wrote of her early years, "and it seems that it was one long-protracted agony." She was tutored at home until the age of 15, when she was enrolled in the Jacobi School, a private school for Jewish girls on New York's West Side. Each summer, the family traveled to Europe, and Guggenheim later credited her father with initiating her interest in art. Upon his death aboard the ill-fated Titanic in 1912, Peggy Guggenheim inherited $450,000. A similar amount left to her by her mother in 1939 made her a wealthy woman, though her fortune was often reported to be much larger than it really was.

After graduating in 1915, Guggenheim set out to liberate herself from what she considered a stifling Jewish bourgeois background. In 1919, after working in her cousin's radical bookshop, she traveled to Paris where she stayed for the next 21 years. There, she met the writer Laurence Vail, who introduced her to the bohemian group of writers and artists that would become her circle of friends. In 1922, she married Vail and had two children, Sindbad and Pegeen. Their troubled relationship ended in divorce in 1930, after which Guggenheim embarked on a long series of tumultuous and mostly unhappy love affairs, including a liaison that gained her a stepdaughter whom she raised with her other children.

By 1937, Guggenheim was living in England and searching for something useful to do. Inspired by her earlier readings of Bernard Berenson's books on Italian Renaissance art and the paintings she had seen on her travels, she decided

to open a modern-art gallery. By her own admission, she knew frightfully little about modern art at the time, but with encouragement from Samuel Beckett, her latest paramour, and guidance from the surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp, she opened the Guggenheim-Jeune Gallery in London, on January 24, 1938. Focusing as she did on the avant-garde work of her friends, her exhibition paintings rarely sold, so Guggenheim bought a piece from each show so that the artists, which included the likes of Kandinsky, Klee, and Miro, would not be disappointed. Thus, her collection began.

In March 1939, with an expanded dream of establishing a museum of modern art, Guggenheim enlisted the help of literary and art critic Herbert Read, then editor of Burlington Magazine and one of England's leading proponents of modern art. He agreed to serve as director of the museum and also drew up a list of painters whose representative work would cover all the important art movements since 1910. With the onset of the war, Guggenheim put the museum project on hold and, after closing the gallery, went back to Paris where, following Read's list, she began purchasing pictures at the amazing rate of one a day. As the Germans approached Paris, Guggenheim asked the Louvre to help her hide her collection, but the museum did not deem the collection worth saving, so she brought it to the United States (shipped as "household goods"). Now involved in a stormy relationship with artist Max Ernst, whom she married in 1941, Guggenheim set up housekeeping in a mansion by the East River and set out to complete her purchase of pictures by the painters on Read's list. With Ernst and surrealist painter Andre Breton, she also prepared a detailed catalogue of the artists she collected. The document, called Art of This Century, became an important source for students of the modern-art movement.

"Art of This Century" was also the name Guggenheim selected for her posh new gallery on New York's West 57th Street, which she opened in October 1942. Designed by Frederick J. Kiesler, of the Columbia School of Architecture, the setting was as sensational as the art treasures housed within. (The Cubist Gallery, for example, had blue canvas walls, with unframed paintings suspended in mid-air on strings. Even the pedestals holding the sculptures were suspended, giving them the appearance of floating mid-air.) In addition to exhibiting her collection, Guggenheim also presented solo shows of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Hans Hoffmann, and other artists that later became part of the influential group known as "The New York School." She was particularly devoted to Pollock who became "the central point" of her gallery. As Pollock's patron, Guggenheim also acquired a sizeable number of his paintings, but later gave many of them away, unaware of the large sums of money the works would bring after his death.

In 1946, after her divorce from Ernst, Guggenheim closed the gallery and moved to Europe once again, where she showed her collection in a special pavilion at the 24th Venice Biennale. The collection was subsequently exhibited in museums in Brussels, Zurich, Amsterdam, Florence and Milan. Guggenheim eventually settled in Venice, purchasing Palazzo Venier dei' Leoni, an 18th-century palace on the Grand Canal, where visitors were invited to view her collection three days a week. Aline B. Saarinen , in The Proud Possessors, called Guggenheim's collection one of the best in Europe. "Nowhere else in Europe is there a similar historic survey of modern art, nor one that exhibits the Americans—like Pollock and Rothko—who are major figures in the international world of art." In later years, Guggenheim felt that the modern-art movement had fallen into decline, and she turned her attention to pre-Columbian art as well as her seven Lhasa terriers. Guggenheim, who was made an honorary citizen of Venice in 1962, was known there as "L'Ultima Dogaress" (The Last Duchess). She died in 1979, leaving her art collection to her adopted city.

Guggenheim chronicled her life in two provocative tell-all autobiographies, Out of This Century (1946) and Confessions of an Art Addict (1960).