Peggy Guggenheim: a spoiled socialite, an activist, a collector, and a muse.

by Irina Sheynfeld, January 21, 2021

Peggy Guggenheim’s famous memoir “Confessions of an Art Addict” (1960) reads like a gossip column on who was who in the art world in the first half of the 20th century. Anyone who mattered or had any impact on the history of modern art was involved, connected, or in bed with Peggy. Her juicy volume begins by announcing, “I come from two of the best Jewish families. One of my grandfathers was born in a stable like Jesus Christ, or, rather, over a stable in Bavaria, and my other grandfather was a peddler.”[1] Both grandfathers ended up amassing enormous fortunes and eventually Peggy inherited some of it, not enough to build a museum-like her uncle Solomon with the help of his lover-curator Baroness Rebay, but enough to open galleries, support artists like Pollock, and eventually open her collection for the public in a palace in Venice, where she was buried with her Lhasa Apso dogs. It is almost ironic, for someone who was so openly Jewish, to choose an almost Egyptian burial with pets and in her own backyard. In fact, if one visits The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, it is as if Peggy’s joyful spirit never left. The white marble palace is a shining concoction of the best painting and sculpture produced in the   20th century and brought together by the passion of a single woman, who not only had a vision but a passion and was not afraid to follow it. 

In 1938, Guggenheim started her first venture, the Guggenheim Jeuene Gallery, which was operational until the beginning of WWII and exhibited works by Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Kurt Schwitters, and Constantin Brancusi, among many others. Guggenheim confessed, “I bought one work of art from every show I gave, so as not to disappoint the artists if I were unsuccessful in selling anything.”[2] Since Guggenheim Jeuene was not a financial success, Peggy decided to open a museum instead.  She was buying art in Paris until three days before Hitler marched into the French capital. Finally, when she decided that it would be safer to go to America, she was able to smuggle her entire collection to the States. She also helped the Breton family and Max Ernst to escape occupied France paying for their passage to New York.

Guggenheim had a notorious relationship with many of the artists she supported, and she was married twice, first to the artist Lawrence Weil, who was considered the King of Bohemia, and then to Max Ernst, the leader of the Surrealist movement. Judging from Peggy’s memoirs both marriages were stormy and exciting affairs, which ended quickly. “I always found husbands much more satisfactory after marriage than during, she noted”[3] When in 1941 Guggenheim arrived at NYC harbor, her two grown children Sinbad and Pageen, her first and her second husband accompanied her as well. 

Peggy’s next adventure, the gallery The Art of This Century opened its doors on October 20, 1942. Guggenheim hired Frederic Kiesler, “a little man with Napoleonic complex,”[4] who was one of the most advanced architects of the time to create a revolutionary setting for her gallery. Kiesler, who was given a blank check and only one condition to leave pictures unframed, created one of the most theatrical and original exhibition settings to this day. Several of his plywood chairs are on display in The MoMA right now. During the opening night, The Art of this Century sold tickets for a dollar, and proceeds went to the Red Cross to help the war effort in Europe. 

Peggy didn’t succeed in making her gallery a financial success. Similar to what happened in London, she was often the only customer at her own gallery. With the help of her many artist friends, she often made visionary and bold decisions with her purchases and built a collection of modern art that could rival any museum. When Jackson Pollock was introduced to Guggenheim, he had just lost his WPA income and was working as a carpenter at uncle Solomon’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the later Guggenheim Museum. Peggy gave Pollock a contract for one year of one hundred and fifty dollars a month. “From then on," she wrote,   "until I left America in 1947, I dedicated myself to Pollock.”[5] She also commissioned the artist to create a mural-size painting for the lobby of the building where she lived and financed the down payment for Pollock and Lee Krasner's house in East Hampton, where he later would paint his most important mature work.

            Who was Peggy Guggenheim? Was she a businesswoman, a spoiled socialite, an activist, a collector, or a muse? Perhaps she was all of the above, but most definitely a passionate art lover. As the first director of The Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr wrote in the introduction to her autobiography, “Courage and vision, generosity and humility, money and time, a strong sense of historical significance, as well as of aesthetic quality – these are factors of circumstance and character which have made Peggy Guggenheim an extraordinary patron of twentieth-century art.”[6]

Footnotes

[1]  Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict. The Ecco Press. 1997. p 11

[2]  Ibid.,. p 49

[3] Ibid.,. p 41

[4] Ibid.,. p 99

[5] Ibid., 106

[6] Ibid., p 11