A nasty woman of some importance
Richard Shone
PEGGY: THE WAYWARD GUGGENHEIM by Jacqueline Bograd Weld
Bodley Head, f15
There is a great deal of penetration in this book, little of it psychological. Peggy Guggenheim's two great interests were art and men and the function of this biography seems to be to detail her purchases in the first and her conquests in the second. Naturally, the two coincided and motiva- tions became blurred. As the famous pic- ture collection swelled, so did the tally of men; both cost her money for, as Mary McCarthy commented, Peggy Gug- genheim 'supported everyone she'd slept with and everyone who'd slept with anyone she'd slept with.' This remorseless catalo- guing of her 'affairs', from afternoon sofa- gropes to her two marriages, would count for nothing if we were not dealing with a woman of some importance. Her claim on posterity rests on her running of two exceptionally lively galleries (one in Lon- don followed by one in New York) and the assembly of a large collection of modern art now permanently on view in Venice in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni where Peggy Guggenheim lived for 30 years until her death in 1979.
A superb catalogue of the collection by Angelica Rudenstine testifies to Peggy Guggenheim's strengths and weaknesses as a collector. She was given good advice and usually took it; she was as ruthless in pursuit of a masterpiece as she was in chasing a man (see for example, Samuel Beckett episode); and though her aesthetic taste might falter, affections over-riding her eye, she had, as Clement Green- berg noted 'a sort of smell for life that made her recognise vitality and convic- tion.' Thus she assembled an array of works by Picasso and Braque, Kandinsky and Mondrian, Ernst and Tanguy, Pollock and Rothko. The character of her opera- tions is contained in her celebrated remark that 'the day Hitler walked into Norway, I walked into Leger's studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars.' As knowledge grew of this massive spending spree, she was eager- ly sought out by artists and dealers. Only Picasso rebuffed her (`Lingerie is on the next floor', he told her at a gathering in his studio). Her intention, made with full Guggenheim beneficence, was to found a museum of contemporary art, but the second war put an end to her plan to establish it in London, where Herbert Read had relinquished his editorship of The Burlington Magazine at the prospect of becoming director of the museum. The collection was eventually opened to the public in Venice in 1951 but its future was by no means secure; in the end the family won the day and the palazzo and its contents are owned by the Solomon Guggenheim Museum.
Peggy Guggenheim's background and early life held equal measures of farce and tragedy. Through the marriage of her parents, the very rich but boorish Gug- genheims became allied to the Seligmans who had established themselves as pre- eminent in New York Jewish society in all of 60 years; naturally they looked down on the Guggenheims with ineffable distaste. Most of them were rich, several were philanthropic, all of them crazy. Uncle Washington Seligman ate charcoal through the day for his digestion and shot himself dead in the Hotel Gerard; Peggy's mother Florette, a certifiable bore according to her daughter, constantly repeated things in threes ('We're having lunch, lunch, lunch, with many, many, many') was fixated on social position and believed Lysol was a cure for everything; Peggy's sister Hazel supposedly dispatched both her children from the roof of a Manhattan hotel; certainly she sounds awful enough to have done it. Escape from family life, if not from family money, was inevitable. In the early 1920s Peggy moved to France (but her mother came too) and married a feckless Bohemian Wasp with a touch of croissant, Lawrence Vail, by whom she had two children. The saga of her later relations with Vail and his second wife Kay Boyle (whom Peggy detested) and the two childen (one of whom, Peggeen, killed herself) courses through the book dirtying already muddy waters.
To look at, Peggy Guggenheim was no beauty, with a bulbous nose she could neither forget nor forgive and a mouth daubed continually with a lipstick called `Eternal Wound'. But she had a good, slim figure and when she wished charm, gaiety and an insinuating manner. There was no shortage of men in her life and she was often to be seen, with Panza-like deter- mination, surging across a crowded room to a man who had caught her eye. Sex and art dominated her otherwise limited con- versation and 'Are you a virgin?' from her shiny lips supplanted more conventional greetings. There were innumerable affairs several of which she catalogued (using fietitious names) in her 1946 memoirs Out of This Century (known in her family as `Out of My Mind'). It included for example, a mild moment of bondage with Roland Penrose which in the later version Confes- sions of an Art Addict (all names supplied) he allowed, so to speak, to stand. Few of her affairs seemed to involve her deeply an Englishman John Helms being the great exception. The composer John Cage was a fleeting object of prey but Peggy gave up thoughts of marriage to him on considering the electric bills. In the end affairs dwin- dled to a likeable Italian gigolo, brief encounters with the Navy and, when sex had finally to be abandoned, flirtations with several international buggers. By then the art collection had gained ascendence and the lbook ends on a positive note.
Jacqueline Weld recounts all this with a certain vicious gusto. She must have real- ised from the start that she had the creation of a monster on her hands. Unwisely, though sometimes amusingly, she has fol- lowed that first impression to the letter. Though there are testimonies to Peggy Guggenheim's good points - her long support of Djuna Barnes, generosity to Ernst and Pollock, her fortitude and humour — the unpleasant aspects are driven home by her friends and enemies quoted from interviews throughout the book. Each change of partner, accident, death and move is commented on from the wings by this group of tricoteuses, all sounding exactly alike. On the other hand, few escaped the last dogaressa's own blade- sharp remarks and desultory behaviour. A touching exception was Peggy's old friend Nellie van Doesburg, widow of the painter, who when passed out drunk at parties could be revived by Peggy pouring brandy on her private parts, an act which in this book must surely be counted as one of kindness.
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