Modern art’s midwife
Peggy Guggenheim used her wealth to save and nurture early 20th-century geniuses
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict Rating:
Starring: Peggy Guggenheim, Marina Abramovic Director: Lisa Immordino Vreeland Duration: 96 minutes
It’s safe to say there have never been many like Peggy Guggenheim. The daughter of one wing of the New York Guggenheim empire — their name is probably most famous now for its art museums, and though Peggy ended up in the same business, her path was full of far more left turns than her wealthier uncles and cousins — she was born into one of those rare lives of grandiose sadness.
Her father died on the Titanic (while travelling with his mistress, to boot), an extra thorn for an isolated, lonely child, and the first in a series of tragedies that would follow her much of her life. Surrounded by the type of, ahem, eccentrics that can bloom only in the fertile soil of never having to worry about money, she still managed to become her family’s black sheep, and responded by diving headlong into one of the most vibrant art scenes the world has ever produced.
Escaping to Paris in the 1920s, she palled around with the legendary group of expats and modernist geniuses who lived in the city — in the rediscovered interview that is woven through this documentary, she remarks on playing tennis with Ezra Pound, and we get a glimpse of photos of her by Man Ray — gradually using her money and desire to prove her family wrong to become, as she puts it, a midwife to art.
Largely disregarded even by some of the people in her circle — once, when showing up to buy a Picasso, he told her the lingerie was on another floor — she responded with a mixture of wild sexual adventures and a spine of pure steel: She had affairs with the likes of Samuel Beckett, which seems like the perfect way to blow off steam when you’ve spent most of 1939 flitting around Paris buying up surrealist and cubist masterpieces on the cheap to try to save them from the incoming Nazis, who viewed it as “degenerate art.”
Facing ridicule from the more stuffy shirts — including her uncle Solomon, who opened the Guggenheim in New York — she nevertheless forged ahead, showing pieces in London and ultimately acting, as one art historian notes, as one of the key links between the European avant-garde and the burgeoning U.S. abstract expressionism movement.
She even helped Jackson Pollock buy his first house, in addition to pushing him and many others on her socialite contemporaries.
There is still a lingering bit of dismissal even in some of the modern talking heads who look back on her legacy, but there’s no denying her impact, on full view at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice.
In recounting her wild life, we’re also given, by virtue of her sharp eye and indifference to criticism, a tour of some of the premiere artists of the first half of the 20th century, which she promoted, bought and encouraged. That she pulled it off backwards and in heels, well — as I said, there weren’t and won’t be many like her at all.