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>> Home / Archives for Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim

October 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

poor little rich girl

Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 – putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn’t understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor’ side of the family.

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismThe first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends – Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.

They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous – Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway – all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as “one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known”

There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.

It’s a life of living in rented houses – in France, England, Switzerland – wherever is fashionable – making visits to America, endless parties, oceans of Champagne, violent rows, fights in restaurants, sexual infidelities – and nobody in sight engaging anything remotely like paid employment.

When John Holmes died unexpectedly (largely of alcohol poisoning) she replaced him with Douglas Garman, another would-be writer, and under his left-wing influence she even joined the Communist Party. A further succession of weekend (and week long) house parties ensued. And rather like the Bloomsbury Group they combined their promiscuity with a curious form of ‘keeping up appearances’ in a bid to preserve social respectability. In common with aristocratic practices, the children produced in these alliances were billeted in outhouses, sent off to boarding schools, raised by paid help, and put unaccompanied on trains to travel half way across Europe at holiday times.

When she got rid of her third abusive husband she began, at forty, what was to become her life vocation. Advised by Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery on London devoted to modern art – and surrealism in particular. She began serious collecting, and quickly ammassed a large collection of works by its foremost practicioners, most of whom she knew personally.

In fact many of them either had been or would become her lovers, because free of marriage, she began a mid-life career of sexual emancipation which few would be able to match. Her list of conquests is almost endless: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett.

By 1940, living in France, she was under serious threat from the Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to realise that she was Jewish. So like many other people she moved to the south then emigrated to America – cleverly arranging for her collection of art works to be sent as ‘household effects’ to avoid tax. Having assembled the collection as a work of love, she wished to put it on show, and despite all the odds she did so in 1942 in New York.

Her concept was novel: it was not just a museum type exhibition, but a living gallery which promoted the work of new young American artists alongside her examples of European art. The gallery was designed to be interactive, and it was a huge success. New York life suited her: she continued to bed men at a prodigious rate, and at one time she lived with a homosexual man with whom she went out on fishing expeditions to pick up sexual partners who they shared.

She exhibited and established the reputations of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. This was the period in which abstract expressionism swept American modernism into the limelight, propelled by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. [See Tom Woolf’s The Painted Word for a sceptical view of the same period.]

And yet almost immediately after the war ended, having established this influential presence in the USA, she closed up shop and decamped to Venice, where she opened the museum that now bears her name. Despite attempts from friends and family alike to deflect her from her purpose, she kept the collection intact, and it now stands as a testament to her personal vision.

In fact last time I visited the gallery it struck me how it encompassed quite a short period of art and a part of the modernist movement which now seems rather tacky – with all the mumbo-jumbo of ‘the unconscious’, the empty posturing of ‘manifestos’, and jejune works by second-rate painters. So the collection is quite an accurate reflection of her life, the later years of which were spent as the grand old lady of the international art scene. But behind the public front of naked sunbathing on the roof of her Grand Canal Palazzo, her gay assistants, and being punted around in the last private gondola in Venice, her real concerns were those of many other elderly ladies the world over – her pet dogs (Lhazo apsos) her wayward children (daughter dead from drugs) and the loneliness of old age.

Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK

Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism, London: Virago, 2004, pp.448, ISBN 1844080609


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Filed Under: 20C Literature, Art, Biography, Lifestyle Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, Modernism, Peggy Guggenheim, Surrealism

Women, Marriage, and Art

July 15, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Mistress, Muse, Mrs, and Miss

Here’s a sample of recommended studies featuring women, marriage, and art. Women not as artists themselves so much as the wives, mistresses, and the muses who have inspired creation. Some have had the misfortune to partner with monsters of egoism, but others have been women brave enough to defy social norms and live successfully in an unconventional manner.

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the WindThe Bride of the Wind   [full review]
Alma Mahler was an aristocratic beauty from Vienna with an appetite for painters, musicians, and artists. Her first major lover was Gustav Klimt: (that’s her portrait in his famous painting The Kiss). She then went on to marry the composer Gustav Mahler, and when Mahler died she started an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoshka. Once again, she inspired one of his most-admired paintings, The Bride of the Wind. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she refused, saying “I only marry geniuses”. He went off to war and was wounded. Whilst he was convalescing, she married the architect Walter Gropius, who was also serving in the war. When he was summoned from military duty to the birth of their second child, he was disappointed to learn it was not his own, but that of her current lover, the writer Franz Werfel. She stuck with Werfel through the 1920s and 1930s, but when he died after the second world war, she didn’t even go to his funeral.
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon US

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismMistress of Modernism   [full review]
Peggy Guggenheim was a rich American heiress – though she protested that she was from the ‘poorer side’ of the family. The first of her many husbands introduced her to the bohemian art world of post-war Paris in the 1920s, and from that point onwards she made a habit of collecting modern art (mainly surrealism) and turning her favourite painters into lovers and husbands. Her list of conquests is fairly extensive: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. She established the museum in Venice that now bears her name, and ended her days surrounded by gay assistants and being punted round the canals in her own private gondola.
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov   [full review]
This is a fascinating biography of a woman who devoted the whole of her life to her husband’s literary production. Vera Slonim became Vladimir Nabokov’s secretary, his editor, proofreader, and literary agent, his driver, protector (she carried a revolver in her handbag) and sometimes she even delivered his lectures. She was just as imperious and aristocratic as he was, but gave herself up entirely to his ambitions. Nevertheless, after suspecting him of dalliance with a young American college girl, she took the precaution of attending all his classes to keep a watchful eye on him.
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon US

Among the Bohemians Among the Bohemians   [full review]
The early part of the twentieth century was a period that gave rise to bohemianism in British life. People (and women in particular) kicked off the social restraints that were still hanging round as a shabby residue of the Victorian era. Most of the female figures Virginia Nicholson deals with in this study were artists and writers: Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, painters Dora Carrington (who lived with two men) Nina Hamnet and the illustrator Kathleen Hale (who was secretary and lover to Augustus John) and the society Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had affairs with both her gardener and Bertrand Russell amongst others. These women took up smoking, wore jumble sale clothes, drank to excess, tried drugs, and refused to do any housework. Very politically incorrect role models – but fascinating characters.
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon US

Parallel Lives Parallel Lives   [full review]
This has become a classic study of four Victorian marriages. John Ruskin was an authority on art and beauty, but he is famous for never having consummated his marriage. What’s not so well known is that when his wife divorced him on these grounds, he offered to prove his virility in the courtroom. John Stuart Mill also had a marriage blanche – but on the principle that men ought to compensate women for the social injustices they suffered. George Eliot on the other hand defied conventions by living with a married man, then when he died married a man twenty years younger than herself. She meanwhile wrote some of the classics of nineteenth century English literature.
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon US

Singled Out Singled Out   [full review]
By the time the first world war ended, more than three-quarters of a million young British servicemen had lost their lives. The single young women who had ‘kept the home fires burning’ and waited for them faced an alarming shortage of marriage prospects. And matrimony was the one escape from the shame of spinsterhood offered to women at that time. This searching original study by Virginia Nicolson (grand-daughter of the painter Vanessa Bell) tells the stories of women who were forced to invent careers for themselves. They became teachers, librarians, journalists, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo. Some sacrificed emotional ties to further their careers; others invented new forms of friendships and intimacy.
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon US

Uncommon ArrangementsUncommon Arrangements   [full review]
In an age where one third of marriages end in divorce, it’s refreshing to look at alternative arrangements some people have explored. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry all frioends with each other. Ottoline Morell helped her husband cope when he revealed to her that both his lovers were pregnant at the same time. Una Troubridge remained loyal as lesbian ‘wife’ to Radcliffe Hall (of The Well of Loneliness fame) whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year long affair with a young Russian girl. Troubridge however took economic revenge when she was made executrix to her ‘husband’s will. Katie Roiphe’s study of radical alternatives to conventional marriage in artistic circles includes a fair amount of emotional suffering and masochism – but it’s certainly thought provoking to see what lengths people will go to in enjoying a little sexual self-indulgence.
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


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Filed Under: Biography, Lifestyle Tagged With: Alma Mahler, Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Literary studies, Modernism, Parallel Lives, Peggy Guggenheim, Vera Nabokov, Virginia Nicolson

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