Having recently spent so much time with my new British friend Jessica Rolls, I’ve noticed that the voice in which I think is now speaking to me with an English accent. I realized this last night when I was lying in bed and began laughing out loud when the voice said to me “Gee, isn’t it a quite a shame that you haven’t written a bit on Peggy’s life yet?”
On that note, I want to begin this post by thanking a good friend Shifra Bronznick who gave me Confessions of an Art Lover, one of Peggy’s autobiographies, as a graduation and going away gift. Here are some of the facts and fun anecdotes that I learned from the autobiography, which I’ve already read twice. (By the way, for all of you art lovers and art lover wannabes out there, this book is a total must; it’s hilarious and it captures Peggy’s passion and spunk…)
Peggy was born in 1898 to what she describes as “two of the best Jewish families,” the Guggenheim’s, a metal owning family, and the Seligman’s, a banking family. Between loosing her playboy of a father to the Titanic catastrophe and having an entirely overbearing mother, Peggy claims to have had an excessively unhappy childhood. However, lucky for Peggy, at age 21 she gained access to her trust fund, making her financially independent and enabling her to move to Europe, where she took on the persona of the Peggy we now all know.
Upon moving to Europe, Peggy first settled in Paris where she met and married the American Dada writer and artist, Laurece Vail, with whom she had two children Sindbad and Pegeen, (to whom a small room in the PGC is dedicated). Through Vail, Peggy met Marcel Duchamp who became a lifelong friend and art advisor, helping Peggy to develop her artistic taste and build her tremendous collection. After seven years of marriage to Vail, Peggy and Vail divorced and she moved to London were she began a five-year relationship with English writer John Holmes, who died tragically young during a routine surgery. Peggy felt badly about his death throughout her life because he was her one true love and she knew that he passed because he was not sober during the procedure, due to their hard-partying ways.
After Holmes’ death Peggy opened her London Gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, with the help of Duchamp. (It was around this time that Peggy took British customs to court and won regarding the art case: see previous post.) After a year and a half Peggy closed Guggenheim Jeune because it proved to be much too expensive, as she ended up being the primary buyer of the exhibited works. In fact, Peggy anonomously purchased one work from every artist in every show at her gallery, in an effort to encourage the artists and support their movements.
After closing Guggenheim Jeune, Peggy decided to open a museum of contemporary art in London to house her collection and serve as an education forum. Given that art prices were good because of the economic hardships that lead up to WWII, Peggy determined that she would purchase one work of art a day until the opening of the museum, (which is when the Brancusi story comes in). Unfortunately, before the museum was able to get off the ground, Peggy was forced to hide her works in a barn in the South of France, (as the Louvre deemed her works too recent to be worthy of their storage space,) and seek refuge in the United States, so as not to be persecuted by the Nazis.
In 1941, Peggy arrived in New York, where she helped save a number of European Jewish artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married shortly after his arrival in New York. In New York, Peggy decided to open a gallery called Art of This Century. The gallery was unlike any other in terms of its interior decoration, which cost Peggy a fortune. Peggy says opening night was a real gala, “[I] wore one of my Tanguy ear-rings and one made by Calder, in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and abstract art.” The first show was dedicated to her collection and the second to the objects of Laurence Vail, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, (whose boxes, which I find to be some of the most fun art in the collection, are on the fireplace in Peggy’s living room). Her third show was dedicated to the works of thirty-one women artists—amazing for the time—but unfortunately lead to the end of Peggy and Earnst’s marriage, as Earnst began an affair with one of the women whose work was in the show.
After that, Peggy focused the gallery shows on rising American talent, which is when she became heavily involved with Pollock, (not romantically,) and held his first one-man show, (see Pollock/Peggy post). During this period she also staged the first exhibitions for a number of young American artists such as Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Clifford Still. Because of this, I like to think of Art of This Century as the launching pad for abstract expressionism and Peggy, the mother of the movement.
In her autobiography Peggy says that her gallery had gained so much popularity that she was working around the clock and began feeling like a slave, and moreover she says, “Much as I loved Art of This Century, I loved Europe more than American and… couldn’t wait to go back.” So, in 1948 when Peggy was invited to exhibit her collection in the Greek Pavillion of the Venice Biennale, as the Greeks were in the midst of a civil war and could not be present, she made her big move.
In 1949 Peggy purchased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the home in which she spent the rest of her life. People were intrigued by Peggy and longed to visit her home, so in 1951 she began opening her home to the public during the summers for just a few hours a week. Of this time she joked, “Anyone is welcome to visit the gallery on public days, but some people, not understanding this, think that I should be included as a sight.” In other words, Peggy had become a full blown celebrity.
Despite having a tenuous relationship with her uncle Solomon Guggenheim and the staff of his museum, in 1969 Peggy graciously bequeathed her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, under the condition that it would forever remain in Venice.
In 1979 Peggy passed away, however just before her death, Gore Vidal asked her how she was doing, to which she responded, “Oh, for someone dying, not bad.” And that was Peggy, a woman who embraced every experience life threw her way…
1. Young Peggy, 1924.
2. Peggy with children Sindbad and Pegeen Vail, late 1930's.
3. Peggy's Art of This Century, 1942.
4. Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, 1990's.
5. Peggy in her home beside works by Calder and Picasso, 1964.
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