After returning from her summer as an intern at the Guggenheim Collection in Venice, our third-year student Millie Cluzan discuss the life and collecting of the inimitable Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979)
This summer I was lucky enough to work as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. One particularly special opportunity was the chance to deliver a talk on Peggy’s career as a collector, and to enlighten visitors as to how Peggy, a woman with no formal training in art history, could amass so many canonical modern artworks; and why these artworks reside in Venice to this day.
At the palazzo in Venice I gathered my crowd, under the shade of the round stone pergola in the Nasher Sculpture Garden (one of the few leafy, green spots to be found in the city), and I told them her story – one as colourful as the Miró paintings her Venetian palazzo enshrines.
Peggy was born in 1898 to the famous New York city Guggenheim tribe. Her affluent parents, Benjamin and Florette, gave her and her sisters a happy childhood until 1912, when the first of what would become several personal tragedies occurred in her lifetime. Her father, a passenger on the Titanic, sacrificed his place on a lifeboat which wealth had afforded him. Following his death financial support was provided by her Guggenheim uncles, who helped to keep the family afloat. Although she was an heiress, she was never one to have unlimited funds. 1919 saw her come into her inheritance, and with financial independence came great eagerness to escape the bourgeois mould laid ahead of her. She began work at an avant-garde bookstore, The Sunwise Turn, allowing her to cultivate her burgeoning interests in art history through exposure to the works of Bernard Berenson.
With growing angst to escape the conformity of her lifestyle, she resolved to move herself to Paris, where she fully integrated into bohemianism upon meeting and marrying the Dada poet and artist Laurence Vail, dubbed ‘The King of Bohemia’ by those within his circle. Their union introduced her to a plethora of important creatives and artists, notably Marcel Duchamp, who was to become her lifelong friend and advisor. Sadly, Vail was an abusive alcoholic. Their turbulent relationship lasted seven years and ended in divorce.
After their separation Peggy moved to London and considered how she might utilise her inheritance; she had interests in opening either a publishing house or an art gallery, though she eventually decided on the latter on advice from her friend Samuel Beckett, who urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art, as it was truly “a living thing” (the implication being that she could have a significant amount of influence on it, if it were properly nurtured). Cementing this decision was Duchamp, who proposed she support the two main tendencies of modern art: Surrealism and Abstraction. Peggy’s infant gallery Guggenheim-Jeune was born in 1938, named as such to call to mind the 1863 Parisian Bernheim-Jeune. Thus she ingeniously inserted her family’s name into the creation myth of early modernist art.
A year of financial hardships ensuing from difficulties selling the art, and a great penchant for buying the work for herself, saw the closure of the Guggenheim-Jeune and the beginnings of her internationally renowned collection. She conceived plans to open a museum of modern art in London. With her shopping list in hand compiled by Herbert Read and revised by Duchamp, Peggy travelled to Paris, where she resolved to buy one painting a day, sometimes from the comfort of her own bed. The art capital in 1939 made this light work, for it was the ideal place and time to collect (her artist friends, under the constant threat of Nazi invasion, were desperately selling works). She astonished Fernand Leger by buying his Men in the City on the same day that Hitler invaded Norway. The war broke out, and the Louvre’s rejection of Peggy’s request to store her collection – they deemed it unworthy of saving, an anecdote she later in life relished in recounting – put her plans to open a museum on hold. The need to protect her collection saw Peggy return to her native New York, cleverly smuggling it to the US disguised as “household goods”.
Peggy was eventually able to open her dream gallery in 1942, Art of this Century. However, this wasn’t a collection of mere personal significance; it clearly displayed her significant role in the transoceanic circulation of art by establishing a clear dialogue of modern art between Europe and the US. At the gallery’s opening, she wore one earring by Yves Tanguy and another by Alexander Calder, communicating her dedication to both surrealism and abstraction.
Peggy notoriously loved dressing up her life’s narrative as much as she adored dressing herself. Following her husband’s infidelities with Dorothea Tanning, featured in her Exhibition of 31 Women, she famously remarked “I realised that I should have had only 30 women in the show”. However, one area of her career rightly sensationalised is her patronage of Jackson Pollock. She gave him his first one man show and provided a monthly stipend, allowing him to paint full time in his Long Island barn. Her support was instrumental to his success.
When the war was over, Peggy greatly wished to return to Europe. The perfect opportunity came in the form of the 1948 Venice Biennale, for which she was invited to show her collection in the Greek Pavilion due to the country being in civil conflict. Exhibiting at the Biennale was a means for Peggy to test the waters in Venice before deciding to settle their permanently. She was delighted to see her name listed in the catalogue alongside Germany and Italy, as if she were her own European country. She found her home and gallery space, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in 1949, where she would spend the last thirty years of her life, opening her home to the public for three days each week.
Peggy’s ashes are interred in the very spot I delivered my talk, next to those of her fourteen beloved dogs. My wish to be selected for the internship came from the deeply exciting prospect of broadening my theoretical knowledge through a rare engagement with the artworks of my passions, but also a great passion for Peggy herself. I could really feel her presence while going about my daily gallery duties. This is something I had the joy of sharing with my fellow interns; we all felt a great sense of pride in keeping her legacy alive through delivering our talks to an engaged public and caring for the artworks she devoted her life to collecting for the enjoyment of generations to come. It is in this way that working at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection was a hugely rewarding experience.
Dispatches in Art History 