The Peggy Talk

Oh, the Peggy Talk. My old friend.

It seems like an age ago that I was sitting in the Elephant House in Edinburgh reading Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography and being shocked and appalled. Now I think I have to look for a term a bit milder than appalled. Maybe dismayed? Anyway, it's all been put into a bit of context. A lot of stories have been told about Peggy that make it clear that she was not so wrapped up in herself as she would have us think.

Peggy Talks are given twice a day by two different interns at noon and 4 o'clock. As their title implies, they are short talks (about 20 minutes) about Peggy, her life, her collection, and her palazzo. They are the most popular talks, I think, and can also be the most fun. If you had told me this two months ago, though...

This is more or less verbatim how mine go. For proper information, though, I will reccommend her autobiography, Out of This Century, and Peggy Guggenheim: Life of an Art Addict by Anton Gill. Here you go (Ehem):

Peggy Guggenheim was the second daughter of Benjamin, who was the sixth son of Meyer, who was the son of Simon (all Guggenheim). Simon emigrated to the US in the 1840s and started a business importing coffee essence and stove polish. Not the most lucrative of enterprises, and luckily (for them) Meyer took over and started buying mines. Bought one in Colorado (Leadville, go figure), then Alaska, then Chile. By the beginning of the First World War the Guggenheim family owned between 75 - 80% of the entire world's silver, copper and lead. Soooo, that's what we're dealing with here.

Peggy's father, Benjamin, left the family business in 1901, resolving to spend his money a lot more efficiently (read: faster) than the other six brothers. He went down on the Titanic in 1912 after giving his seat on a lifeboat to his secretary (remember that scene in the movie? That was him!). Very noble, but it meant that Peggy, her two sisters, and her mother (Florette Seligmann) were sundered from the rapidly massing mass of wealth of the Guggenheim family. The Seligmanns were also a very old, very wealthy family, but as the Guggenheim family's wealth and fame took over New York, Peggy began to feel herself a bit of a 'poor cousin' and wanted out.

In 1919 Peggy becomes financially independent and heads overseas. On her father's death, the Guggenheim uncles had put together some change ($450,000-ish) in trust funds which she could access sporadically throughout her life. Thus, her money was never unlimited. She heads to Paris, hangs out, is groovy, and meets and marries Laurence Vail, the King of Bohemia. It is through Laurence that Peggy meets probably the most influential person of her life, Marcel Duchamp. He is an advisor to her later in her career, and their friendship outlasts her marriage to Vail, which ends in 1929.

After spending some time in London, and on the advice of her friend Samuel Beckett, Peggy opens an art gallery: Guggenheim Jeune. Like many collectors of her time, Peggy chose to collect modern art, contemporary art for her, because it was 'a living thing' in Beckett's words. Her first show threw her into the headlines, a show of the artist Jean Cocteau's stage pieces for The Knights of the Round Table. A tapestry depicting pubic hair was held up in customs and only released with a solemn promise that it not be shown to the public. Fine then, she says. I will hang it in my office and show it to everyone anyway, and then I will buy it. This starts a bit of a trend. Peggy's next show is Vassily Kandinsky's first show in Britain. It's a retrospective, and so it should be: he is at this point 70 years old. It is a critical success but nothing sells. So poor Vass doesn't feel so bad, Peggy buys Dominant Curve anonymously. And so, at around 40 years old, Peggy Guggenheim begins her art collection trying to make people feel better. Awww.

About a year later all this being nice is taking it's toll and Guggenheim Jeune closes. Peggy decides she's finished with the galeries and wants to open an art museum instead. It's an ambitious plan: contemporary artists would give talks to the public, there would be places to study and learn. She recruits Herbert Read, then editor of the Burlington magazine, to be her director. A list is made of works that she MUST have, checked once, checked twice, and she starts raising funds. Unfortunately, just as everything is ready to go, WWII breaks out. All of a sudden people have a lot more important things to worry about. Peggy has the money, but no museum. So she goes to Paris with the list and buys the works for herself.

It is during this time that most of the works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection were acquired. Peggy resolved to buy 'a picture a day.' She shocked Lèger by buying a work the day Hitler invaded Norway. As Paris was being shelled, she was negotiating a price with Brancusi for his beloved Bird In Space. A bit crass, perhaps, but also astute. And also practical: artists needed the money to get out of Europe. By the time 1940/41 rolls around, the situation is too dangerous to ignore any longer and Peggy, being Jewish, has to also find a way out. She asks the Louvre to store her collection but is denied on the grounds that the paintings are too recent. Fair enough, 'spose. Instead, she rolls the paintings up and sticks them in a barn in Vichy, France, and makes her way back to New York.

In 1942 she marries Max Ernst, who she helped flee Europe, in New York. She has her collection shipped from Europe in crates marked 'household items' and sets up a museum gallery called Art of this Century. It quickly becomes a centre for New York's avant-garde and a place where American artists can not only be exposed to European avant-garde artists, but meet them also. Peggy holds a Spring Salon for young artists with a panel including Piet Mondrian. Jackson Pollock, who was at the time working at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art as a carpenter, enters work. Mondrian encourages Peggy to take him on, and he becomes the first artist in New York to be paid a stipend. She pays him $150 a month allowing him to leave his job and paint. And paint he does. In the years between the 1942 Salon and 1947 when Peggy returns to Europe, Pollock develops the drip style for which he becomes famous. Upon leaving Europe, Peggy arranges for the stipend to be sustained by Betty Parsons, assuring that Pollock always have a shoulder to rest his whiskey on.

Meanwhile, in 1946, Peggy published her memoirs. Out of This Century (catch that?). The rest of the Guggenheim uncles were as shocked as I was at the book and tried to buy the whole print run.

In 1948, back in Europe post-war, Peggy comes to Venice and starts to look for a home. She is invited to show her collection in the Greek Pavilion of the Venice Bienalle (Greece was in civil war at the time). This was the first time that many of the artists represented in the collection (Pollock, Rothko...) were shown in Europe.

In 1949 Peggy buys the unfinished Palazzo Vernier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal where she will live out the rest of her life. She hangs her collection and opens her home to the public starting in 1951 for free viewings of the paintings and sculpture garden. She sunbathes on the roof terrace, she sponsors artists, she raises her dogs. In 1962 she is made an honorary citizen of Venice.

And in 1979, she dies.

But wait! There's more! In 1969, however, she had been invited finally to show her collection alongside that of her uncle Solomon's in his museum in New York. It was on this occasion that she agreed to will her collection to her uncle's foundatoin on her death. With a number of conditions, of course: that it never be separated, that it never leave Venice, and that it be opened to the public at least in summer. Peggy died on December 23rd, 1979 and in April 1980 her home was opened as a museum more or less as we have it today. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Whew. There it is.