Art Lover: A Biography of Peggy Guggenheim

by Anton Gill

Peggy Guggenheim's tempestuous life (1898-1979) spanned the most exciting and volatile years of the twentieth century, and she lived it to the full. How she became one of the century's foremost collectors of modern art-and one of its most formidable lovers-is the subject of this lively and authoritative biography. Her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, went down with the Titanic en route home from installing the elevator machinery in the Eiffel Tower, and it was in Paris in the 1930s that the young heiress came into a small fortune and began to make her mark in the art world. Uneasily married to the alcoholic English dilettante writer Laurence Vail, she joined the American expatriate bohemian set. Though her many lovers included such lions of the worlds of art and literature as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst (whom she later married), Yves Tanguy, and Roland Penrose, real love always seemed to elude her. In the later 1930s, Peggy set up one of the first galleries of modern art in London, quickly acquiring a magnificent selection of works by Picasso (who snubbed her), Magritte, Miró, and Brancusi, and buying great numbers of paintings from artists fleeing to America after the Nazi invasion of France. Escaping from Vichy, she moved back to New York, where she was hugely influential in assisting the beginnings of the new American abstract expressionist movement (in particular, Jackson Pollock). Meticulously researched, filled with colorful incident, and boasting a distinguished cast, Anton Gill's biography reveals the inner drives of a remarkable woman and indefatigable patron of the arts.

Genres: Art, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Memoir, Art History

480 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2001

About the author

Anton Gill worked for the English Stage Company, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the BBC before becoming a full-time writer in 1984. He has written more than twenty books, mainly in the field of contemporary history.

aka Oliver Bowden

Reviews

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say. Peggy Guggenheim is one of the most fascinating, driven, entertaining, annoying, dysfunctional, delightful, frustrating, self-centered, philanthropic women I have ever encountered in a biography. Her friends, acquaintances, lovers and enemies find heaps of reasons to love her and hate her. Gill covers a lot of ground in these 480 pages, drawing on Peggy's own memoir, other bios of her, countless other books and interviews to present Peggy's 80-year life. (I had the good fortune to visit the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice a few months ago, and knew I had to delve deeper into the person who could have created such a lasting monument to some of the great European and American artists from 1910-1950.)

If I had any major criticism of the text, it's that the first 164 pages are devoted to Peggy's first 39 years, not a particularly noteworthy time of her life unless you are keen on failed marriages, who's cheating on who, and the challenges of being a poor little rich girl. Not until Peggy purchases Jean Arp's polished brass "Head and Shell" in 1937 is she smitten with the Art Collector bug and begins amassing the modern art collection that will grow to 189 pieces, valued today at about $500 million, give or take a Pollock or de Chirico. Peggy's fecund period, her raison d'etre, was the decade 1937-1947, in which she assembled most of her collection and rubbed shoulders (and more) with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Renee Magritte, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Salvador Dali, Constantin Brancusi, Vasily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and many more. The heart of the book -- why Peggy is called 'Art Lover' -- is this 10-year stretch. Had this decade been covered in more depth and the remainder of the book proportionately reduced, it would have been a far better read. But Gill is to be commended for his wide-ranging research and his 5-page bibliography whetted my appetite for more.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading about Peggy's life and her artist friends was facinating, make sure to pick up a companion art book so you can look up the artwork as you read the book ( a tip from a friend)

[Lulufrances · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now I know more than I ever wanted or needed about Peggy Guggenheim and yes. What to say.
I feel somewhat sorry for her?! How much can one person experience in a lifetime (not neccessarily in the negative, just in general) and still seem to be so unfulfilled. But then again, this is just a biography and I obviously never knew the real person.
All in all, only read this if you are reeeally interested in her or the art of the beginning of the 20th century (I am interested in at least the latter; and was always slightly intrigued by the former).
The first half was especially interesting, the last half was pretty tedious and it all took me way too long to read.
It did make me go and look up Dorothea Tanning though, and I do really enjoy her art - I wish art history would be rewritten faster currently, to include more females.

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea why, but I am totally obsessed with Peggy Guggenheim. I love when crazy people are brilliant (and I can't get enough of her life in venice). I read way too many Peggy biographies after we got back from venice and this is my favorite. It relies heavily on Peggy's biography (including what was added and deleted through the various publishings) as well as other perspectives that frequently completely counter what she believes to have been true in her life. While my other historical women role models would role over in their graves, I truly believe that this is a woman you should know about.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Peggy had been trying to get [Somerset Maugham] to call at her palazzo for years, and eventually, having refused many times, Maugham accepted an invitation. Peggy saw him coming up in a gondola, whereupon she ran out onto the terrace, unscrewed the phallus from [Marino Marini's] Angel and waved it in the air at Maugham, crying, 'I've got you at last!' Maugham took one look and told the gondolier just to row on without stopping."

[Kerry Pickens · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must admit I didn’t know much about Peggy Guggenheim before I read this book, and she was both a tragic figure and a feminist leader. It was actually her uncle Solomon Guggenheim through his Guggenheim Foundation that funded many art museums. Peggy is mainly known for a museum in Venice, but she held some exhibitions for women artists only. There was a dark side to the Guggenheim family, including her mother Florette (Seligman) who obviously was autistic as well other women in the Seligman who had autistic traits. The Seligmans married their cousins so there was a double down on these traits through inbreeding. Peggy had the habit of “tongue thrusting” which is today considered stimming behavior. Peggy was a tall, slender woman but she was no beauty. She was known for having a large bulbous nose. She was extremely promiscuous even while married, and a great deal of this book is who was having an affair with who. Peggy’s father drowned in the Titanic, and her part of the family were not as wealthy as their relatives. The Guggenheims made their fortune uranium mining and lead smelters which we know today causes a great deal of environmental damage and health risks. Peggy did not start purchasing art until her forties, and because of WWII she was able to purchase the art for low prices. She did help many artists leave Europe to escape the Nazi invasion including her husband Max Ernst. The book was interesting but I thought it could have been shorter, and I would have like to have seen more photographs of the artists and art. I watched the documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict and that film helped me get more of sense of who she was. For example, she went to finishing school and spoke in this accent that is called the Mid-Atlantic dialect that common at that time among the upper class. Katherine Hepburn, for example, had that type of accent. I also learned from the film that Peggy promoted the actor Robert De Niro’s parents who were both artists.

[Thea Stayton · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is true that this is a very important biography: Anton Gill had access to letters and personal papers never seen before and spoke with many of the younger family members and friends mentioned in the book—the thoroughness and intimacy of the details cannot be overstated, and if he kept his notes, I’m sure they will be invaluable for art historians for decades to come.

But it is NOT a great biography; for two very important reasons.

The first is perhaps a curse of abundance. Peggy associated at one time or another with such a large swath of artists, musicians, and writers who had a huge influence on their time and on the arts in general, that if there’s any sliver of Western culture one is interested in, Peggy probably touched it. The gossip is irresistible. Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jackson Pollock, John Cage, and members of the French Resistance are just a few of the people who she loved, helped, hosted, partied with, fought with, or bought their work. And Gill mentions every single incident. He cannot resist. If someone stays over or if Peggy goes on a trip, he has to mention it. Sometimes that is fascinating, but it bogs down the story of the actual subject of the book.

Which leads us to flaw number two: Gill very clearly dislikes Peggy Guggenheim, the woman he is writing about. He seems like he’d much rather write about the people she knew than Peggy herself. Though he acknowledges the very misogynistic world she moved in, when anytime a woman asserted power or independence, people took offense regardless if she had the right to do so, he loses no opportunity to hold those offenses against her. Peggy was a deeply flawed person, and there is no doubt that those flaws had real and painful consequences for people around her, including people she loved. However, that does not diminish her real accomplishments and contributions to modern art, though Gill seems to wish it did. He seems to repeat every nasty comment or rumor about her he can, often un-cited, and insists on assuming most of them are true. Any acknowledgment of good she does, he gives grudgingly and follows up with a failing as quickly as possible. He cannot bear the idea that any of her art collecting or her galleries were more than the result of the influence of more intelligent men—though she seems to have had an unerring knack for finding just the right people to advise her. He insists repeatedly that she didn’t like other women, between mentioning her continued friendships and correspondence and mutual help with women who stayed in touch with her for decades. She could be penny pinching and cheap, though the fact that she lived in a world that constantly tried to take control of a woman’s money away from her is never acknowledged. He is so petty, that when he quotes a letter she wrote answering a question about a curator she employed twenty years before and begins a statement, “As far as I can remember...” he accuses her of being disingenuous!
The only times he writes about her with any empathy is describing the poor treatment she suffered from family, lovers and husbands. She was tough and could dish it out as well as take it. So a lot of the book reads as nasty gossip instead of an insightful portrait of an important figure in the modern art world.

Someday, there will be a great biography that gives this complicated, brilliant, and troubled woman the treatment she merits, and Gill’s work will be an important source for it.

[Sally · Rating 1 out of 5]

P Guggenheim had such a fascinating life that it s tempting to over rate this book.
The whole thing deserves to be rewritten to take out to and fros which are hard to follow, irrelevant stuff and just basically to get the thing back into swing.

[Matthew Wilder · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is hard to do a bio of Peggy Guggenheim because it is hard to get inside her head. It is not clear that she got inside her head. There was an insane amount of promiscuity, a lot of champagne drunk and sleepy afternoons in posh or posh-adjacent places, and finally the purchase of a lot of pictures, with Peggy chasing after the same loveless, narcissistic, closed-off, not-as-great-as-he-thinks-he-is dude in another body. But self-examination? Not much. Maybe a bit near the end, when her daughter Pegeen, whom she truly loved, died, many speculated of suicide. But in the end Peggy shrunk into her carapace in her sinking-into-the-sea palazzo in Venice. She shrank inward, and eventually gave away her collection to the family foundation. She was a defining figure of twentieth century art but who was she? We must do further work to find out.

[Katie Johnstone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couldn’t get over the author’s misogyny and anti-semitism, though it could just have been his poor narrative style, failing to assert his own authorly voice over the voices he cites in telling the story of Peggy. A fascinating flawed and none too likeable character, though how much of that is the author’s fault remains unclear. A very thorough history.

[Hermien · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of visiting the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed this detailed biography. Certainly a fascinating woman who lived in interesting times.

[Adrianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tak nudna książka, że zapomniałam, że mam ją w domu i teraz muszę się tłumaczyć w bibliotece.

[Lee Kofman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved, but in an excruciating way, this biography. This book arose all my feminist instincts. The poor woman’s fault was she wasn’t attractive enough, but she was rich and therefore used and abused by all those men, all her lovers. And yet she didn’t resent them enough in my view and kept supporting some of them. Oh… I often gritted my teeth (almost literally) as I kept reading this biography. In artistic and intellectual terms, this is an erudite book. I love the comprehensiveness of context it sets to Peggy’s life – history of art, wars, other notable people’s lives, countries and continents. I just wanted a bit more insight into Peggy’s… soul, I guess! But maybe it’s too much to ask from a conventional biography.

[Amy Talluto · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good solid biography...but the book is long and especially dragged a bit in the last sections (perhaps because her life slowed down as well). The author doesn't pull any punches and shines a blazing spotlight on Guggenheim's flaws, bad relationships and poor decision-making and parenting. On one hand, this makes for juicy reading at times, but then the flip side is that also makes her a less sympathetic character. I ultimately didn't end up caring that much about her and so my heart wasn't caught up in her story like in other biographies. It could be that in life she was un-relatable, and so in print, she appears equally so.

[Phil Brett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Peggy Guggenheim's life does seem to be best summed up by, paraphrasing, the quote, that money can't buy you happiness but you can be miserable in comfort. Rich through no real effort of her own, she lived a soulless and unhappy life. People used her for her money, and she used her money to use others. To be honest, with the interesting people surrounding her, I expected her life to be more interesting. With cultural upheavals, not to mention such epoch defining events as WW2, here was a setting for an engrossing tale. I didn't find it to be. She wasn't really that interested in them. Indeed, it ironically comes across to be a similar thing with her connection with the art. She knew what she liked, but unlike the road sweeper or office worker who might say that, she had the wealth to buy, collect and show the art, which she liked. That said, if anyone is lucky enough to Venice, her collection is worth visiting.

For anyone interested, I have written something on the power and prestige of art http://www.culturematters.org.uk/inde...

[Sjoerd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't deny that Art Lover is a very well-written biography. It contains detailed accounts of every stage of Peggy's life, with anecdotes, comments on the events by other people of her time, and the occasional observation of the author. The main reason for the three-star rating is that the book was too long and in-depth to really be enjoyable - it felt more like a historical work or study book. Perhaps this was even Gill's intention, but it wasn't why I picked up the book. There must be more than a hundred names in the book that I forgot again right after reading them, and there were too many accounts of things I just didn't think were that interesting to know.

This might be the perfect book for someone already well-acquainted with the 20th century modern art circles and who is interested in getting a clearer picture of the world at the time, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who'd simply want to know a bit more about the life of Peggy Guggenheim.

[Wyatt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think a biography can succeed if the author is wholly unimpressed by and uninterested in its subject, which sure seems to be the case with Anton Gill and Peggy Guggenheim, the subject of Art Lover. But Gill’s not only bored by Peggy; he also has little to say about the art Peggy collected or even about Venice, the enchanting city of which Peggy has become an icon. What we are left with is a chronology of life events and lists of artists and their works with little explanation or context. Gill clearly thinks Peggy was shallow and her collection unremarkable; unfortunately, his book was too.

[Constance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ms Guggenheim has been a fascinating mystery to me. This book tells it all. She was a fierce protector of her art; more so than her children which she had two, Pegeen and Sindbad.

She was a woman in a man's world of art and knew all the artist of the 20's and 30's. It was interesting to read her interactions with the greats!

She was a sexual being and did not hesitate to let you know. Many of her affairs were well known and she blatantly played them out for all to see and hear.

The only negative for this book is the length. Mr Gill could have cut it down to 300+ pages.
He constantly introduced people and one became confused as to who they where and why they were in the story. I would recommend to anyone who is in love with the arts and artists. There is a full array of interesting tidbits that will leave you laughing or crying.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned so much from this book that I would have given it 5 stars if the biographer had been a little more generous to Peggy, and accepted some of her idiosyncrasies with a little less criticism.

Her history and life and the people she knew were fascinating. The fact that she wasn’t pretty doesn’t necessarily explain why she had many lovers - maybe she was just enjoying herself. And how many times do we have to hear that she was a bad mother? I enjoyed the detailed profile of her but it seemed that unfair attention was given to these flaws.

[Colleen Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-researched biography of a fascinating woman! I really enjoyed it overall, but had an issue with the way the author presented opinions as facts, like, saying Peggy had no right to interfere in her daughter’s marriage and that she was a bad mother. While I do agree with both these opinions, I feel that biographers should not present their own thoughts and opinions of their subjects as facts.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always enjoy reading about the art scene in 1920s and 1930s Europe so this was exactly my jam. Guggenheim's life was fascinating, although you get the sense she was _a lot_, and Gill respects her eye for art and passion for collecting even as he documents some of her more sordid exploits. As Lawrence Salander said of Guggenheim: "Don't dismiss her as a rich fool just because she wasn't too sure of herself and lived a flamboyant life in defiance of her straitlaced upbringing. . . . If I achieved half as much I'd consider my life nourishingly creative."

[Margo · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. Too much detail. I should probably pick up at some point because I was just getting g to the part where she hung out with the surrealists. Not sure Peggy is all that interesting. Her money was interesting - just enough to give her a life of leisure and collecting, but not enough to truly put her in the under-wealthy.

[Mary Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her story is amazing but sad. The book may be a bit tedious if you don't have some interest/knowledge of modern art. Particularly good if you have visited her collection or intend to. There is a lot of material here covering art, parenting, love, sex, relationships, WWII and so much more.

[Sue Garrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

The look into the modern art world of the first half of the 20th Century was interesting. But Peggy herself was a selfish, pathetic character who just happened to have the money to hang around this artistic community and support a couple artists, including Jackson Pollack.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peggy was a character. The book is fascinating from so many perspectives. The two wars, Paris, London, New York, and certainly the art. Peggy was a very tough, but hell bent on being taken seriously as a collector when there were few women in the world that collected. Worth the read.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting story of her art collecting, but I just didn't like Peggy. Among many faults she was self-centered and spoiled. I couldn't wait to finish slogging through the 400 pages of way too much detail, about her "way too man" relationships and sexual conquests.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

NOT read until the end. Initially fascinating story about unique women has become a chaotic list of men, places and friends without any special meaning. Maybe her life was exactly that, but , on the other hand, I don't need tobread about on next 70 pages.

[Zabette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating biography of a damaged but undaunted person who was a patron of modern art. The film documentary about Peggy is also highly recommended.

[Marypeitz peitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly thorough. She led a weird and amazing life and collected a great cross section of art

[Kathleen McRae · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about a very messed up lady with very low self esteem and what she did to try and be somebody.