Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim

by Jacqueline Bograd Weld

Born into one of America's wealthiest, most eccentric families, Peggy Guggenheim was to abandon the cloistered world of her childhood and hurl herself into a life of adventure. In 1920, at age twenty-two, she set sail for Paris. There she met her first husband, the irrepressible and charming Laurence Vail, who introduced her to the enchanted, hypnotic whirl of the Left Bank. With him she befriended the writers, musicians, and artists who were transforming the age: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and many more. After indulging in a series of scandalous love affairs, Peggy opened an art gallery in London in 1938, where she continued to cultivate a taste for the avante-garde in art and men. She began buying paintings from each artist she showed, launching a lifetime addiction to art. WW II trapped her in France, where she went on a buying spree, snapping up "a picture a day" by modern masters including Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, and Miró. Escaping to New York with her husband-to-be, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, she opened a spectacular gallery, Art of This Century. There she showed her own collection alongside works by young, undiscovered artists of the New York School: Motherwell, Hofmann, Rothko, and the tormented but brilliant Jackson Pollock. It was Peggy who gave Pollock his first one-man show, who believed in his genius when no one else would buy his work, and who became his patron, supporting him in exchange for dozens of paintings. Soon after the war ended, Peggy left New York to go house hunting in Venice. She installed herself and her fabulous collection in a palazzo on the Grand Canal and proceeded to surround herself once again with outrageous personalities and a persistent whiff of scandal. The Venetians called her "the Last Dogaressa" and the great and famous made her house an obligatory pilgrimage. Today the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the foremost assemblage of modern art in Italy and a major tourist attraction.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Art

747 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2016

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

Peggy Guggenheim was shockingly fickle. I was hoping to relate to her, but the more I read about her the more I disliked her. What a messy private life. I also didn't realize how late in life she decided to start an art gallery.

[Alex Scroxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bittersweet book. Growing up in what we would now recognise as a deeply abusive family environment, Peggy Guggenheim seems to have retreated as an adult into a fantasy world of her own creation, unable to relate to anybody on any terms other than her own, a place in which she ruled by fiat, eventually becoming in her turn a perpetrator of abuse against her own children and those around her. I was left with the impression of a deeply sad life.

And yet reading this I couldn't help but be beguiled and charmed by the tale she had to tell. Peggy's influence on 20th Century art is quite staggering in its significance, and although at times overlong, The Wayward Guggenheim blends Peggy's tragic personal tale, peppered with insights from the people who knew and loved her, with a candid history of modern art and those who created it.

[Frankie]

It's pretty obvious I am not going to pick this up given I haven't touched it since like... mid-June.

Also yes I log my DNF's into my yearly challenge because I *tried* to read them and that's good enough for me.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim

This is a wonderful collection of how the story of modern art became a collection. While Peggy was not a great mother, she certainly had an excellent idea for talent and saving many great artists and their art in the early days of WWII. She was cheap and generous, never loving, probably never really loved. A very interesting book.

[Trent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating material, and often interestingly told. (Occasionally, one wishes the biographer had better control of her narrative and was a more facile prose stylist.)

[Victoria Lane]

Extraordinary detailed bio, every cafe and cocktail mentioned. Yet overall a downbeat portrait of a woman driven more by self interest than artistic vision.