The heiress who loved living life on the fringe
In viewing Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s informative and engaging documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, one might conclude that the influential art collector and gallerist’s greatest asset was her perennial outsider status.
The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Guggenheim was born into money on both sides of her New York family: from banking on her mother’s, and mining on her father’s. But tragedy struck early as her dad died aboard the Titanic when she was just 13, leaving her with a relatively modest fortune of “only $450,000.”
Not content to settle down and marry a fellow heir, she found her way to Paris in the ’20s, mingling with oddballs all kinds, particularly artists of the European avant garde.
We hear these stories through an array of commentators, as well as from Guggenheim herself via a lost tape containing the last interview Guggenheim ever gave, which Immordino Vreeland found while sifting through the basement of Guggenheim biographer Jacqueline B. Weld.
Meeting Marcel Duchamp was an awakening, we hear; the iconoclast opened Guggenheim’s mind to a whole new world and informing her approach to art forevermore. Although she is said never to have had a particularly keen eye, she surrounded herself well and loved life on the fringe.
There she was hanging with Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett before heading to London to open her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in the late 1930s.
Artists were eager to sell as war swept in, and Guggenheim found herself buying from the underdog surrealists, based on a “consensus of advice” guided by Duchamp.
She moved back to New York in the ’40s, where her Art of This Century gallery caused a stir by showcasing a who’s who of the emerging abstract expressionist scene.
At the forefront was a certain Jackson Pollock.
All the while, Guggenheim was wheeling and dealing, and using her rising art-world clout to lubricate her social life and hyperactive sex life. Despite recurring cycles of family tragedy, the woman knew how to have a good time.
When a rumour is broached of her having slept with groundbreaking musician John Cage, she retorts: “There’s no use putting that in because I only slept with him once.”
Robert De Niro turns up to tell how his mother and father, both artists, exhibited with her.
Guggenheim finally bought a palace in Venice, where she established a museum and cemented her significant place in the history of modern art.
Immordino Vreeland’s actionpacked documentary tells all this and then some, painting a vivid picture of a vivacious woman who blazed her own path from beginning to end.