One Painting a Day
Peggy’s Venice
“It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left in your heart for anyone else.” — Peggy Guggenheim
Increasingly the idea of a “collector and patron” is someone who buys and spends; Peter Brandt is collector and patron because he owns more than a thousand works and opened a by appointment gallery space in his back garden; Eli Broad has more than two thousand works and opened a private museum, and so he too is accorded the same appellation. It’s important to remember that a true patron offers more than just a healthy bank balance. Now the art world is nothing more than a manufactured landscape; an asset class. Peggy Guggenheim was a patron in the truest sense of the word, credited with launching the careers of so many modern masters — Max Ernst (1891-1976) (who grudgingly agreed to marry her when threatened with deportation, and never got out of his habit of addressing her as “vous”), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970), amongst others — who at the time hadn’t even been identified as great artists. She was a unique entity and in the high-rolling world of twentieth century art patronage, she bought art not as an investment, but because it moved her. “I soon knew where every painting in Europe could be found,” she wrote in her autobiography, “and I managed to get there, even if I had to spend hours going to a little country town to see only one.” Without Guggenheim the contemporary art world, as we now know it, would look very different. The American writer Gore Vidal (1925-2012) once described her “as the last of Henry James’s transatlantic heroines, Daisy Miller with rather more balls.”
When Guggenheim started to collect in the 1930s, she had a relatively conservative taste for old masters. The Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) — one of her many lovers — talked her out of it, persuading her to dedicate herself to contemporary art, as it was “a living thing”. With a lingering “inferiority complex” (reinforced by the condescension of so many of the people around her) it wasn’t until Guggenheim was nearly 40 years old, a divorced mother of two living in Europe, that, at the suggestion of the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), she made her first purchase, Shell and Head (1933), a small piece by Jean Arp, of which she said, “I fell so in love with it. The instant I felt it I wanted to own it.” Duchamp would become the first and arguably the most important of Guggenheim’s advisers. “At that time I couldn’t distinguish one thing in art from an-other” Guggenheim would later recall. “Marcel tried to educate me. To begin with he taught me the difference between abstract and Surrealist art.” In the years that followed she would forge a career unlike any woman before her; “Her choices affected the course of twentieth-century art history,” wrote one of her biographers, Mary V. Dearborn.
With a fortune inherited from her father (who went down with the Titanic in 1912, having relinquished his place on a lifeboat — and his fur coat — to his mistress, a French singer, Léontine Aubart (1887–1964)), she boldly resolved to “buy a picture a day,” and in doing so, Guggenheim was quickly able to amass seminal works by the likes of Georges Braque (1882-1963), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and Fernand Léger (1881-1955) (whose Les hommes dans la ville (1919) she bought on the same day Hitler invaded Norway; the painter claimed to be “astonished by her sang froid”). An obsessive collector, ruthless in her pursuit of art, she patrolled the ateliers of Paris, snapping up works that didn’t sell and for which there was, as yet, no market. “During the war I wanted to buy a Brancusi,” Guggenheim said. “Bird in Space was one of [his] favourite sculptures. I used to go and see him every day ... the awful thing is, I thought if I had an affair with him the Bird would be cheaper.” On the day the Germans invaded Paris, she visited his studio, where he carried it out in his arms and gave it to her with tears strolling down his cheeks; “I never knew if it was because he was parting with me or his favourite Bird,” Guggenheim would later recall. Only then did she leave Europe for her native New York, her burgeoning art collection obscured as household goods so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Nazis. She was a modern woman at a time when the idea of a modern woman didn’t exist, and had an influence in London, Paris, New York and finally, Venice, where she would spend the last three decades of her life, along with her 14 Lhasa Apso dogs (among them Cappucino, Pegeen, Madam Butterfly, Emily, and Sir Herbert), which she often bought to art openings and are buried alongside her, behind a gazebo in the garden of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Peggy Guggenheim with at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (c. 1950) © Archivio CameraphotoEpoche/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Study for Chimpanzee, oil and pastel on canvas (1957) by Francis Bacon, part of the Peggy Guggenheim collection
Guggenheim first came to Venice in 1924, while there on her honeymoon with her first husband (whom she said she needed to “lose her virginity”), the Dadaist and writer Laurence Veil (1891-1968). “I have never been in a city that gave me the same sense of freedom as Venice,” Peggy wrote rapturously, “Venice is not only the city of freedom and fantasy but it is the city of pleasure and happiness.” When the Venice Biennale resumed in 1948 after the Second World War, Greece, then ravaged by its own civil war, was unable to contribute. Turning the loss into an opportunity, Secretary General of the Venice Biennale, Rodolfo Pallucchini — on the advice of Italian artist Giuseppe Santomaso (1907-1990) — invited Guggenheim to display her private collection in the Greek Pavilion. Europe had yet to see a collection so representative of “non-objective art” and of the avant-gardes, from Cubism and Futurism to Dadaism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. It was a landmark event, the first display of a comprehensive modern art collection in Italy after two decades of dictatorial regime; showcasing art banned as Entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”) by the Third Reich. “The pavilion was one of the most popular of the Biennale,” Guggenheim proudly noted in her memoirs. “What I enjoyed most was seeing the name of Guggenheim appearing on the maps in the public gardens next to the names of Great Britain, France, Holland … I felt as though I were a new European country.”
Truly ahead of her time, Guggenheim’s pavilion captivated and confused its audience in equal measure. The 1948 press titled: “The Exhibition of Wonders or Guggenheim’s Noah’s ark?,” and cruelly succinct, “Apologies, We Laughed.” Nevertheless, the exhibition was Guggenheim’s official introduction to the city as a progressive, forward-thinking patron and collector; confirmation that she had found a home for herself and her art. Among the pieces presented at the Biennale, were three paintings by Jackson Pollock; not only did it mark the artist’s debut on the European art scene, but offered an insight into the latest developments in American art. (In 1945, Pollock had famously signed a contract with Guggenheim to give her most of his output in return for a $2,000 loan towards the down payment on a rundown house and adjacent barn in Springs, a small town in East Hampton.) Pollock had recently developed the technique of poured paintings — for which he is now so celebrated — but which at the time shocked collectors and critics with its blatant rejection of the traditional artistic canon. Much to Pollock’s chagrin, the Italian critic Bruni Alferi described his work as: “Chaos. Absolute lack of harmony. Complete lack of structural organization. Total absence of technique, however rudimentary.” Despite the bad press, all was forgiven as Guggenheim recalls, when Alferi “saved a dismantled Calder mobile from being thrown away by the workmen, who thought that it was bits of iron bands which had come off the packing cases.”
Guggenheim had already opened her pioneering New York gallery, Art of This Century, a radical space designed by the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965). Of the opening night, she wrote: “I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.” It was a meeting place and nexus for exiled European artists and played a pivotal role in launching the new American avant-garde. By 1948, following the Venice Biennale, Guggenheim had established herself as an intrepid, even visionary collector of modern art. According to the critic Clement Greenberg, she gave “first showings to more serious new artists than anyone else in the country”. Yet, despite the speed of her gallery’s success, Peggy had grown tired of life in New York. The city’s very male, misogynist art scene had always been inclined to belittle her achievements, subjecting her to blatantly sexist and anti-Semitic attitudes (her surname, indistinguishable to some ears from “Rich Jew”), writing off her gallery as a mere plaything, or rich woman’s vanity project. Guggenheim had been unashamed of her promiscuity (which, unlike equality, was in reach for women of her generation), and her recently published memoir, Out of This Century (1946) with its colourful admissions of her love affairs, had further undermined her reputation. When asked how many husbands she had had, the twice-married Guggenheim quipped, “D’you mean my own, or other people’s?” Such behaviour was, at the time, considered unacceptable for a woman of 50, and even the surrealists — whose work she collected — kept faith with the idea that a woman looked after the house and raised children. Pollock joked that you’d have to put a towel over her head to fuck her; this was despite the fact that when he was a nervous, unknown artist, working as a handyman at the Museum of Non-Objective Art (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for its principal benefactor), Guggenheim paid him $150 a month to do nothing but paint.
Empire of Light, oil on canvas (1953-54) by René Magritte, part of the Peggy Guggenheim collection
Venice seemed to Peggy a more welcoming, forgiving place, and in 1949 (reportedly for $60,000) she bought the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni — or palazzo non finito as it was known in the neighbourhood — where she would settle for the rest of her life, displaying her unparalleled collection of 326 artworks amid a melange of dogs and personal possessions. An unfinished building on the eastern stretch of the Grand Canal, it had been built around 1748 for an aristocratic Venetian family. A long, low structure, only one storey high, it stands out for its unusual restraint against the riotous profusion of Gothic palazzos and grandly classical façades that surround it. With its clean lines and gleaming white walls, many visitors assume it must have been built during the last century. It might even have been demolished, and excised from history had it not been for its three twentieth century female inhabitants.
The first was the Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), one of the wealthiest women in Europe, who, having fallen for the legendary charms of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) (a prototype fascist who paved the way for Mussolini), turned her back on conventional society to realise her ambition of becoming “a living work of art”. Casati spent recklessly and hosted parties of unimaginable extravagance; for an eighteenth century costume ball she took over the whole of Piazza San Marco, hiring two hundred black servants, all dressed by Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst (1866-1924), to hold back the throngs of onlookers. Luisa’s money was of course finite, and in 1924 she was forced to relinquish the palazzo. It was acquired by Cara Delevingne’s great aunt, Lady Doris Castlerosse (1900-1942), a London socialite and serial mistress, who, having slept her way through English society, fulfilled her ambition to marry a lord. During the 1930s, as her reputation began to tarnish and middle age loomed, she looked to Venice as a city where she might relaunch herself. Her palazzo refurbished to a luxurious summer salon — paid for by one of her wealthy lovers — Castlerose embarked on a career as a Venetian salonnière. War put an end to her aspirations, however, and also to her life — she took an overdose of sleeping pills at the Dorchester Hotel in 1942, shortly after her return to London. The palazzo was thus on the market again, lying empty and neglected, when Guggenheim came to view it late in 1948, in the hope of reinventing her own troubled life.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2008) © AndreaSarti/CAST1466/Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, Venezia
In 1951, Guggnheim’s collection was installed in the palazzo, an avant-garde salon, open to the public, free of charge, three afternoons a week, from April to October. Her collection was said to have “more than once shocked Venice’s Renaissance soul.” Transformed into a modern art museum, Pollock shared space with Picasso, Dalí with Cornell, Braque with Ernst, and so on. “[Guggenheim] was a single, 50-year-old divorcee, bringing with her a collection of artwork that was still considered strange, especially in the context of Venice and its connection to the old masters,” says Francine Prose, author of Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern. For the most part, however, her collection remained a private one, with friends and acquaintances arriving from around the world to enjoy the intimate setting: the young poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001) recalled an entrancing visit that involved “wild alone ball dancing” with Guggenheim “through Picassos and Arps and Ernsts”. During her thirty years in Venice, Guggenheim grew into a kind of grande-dame eminence. Guests at her palazzo might dine with Truman Capote (1924-1984), Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) or Henry Moore (1898-1986); yet, it was almost as if she wanted to stay living in a certain period of time, those post-war years during the peak of her notoriety, and for e.g. when Andy Warhol (1928-1927) came to Venice to see her collection, she refused let him in.
Before Guggenheim died, she donated the palazzo, and its contents, to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, started in 1937 by her uncle, who opened the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1959 (“My uncle’s garage, that Frank Lloyd Wright thing on Fifth Avenue,” as she called it). “It was rather a joke,” Guggenheim once said about leaving her collection to the Foundation, “since I wasn’t on very good terms with my uncle.” Guggenheim lived and breathed art and the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni serves as a living monument to a woman whose acumen and progressive spirit continue to inspire generations of collectors worldwide. Guggenheim had an urge to unnerve, she was the enfant terrible of the art world, and throughout her life she exhibited art that was truly new and disturbing; she told an interviewer in 1976, “I was totally free financially, emotionally, intellectually, sexually”.