"If I had one question for Peggy Guggenheim it would be, ‘How was Samuel Beckett in bed?" Lisa Immordino Vreeland follows up her debut, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, with this impressive exploration of the Guggenheim 'enfant terrible'.
Born into the wealthy Guggenheim family – her father famously called for more brandy as the Titanic sunk, it’s her uncle’s name on the New York museum – but Peggy was the black sheep, a rebel who rejected the expected path of marrying into another wealthy family to go her own way. Although knowing little of art, she begins collecting pieces that she likes and makes for Paris in the twenties where she throws herself in with the bohemian lifestyle. She attaches herself to artists who she hopes will teach her something ("…and give me a discount!") and as the Germans approach the capital in 1940, she ensures safe passage to New York for many artists… and her prized collection. From there she sets about opening museums and organising exhibitions for surrealists and cubists, helping to bring the movements and its artists to public attention. She becomes, as she put it, the midwife to art.
Like this year’s terrific Listen To Me, Marlon, Vreeland’s documentary is structured around candid home recordings – the tapes, long thought lost, she made with biographer Jacqueline Bograd Weld circa 1978-79, the last year of her life, are of an intimate nature. Talking heads are largely dispensed with (Robert De Niro pops up) in favour of this 'narration' of sorts over previously unseen photos of Guggenheim and the paintings of the artists she championed. Although she didn’t discover Jackson Pollock, no one believed in him like she did. She bought him a house and studio. She also slept with him. And many others.
Guggenheim is frank about the number of lovers she took, calling herself a nymphomaniac, and while she is prone to name-dropping, the list of famous names is jaw-dropping. But the recordings portray a character totally at odds with one typical of an hoity-toity art world, coming across as unpretentious, unafraid to admit that her knowledge of a movement was sketchy at best and would latch on to anyone who could teach her. She's also open about her family and childhood. A tragic youth involved the suicide/murder, she suffered from depression and had a nervous breakdown. Her "awful" mother in all of this "was no comfort".
Interesting stuff.
