Peggy Guggenheim

July 20, 2015
Lively, complex, and inclined to shock, Guggenheim (1898–1979), the modern art collector, emerges as the embodiment of the age in Prose’s (Lovers at the Chameleon Club) judicious biography. Leaning heavily on Guggenheim’s provocative memoir, Out of this Century (1979), Prose reveals the collector as both insecure and irrepressible, someone who continually felt taken advantage of, which was frequently the case, and who seemed to gravitate to social drama. Though she invariably footed the bill and financially supported many people, she was always accused (with its anti-Semitic implication) of stinginess. While she could be reckless and insensitive, Guggenheim was, thankfully, never dull. She counted Herbert Read, Marcel Duchamp, and Alfred Barr as advisers, and Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, and Max Ernst as lovers (she bragged about having slept with more than 400 men). In London, she established Guggenheim Jeune, a gallery that showed Jean Cocteau, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexander Calder. Before the Nazi occupation of France, she rescued works of art and funded artists’ passages to the U.S., the importance of which Prose forcefully brings home. In New York, she founded a completely new kind of art space called Art of This Century, where she promoted an obscure Jackson Pollock. Finally, in Venice, she invigorated the city with her collection and hosted a bustling salon. Guggenheim, though, had a better eye for art than for men. She clung to problematic, if not abusive, relationships. In the description of the collector’s husband Max Ernst beating her while Duchamp looked on, Prose points to the dark underside of these times. Photos.