Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), as readers of The Artwork Newspaper will know, is the Venice one and never the New York one, although shortly earlier than her dying she gifted her unfinished palazzo and her assortment, together with the Marini horseman with the famously removable phallus, to the muse arrange by her uncle Solomon. She lived on the coronary heart of the twentieth century: from her father’s dying on the Titanic; by way of her pioneering achievements as a patron and gallerist, displaying avant-garde works in progressive areas and nursing Summary Expressionism into being, devoting a present, 31 Ladies, to up to date feminine artists for probably the primary time anyplace; to a partly peaceable third act (marred by her daughter Pegeen’s suicide, after many makes an attempt, in 1967) in Venice, which had, by the point she moved there after the Second World Conflict, regained its historical standing as a cultural pilgrimage web site.
Reputations and estimations—gossip, within the mistaken fingers—loom giant in any account of Guggenheim’s life. Her mom’s facet of the household seemed down on her father’s for having made their cash in business reasonably than on Wall Avenue; wealthy gentiles seemed down on all of them equally. Her father spent freely, and slept round; not a lot in his life turned him just like the leaving of it, as he tucked a rose in his lapel, lit a cigar and went down with the ship. Guggenheim’s sister, Hazel, was suspected of dropping her two kids off the highest of a constructing. Pegeen would present up in the course of a cocktail party lined in blood.
Guggenheim’s personal sturdy sexual urge for food (“I whispered then,” she says within the current e-book, “I stated the phrases like a vow: I’m—I’m—a libertine”) and typically tangled private life, coupled with the easy reality of her wealth, made her a goal for moochers and freeloaders. Her first husband—Laurence Vail, the “King of Bohemia” and Pegeen’s father, a author and artist of modest achievements (although he did write a roman à clef about their marriage, which I might not thoughts searching down a while, fetchingly titled Homicide! Homicide!)—didn’t at all times deal with Guggenheim kindly.
Artwork-world tabloid fodder
There’s a perception afoot that Guggenheim has been become the art-world equal of tabloid fodder, to the detriment of her accomplishments. Quite a few makes an attempt have been made to set the document straight, from her personal Out of This Century: Confessions of an Artwork Addict (1960) and Mary Dearborn’s Mistress of Modernism (2004) to varied documentaries and the limitless excitable blogposts I got here throughout whereas engaged on this evaluate.
And now, alongside comes Peggy. The novel is rounded with a few unhappy notes: Rebecca Godfrey labored on it for ten years, however died of most cancers earlier than she might end it; Leslie Jamison was commissioned to complete it by her agent. The acknowledgements, of which there are a number of, had been partly dictated by Godfrey to her husband, Herb Wilson. All in all, you would need to be some sort of monster to criticise it. However, as Samuel L. Jackson so almost says in Jackie Brown: I gots to be that sort of monster.
There may be nothing notably mistaken with the execution, although it’s performed in a clotted baroque model that’s an odd match for a girl who championed Modernism: who sat for Man Ray (dressed considerably like a fortune teller, admittedly), purchased Berenice Abbott her first digicam and ripped the rococo boiseries out of her residence within the Place Vendôme in Paris. Dialogue shouldn’t be flagged typographically, so you might be always studying issues and questioning whether or not somebody is saying them, or Guggenheim is considering them. The purpose, I suppose, is to carry the innermost self of the topic to life, to redeem Guggenheim from the belittling scrutiny of others; however we’re so always swept alongside within the torrent of her ideas that we don’t get a lot sense of what she thinks about something, be it artwork, intercourse or Paris (“I felt as if I used to be strolling right into a portray,” she says, bathetically).
Guggenheim’s sophisticated relationships with and contradictory emotions about household, associates and lovers come throughout fairly vividly, it must be stated. However we have now all bought these. What is definitely fascinating about her (and what can certainly be occluded by focusing too narrowly on her nostril job, her amorous marathon with Samuel Beckett and so forth) is what she did. The motion of Peggy concludes on the brink of triumph, with the opening of her Cork Avenue gallery in 1938; then there’s a transient epilogue (written by Jamison) in Venice. So no Forties New York, no green-card marriage with Max Ernst, no Artwork of This Century, her gallery on West 57th Avenue with its startling Bond-villain aesthetic, no Dorothea Tanning (who exhibited in 31 Ladies and duly caught Ernst’s wandering eye), no Jackson Pollock widdling within the fire, no fallings out with uncle Solly’s creative consigliere Hilla Rebay.
Equally, there’s nothing about Pegeen’s tragic grownup life, or Guggenheim’s slanderous hounding of her son-in-law, Britain’s foremost Situationist Ralph Rumney, who she blamed for Pegeen’s dying. As a substitute, we have now a skilful sufficient tackle a wearyingly acquainted trope: a wealthy American reducing free within the Outdated World. Not less than she doesn’t complain concerning the plumbing.
Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison, Peggy: A Novel, John Murray, 384pp, £18.99 (hb), printed 15 AugustKeith Miller is an editor at The Telegraph and a contributor to Apollo journal and The Occasions Literary Complement
