‘Fights all day, sex all night’: Peggy Guggenheim’s tormented Sussex years

Despite being the most famous art collector in the world, Peggy Guggenheim is better known for her string of lovers. In her thrillingly indiscreet memoir, Out of This Century, she lists Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Humphrey Jennings and Max Ernst amongst them, and hints at a fling with Henry Moore. The book, published in 1946, earned her the title ‘the female Casanova’ and caused such a stir that her American tycoon uncles tried to buy up the entire print run. 

But this reputation as arch bohemian has often overshadowed her importance in art history – something a forthcoming exhibition at Petersfield Museum & Art Gallery, Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo, seeks to put right. Featuring work by Moore, Tanguy, Ernst and Jean Arp, it tells the story of an often overlooked part of Peggy’s remarkable life: the years she spent in a damp cottage in the village of South Harting in West Sussex, between 1934-39 (which also formed the basis for my 2009 novel The Good Plain Cook).

Of South Harting Peggy wrote, “The village was absolutely dead, like all such places in England, but it was in the midst of the most lovely country. Naturally, it had a fine pub.” Hating the weather, the food, and disappointed by her English poet lover, Douglas Garman, she soon moved to London in search of a new beginning. But Peggy’s brief fling with the English countryside ended her fantasy of finding fulfilment through being a bohemian wife, and inspired her life as an art collector.

On the one hand, Peggy was the perfect bohemian – famed for her wild parties in 1920s Paris, she was sexually liberated, obsessed by art, liked to wear outrageous clothes, and adored sunbathing nude on the roof of her Venetian palazzo. On the other, she was neither an artist nor an art ‘expert’ herself. She was a good business woman; she loathed dirt; and, perhaps most significantly, she was hampered by that most non-bohemian encumbrance – kids.

Peggy grew up privileged but described her childhood as ‘full of torments’. Her father, New York businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, made a fortune from smelting metals. Benjamin went down with the Titanic when Peggy was just 13. In response, Peggy shaved off her eyebrows and became, as she later wrote, the “black sheep” of the family.

Peggy was determined to live differently to the rest of the Guggenheims. When she was 23 she travelled to Europe, where she made a lifelong friend in Marcel Duchamp. In 1922 she married the writer Laurence Vail after shocking him with her sexual frankness on their first date. “Laurence had a pretty tough time because I demanded everything I had seen depicted in the [sexually explicit] Pompeian frescoes,” she wrote in her memoir, adding that he soon made it clear that she should consider herself “fortunate to be accepted into Bohemia … since all I had to offer was my money, I should lend it to the brilliant people I met and whom I was allowed to frequent.”

The pair had two children, Sinbad and Pegeen, but Laurence was frequently violent and the marriage was over by 1928, when Peggy met John Holms, another struggling writer, and went to live with him on the edge of Dartmoor. In 1933 tragedy struck when John died while under anaesthetic. The death was a huge shock for Peggy, who sought solace in the arms of poet Douglas Garman. 

Ashamed at her haste in taking another lover, she hid Garman when guests arrived at their home, Warblington Castle. After then buying Yew Tree Cottage, just down the road in South Harting, she wrote in her memoir: “Soon after I took this step I decided to commit suicide, I was still so unhappy about John. I therefore put the house in Garman’s name as I intended to die. Of course I didn’t and went to live in the house instead.”

Still grieving for John, Peggy spent time secretly typing up his manuscripts in the hope of getting them published. She began to drink more, of which Douglas disapproved. In her memoir, she describes goading him until he slapped her in the face. Not usually a violent man, Douglas wept with shame. It wasn’t long before their life in Sussex became, as Peggy put it, “fighting all day, f---ing all night”.

But there was a happier couple in the house. When Jack, the gardener, introduced his fiancée, Kitty, to Yew Tree Cottage, Peggy employed her as a cook. Kitty, a local Sussex girl, could only manage Yorkshire pudding and roast pheasant, so Peggy found a fancy chef called Wahab to teach Kitty a thing or two. Peggy, perhaps bored, also took part in the lessons. It was this fascinating scenario – the local cook being taught to tackle French dishes alongside her American bohemian mistress – which inspired me to write much of The Good Plain Cook from Kitty’s point of view. 

The real Jack and Kitty were married in the church at Petersfield, with Pegeen and Debbie as bridesmaids. By contrast, nothing lasting came of Peggy’s affair with Douglas. Finding herself alone at the age of 39, Peggy wrote she was “at a loss for an occupation, since I had never been anything but a wife for the last fifteen years.”

She began to toy with the idea of an art gallery, and opened the Guggenheim Jeune in Cork Street, London, in 1938. Jean Cocteau was the first exhibitor and the gallery housed the first solo exhibition of works by Wassily Kandinsky in the UK. She even began to make plans to open London’s first public gallery of modern art.

World War II intervened but if anything Peggy capitalised on the chaos. She travelled to Paris, where she aimed to buy a painting a day. Terrified of the approaching Nazi regime’s attitude towards ‘degenerative’ art, artists flocked to her apartment with works for sale. In her memoir she boasted, “The day Hitler walked into Norway, I walked into Leger’s studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars.” While in Paris she acquired around 150 works, including pieces by Dali, Klee, Miro, Giacometti and Man Ray. She left three days before the Germans took the city, taking much modern art safely out of Europe. 

Peggy was launched as a serious collector and she continued to buy. Having escaped Europe with Max Ernst and Andre Breton, who she effectively saved from the Nazis, she went on to marry Max and, in 1942, she opened another gallery, Art of this Century, in New York. The space was radical: the paintings were hung without frames, on white walls, or suspended from the ceiling on wires.

In 1949, aged 51 and now divorced from Ernst, Peggy bought and moved into the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni  in Venice, which she opened to the public as a museum in 1951. It still houses her collection, attracting some 400,000 visitors per year.

And yet the interest in her sex life continues. When her memoir was published in 1946, malicious rumours about Peggy’s sexuality went wild. There were stories of bestiality, and of threesomes including Pegeen. Peggy herself tended to belittle her own artistic achievements, filling her memoir not with art, but with sex. There’s little doubt that Peggy was judged harshly for delighting in her sexual appetites in a way her male contemporaries would never have been. Had the book been published today, Peggy might have been celebrated for being a public woman of middle-age who revelled in her sexuality.

The memoir also reveals another of Peggy’s blind spots: her children. Peggy famously said she’d “rather have a Picasso than a daughter”, and Pegeen was clearly neglected. She struggled with her mental health and in 1967, following what her husband Ralph remembers as many attempts at suicide, was found dead, aged 41, in her apartment after an overdose of drugs and alcohol.

Despite her staggering success, there’s a whiff of sadness about the older Peggy, who was always accompanied by her ‘beloved babies’ (her Lhasa Apso dogs) but remained alone, floating in her private gondola at dusk. In the end, Peggy was surrounded by her art works. “They’ve become more or less the most important part of my life,” she said.  “I can’t imagine now living without them.”

Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo runs at the Petersfield Museum & Art Gallery from June 15 to October 5; petersfieldmuseum.co.uk