US Edition
Review
Peggy Guggenheim: the mistress of Modernism
'I come from two of the best Jewish families,” wrote Peggy Guggenheim when she was 25. “One of my grandfathers was born in a stable like Jesus Christ or, rather, over a stable in Bavaria, and my other grandfather was a peddler.”
She broke this promising work off after only a few sentences, but her character in caricature is already there: Peggy Guggenheim was very Jewish, very rich and very amusing, but not quite convinced of her own worth.
Her second try at a memoir was more fruitful. In 1946, the 48-year-old proprietress of New York’s most daring gallery brought forth a book: Out of This Century. It was a scandalous account of near-numberless romances, two Bohemian marriages and her equally passionate – but more successful – acquisition of abstract and surrealist art in London and wartime Paris, before escaping the Nazis in 1941 with her collection of “degenerate art” intact.
The book was ill received, the critics discomfited by her flat revelations of marital abuse and abortions. Time called it “as witless as a harmonica rendition of the 'Liebestod’ ”; Chicago Tribune suggested that her “nymphomaniacal revelations” should be retitled “Out of My Head”.
They were missing the point: for all its flaws, Peggy Guggenheim’s midlife memoir is hysterically funny. Gore Vidal called her unaffected and efficient style “almost as good as Gertrude Stein… and a lot funnier”. But sympathetic readers like Vidal were, and had always been, few. The insecurity that gave her, Francine Prose argues in this generous biography, is a clue to the nervous promiscuity that she sustained into her grand old age in the Venetian Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
As “The Money” in a Bohemian set, Peggy was always worried that people were not interested in what she had to say, only in whether she was going to pick up the bill. She usually did, but it only encouraged her spongers (among whom we should count both her husbands, the sculptor Laurence Vail and the surrealist painter Max Ernst) to demand more.
Peggy Guggenheim’s intense generosity gave the impression that her wealth was infinite. In her infancy, it probably was. Her mother’s family, the Seligmans, were one of the wealthiest Jewish clans in America; her father’s family, although considered by the Seligmans slightly parvenu, were even richer. She grew up in a gloomy house on the Upper East Side of New York, opposite Ulysses S Grant’s widow. There was an enormous bearskin on the floor, the tongue and teeth of which kept falling out.
Lunacy ran in the family. One uncle spent his entire fortune on fur coats for any pretty girl who looked cold; another ate only charcoal. Her mother, Florette, said everything three times. Peggy herself, the ugly duckling daughter, had some sort of breakdown in her early 20s, obsessing over unburnt matchsticks.
Her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, was immortalised in the film Titanic as the gallant who asked the steward for more brandy as the ship went down. Although he had been mostly absent in Peggy’s childhood, more philanderer than philanthropist, his loss perhaps helps to explain her weakness for pseudo-fathers, mentors such as Marcel Duchamp or elderly lovers such as Max Ernst.
Moreover, Benjamin Guggenheim’s last act was to lose most of his ample fortune, some $200 million, speculating on the Eiffel Tower. Peggy never had more than $450,000 to her name: enough never to have to work and to live where she pleased; enough to collect the work of then-unknown young artists for a few hundred or thousand dollars each; but nothing like the boundless wealth her father had lost, and that her friends accused her of withholding.
Least gracious of all was her first husband, the infantile, Byronic sculptor Laurence Vail. The “King of Bohemia”, he introduced Peggy to a circle of artists and writers, among them Dali, Joyce, Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Brancusi and Berenice Abbott. In her memoir, she recalls Vail’s command that: “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.”
Itinerant across Europe, they had two children, Sindbad and Pegeen, to whom Peggy was never an attentive mother (Prose defends her in vain). Vail was a staunch drinker, and, when drunk, fond of rows. The hero of his anti-Semitic, autobiographical novel Murder! Murder! tries to drown his wife in the bath but loses nerve. In real life, Vail’s favoured humiliation was to rub jam in Peggy’s hair. She eventually left him for the gentler, but more alcoholic writer John Holms, after which the count of her lovers spiralled into the hundreds (she once claimed, then denied, a thousand), among them Samuel Beckett, a hairdresser and James Joyce’s son Giorgio.
No biographer has been sympathetic to Vail, but Prose’s account does too little to explain why Peggy continued to trust the advice of her ex-husband. Prose also ventriloquises Peggy’s own memoir too faithfully: this short Life is most convincing when it enlists the voices of bystanders, chiefly the writer Emily Coleman and Peggy’s stepson Jimmy Ernst.
However, Prose’s sympathy is a corrective to the only other Life still in print, Anton Gill’s censorious Art Lover (2003), which accepts the spongers’ line on Peggy’s “built-in money-grubbing streak” without challenge. By describing fairly the limits of her wealth, and the nous with which she spent it, Prose does justice to this great modern Maecenas.
240pp, Yale University Press, £16.99, ebook £12.34