Guggenheim amassed a modern art collection, now housed in Venice.
If you had a sizable fortune, what would you do with it? Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict suggests one possibility: amass a world-class collection of works by peerless visual artists, some of whom you’ve had sex with.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was an art patron, scenester and bon vivant. In her collecting, and in her gallery work on both sides of the Atlantic, she championed pivotal 20th-century artists, including Paul Klee, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. This engaging documentary about her was directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, whose previous feature, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, profiled the famous fashion journalist, who was the filmmaker’s grandmother-in-law.
In Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, Guggenheim herself tells much of the story, in marvelous audio excerpts from a late interview conducted by her biographer, Jacqueline Weld. Weld is interviewed for the film, as are numerous experts from the art world. Vreeland also interviews author Edmund White and an actor you may have heard of, Robert De Niro, son of Robert De Niro Sr., the Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor whose work Guggenheim exhibited.
When you think of art and the name Guggenheim, you may think of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the iconic structure on New York City’s Upper East Side. Solomon was Peggy’s uncle, and their art-related activities were separate, at least at first. The film doesn’t convey much information about Solomon’s art pursuits, but even the uninitiated can safely assume that unlike Peggy’s, they didn’t include marrying the Surrealist Max Ernst.
Guggenheim was captivated by European art before World War II, by Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy. “Surrealism mirrored her outsider attitude,” an interviewee says. She was exposed to this work in the 1920s, when she left New York for Paris and associated with the likes of Man Ray in the city’s robust art scene.
Later she opened an influential gallery in London, and as war engulfed Europe, she bought, at bargain prices, the core of a great modern art collection. “On the day that Hitler invaded Norway, I walked into Léger’s studio and bought a wonderful painting,” she says.
Guggenheim had the works shipped to New York, where she opened another influential gallery, the Art of This Century. She began supporting and promoting Abstract Expressionists like Pollock just at that dramatic moment when the focus of the international art scene shifted from Europe to the U.S. Guggenheim stayed in New York only a few years and then moved to Venice, where she bought the palazzo that is now a museum housing her collection.
Vreeland illustrates this story with numerous images of paintings Guggenheim acquired. The images convey the sheer size and variety of the collection, but seeing them so quickly means you don’t get much of a chance to contemplate them, and what they might have meant to their owner. For that, I guess you have go to the museum. It appears to be a lovely place to visit.
