Confessions of an Art Addict Read online

  My Marini

  DEDICATION

  For Alfred H Barr Jr

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  FOREWORD by Gore Vidal

  INTRODUCTION by Alfred H. Barr Jr.

  1 GILT-EDGED CHILDHOOD

  2 MARRIAGES

  3 GUGGENHEIM JEUNE

  4 SERIOUS COLLECTING

  5 LIFE WITH MAX ERNST

  6 ART OF THIS CENTURY

  7 VENICE AND THE BIENNALE

  8 PALAZZO VENIER DEI LEONI

  9 CEYLON, INDIA AND VENICE AGAIN

  10 NEW YORK REVISITED

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  MYSELF AGED FOURTEEN

  JOHN HOLMS

  LAURENCE VAIL

  YVES TANGUY

  MARCEL DUCHAMP

  ART OF THIS CENTURY

  MAX ERNST

  CALDER’S BEDHEAD

  MYSELF WITH GRACE HARTIGAN’S PAINTING

  THE VIEW FROM MY ROOF

  THE TWO SIR HERBERTS AND RAOUL

  WITH BACCI AND TANCREDI

  IN MY BARCHESSA

  THE PALAZZO VENIER DEI LEONI

  WITH PEVSNER’S CONSTRUCTION

  The photograph of the author, is by Curtis Bell; those of Laurence Vail, Yves Tanguy and Marcel Duchamp, are by Isabey, Man Ray and Sidney Waintrob respectively; the one of Art of This Century, is by George Karger Pix. The photograph of Max Ernst, is by Leonar; those are by Cacco, Sidney Waintrob and Jerome Zerbe respectively, and those of the author, by Cacco and by Roloff Beny, as is the one. The Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, is by Jerry Harper.

  Foreword

  BY GORE VIDAL

  In the winter of 1945-46 I was a Warrant Officer in the Army of the United States, stationed at Mitchell Field, Long Island. I had just finished a first novel, Williwaw, based on my experiences as the first mate of an army freight supply ship in the Aleutians. Before I enlisted in the army at seventeen, I had lived in Washington, D.C. My family was political-military. I give these little personal facts to set the scene for my first meeting with Peggy Guggenheim.

  In the early part of that winter I had met Anaïs Nin. I was twenty. She was forty-two. Our long and arduous relationship, or Relationship, began in the cold, as the sweet singer of Camelot would say. Anaïs was a shining figure who looked younger than she was; spoke in a soft curiously accented voice; told lies which for sheer beauty and strangeness were even better than the books she wrote—perhaps because what she wrote was always truthful if not true while what she said was intended only to please—herself as well as others.

  “I shall take you to a party, chéri,” she announced. We were in the five-floor Greenwich Village walk-up where she lived with her husband (a banker who made movies and engravings and helped Anaïs play at being a starving Bohemian). Anaïs always called me “chéri” with a slightly droll inflection. Since I had not yet read Colette, it was several years before I got the joke. But then she did not get all my jokes either. So “chéri” and Anaïs went to Peggy Guggenheim’s house and “chéri” has never forgotten a single detail of that bright, magical (a word often used in those days) occasion. In a sense, like the character in Le Grand Meaulnes, I still think that somewhere, even now, in a side street of New York City, that party is still going on and Anaïs is still alive and young and “chéri” is very young indeed, and James Agee is drinking too much and Laurence Vail is showing off some bottles that he has painted having first emptied them into himself as part of the creative process and André Breton is magisterial and Léger looks as if he himself could have made one of those bits of machinery that he liked to paint; and a world of color and humor is still going on—could be entered again if only one had not mislaid the address. Recently I came across an old telephone book. I looked up Anaïs’s number of thirty-five years ago. Watkins something-or-other. I rang the number; half-expected her to answer. If she had, I’d have asked her if it was still 1945 and she would say, Of course. What year did I think it was? And I’d say, No, it’s 1979, and you’re dead. (“Chéri” was never noted for his tact.) And she would laugh and say, Not yet.

  Not yet. Well, “yet” is here. And so is Peggy Guggenheim. When I first saw her she was smiling—a bit sleepily. I remember something odd hanging about her neck . . . Barbarous jewelry? My memory’s less perfect than I thought. Actually, I remember Agee’s red-rimmed drinker’s eyes and Vail’s white streaming hair rather more vividly than I do Peggy, who drifted effortlessly through her own party, more like a guest than a hostess.

  There. I am getting, as it were (as Henry James would say), something of Peggy’s aura then and now. Although she gave parties and collected pictures and people, there was—and is—something cool and impenetrable about her. She does not fuss. She is capable of silence, a rare gift. She listens, an even rarer gift. She is a master of the one-liner that deflates some notion or trait of character or person. As I write this, I am trying to think of a brilliant example; and fail. So perhaps it is simply the dry tone—the brevity with which she delivers her epitaphs—that one remembers with pleasure.

  Peggy never liked Anaïs. For some reason, to this day, I have never asked her why. Last year, shortly before Peggy’s eightieth birthday, we were sitting in the salone of her palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal (writing that sentence I begin to see Peggy Guggenheim as the last of Henry James’s transatlantic heroines, Daisy Miller with rather more balls), and Peggy suddenly said, “Anaïs was very stupid, wasn’t she?” It is the artful making of statements in the form of a question that sets apart Peggy’s generation from the present age where there are no questions, only thundering self-serving assertions.

  “No,” I said. “She was shrewd. And she got exactly what she wanted. She set out to be a legendary figure.” Legend was a word that Anaïs always used with reverence. “And she lived long enough to see herself a sort of heroine to the women’s liberation movement.”

  “That may be shrewd,” said Peggy—in the late afternoon light the sleepy narrow eyes suddenly shone like cats’ eyes—“but it seems a stupid thing to want to be.”

  Now Peggy has been transformed by time (with a bit of help from her own shrewd nature) into a legend of the very same variety that Anaïs had in mind, a high romantic Murgeresque mind. Yet, at eighty, the legendary Peggy keeps a sharp eye on a world that is declining rather more rapidly than she is. After all, Venice is sinking, literally, beneath her unfinished white palazzo. If the ultimate dream of the solipsist is to take the world with him when he dies, Peggy may very well end by taking Venice out of this world and into her own world where that party still goes on and everyone is making something new and art smells not of the museum but of the maker’s studio.

  Last summer I asked, “How are you?” Polite but real question: she’d been in considerable pain with some disturbance of the arteries. “Oh,” she said, “for someone dying, not bad.”

  It seems to me that this memoir—artful rather than artless, though the unknowing will not get the point to the art—reflects a world as lost now as the Watkins number that did not ring for lack of a digit. But since the prose in this volume is all Peggy’s own, something has been salvaged. One hears in these lines the brisk yet drawling voice; sees the sudden swift side-long glance that often accompanies her swift judgments; takes pleasure if not in her actual self, in its shadow upon the page.

  I last saw Peggy looking very shadowy on Italian television. Venice was celebrating her eightieth birthday; or at least that part of Venice which has not sunk into sloth as opposed to the Adriatic.

  The camera came in for a very close shot o
f Peggy’s handsome head. An off-camera voice asked her what she thought of today’s Italian painters. The eyes shifted toward the unseen questioner; the half smile increased by a fraction. “Oh,” she said, “they’re very bad.” Then always the Jamesian heroine, she added, “Aren’t they?”

  Consternation throughout Italy. The heroine of The Golden Bowl had shattered the bowl—and prevailed once again.

  [1979]

  Introduction

  BY ALFRED H BARR JR

  Courage and vision, generosity and humility, money and time, a strong sense of historical significance, as well as of aesthetic quality—these are factors of circumstance and character which have made Peggy Guggenheim an extraordinary patron of twentieth century art. On ground rocked by factionalism, she has stood firm, taking no sides, partisan only of the valuable revolution. Consequently we find in her collection works which are diametrically opposed in spirit and form, even though they may seem to be alike in their radical strangeness.

  The collection is Peggy Guggenheim’s most durable achievement as an art patron, but it is quite possibly not her most important. I have used the threadbare and somewhat pompous word ‘patron’ with some misgivings. Yet it is precise. For a patron is not simply a collector who gathers works of art for his own pleasure or a philanthropist who helps artists or founds a public museum, but a person who feels responsibility towards both art and the artist together and has the means and will to act upon this feeling.

  Peggy Guggenheim had no early interest in modern art. In fact, she loved and studied Italian Renaissance painting, particularly that of Venice. Berenson’s books were her guide and perhaps they confirmed that sense for the history of art which she carried into the twentieth century, the very point in time and taste at which her mentor stopped.

  Then in the late ’thirties, largely as an amateur’s diversion, she opened an avant-garde gallery in London. Marcel Duchamp was her chief adviser (the same who in New York twenty years before had counselled Katherine Dreier in her creation of the pioneering Société Anonyme). Guggenheim Jeune, as she humorously called the enterprise, gave several excellent exhibitions, among them England’s first one-man shows of Kandinsky, the first abstract expressionist, and Yves Tanguy, the surrealist painter. At the same time, the gallery gave their first exhibitions to young artists such as John Tunnard, the best of the new English abstract painters of the period. Yet these achievements seemed to her too impermanent.

  Early in 1939 Peggy Guggenheim ‘had the idea of opening a modern museum in London’, a project which must have seemed urgent, the director of the Tate Gallery having not long before declared for customs purposes that sculptures by Calder, Arp, Pevsner and others, which Guggenheim Jeune was importing for a show, were not works of art at all.

  With her usual flair for enlisting the ablest help, she asked Herbert Read, now Sir Herbert, to become the director of this projected museum. Read, generally considered the leading English authority on modern art, was persuaded to resign his editorship of the highly respectable Burlington Magazine in order to assume his new and adventurous position. The patron and the director drew up an ideal list of works of art for the new museum—a list which was also to serve as the basis for the opening exhibition. A building was found, but before the lease could be signed World War II began and the dream faded, or better, was suspended.

  In Paris during the winter of the ‘phony war’ Peggy Guggenheim, only a little daunted, kept on adding to the collection, ‘buying a picture a day’ with the advice of her friends Duchamp, Howard Putzel and Nellie van Doesburg. She even rented space for a gallery in the Place Vendôme, but meanwhile the cool war turned hot. The Brancusi Bird in Space was bought as the Germans were nearing Paris.

  During the first year of the German occupation the collection was safeguarded in the Grenoble museum; but it was not shown there because the director feared the reprisals of the collaborationist Vichy régime. Finally, in the spring of 1941, the collection and its owner reached New York.

  Thanks largely to the influx of refugee artists and writers from Europe, New York during the war supplanted occupied Paris as the art centre of the Western world. Later, most of the Europeans returned, particularly to France; yet, in the post-war world, Paris seems clearly less pre-eminent and New York remains a contestant partly because of the rise of the most internationally respected group of painters so far produced in the United States. In their development, Peggy Guggenheim, as patron, played an important, and in some cases, a crucial role.

  She had been frustrated in London, in Paris and in Grenoble, but in New York, thanks to its distance from the conflict, she was able temporarily to realize her vision. With the advice of the surrealist painter, Max Ernst, and the poet André Breton, she continued to add to her collection and published a brilliant catalogue, Art of this Century, the title she also gave to her new gallery.

  Art of this Century immediately became the centre of the vanguard. Under the influence of Duchamp, Ernst and Breton, the surrealist tradition was strong but never exclusive. The great abstract painter, Piet Mondrian, was also welcome and took an active part as a member of the juries which chose the recurrent group shows of young American artists.

  In the first ‘Spring Salon’, 1943, three young painters stood out: William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Within a year all three were launched by the gallery with one-man shows. Pollock’s exhibition, with an enthusiastic catalogue preface by James Johnson Sweeney, won special admiration. Then, again with remarkable prescience, Art of this Century gave shows to Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and others. I say prescience because although their work had not come to full maturity at that time, Rothko, Still, Baziotes, Motherwell, Pollock and two or three others are now recognized in the United States and increasingly in Europe as the chief pillars of the formidable new American school.

  Early pictures by these painters, bought by Peggy Guggenheim out of their shows seventeen years ago, may be seen in her collection today. Jackson Pollock, the most renowned of them, is represented by many works, though not by his largest, a mural commissioned by his patron for the lobby of her New York residence. Pollock she also helped financially, and when in 1947 Art of this Century closed she helped to place the artists in other galleries.

  Today, in Venice, Peggy Guggenheim, her collection and her exhibition gallery continue to work. Visitors who study the collection with the sounds of the Grand Canal in their ears should know something of the history of the collector as patron—particularly Americans, who owe a special debt to their countrywoman, Peggy Guggenheim.

  1956

  CHAPTER ONE

  GILT-EDGED CHILDHOOD

  In 1923, I began to write my memoirs, but did not get very far. They began like this: ‘I come from two of the best Jewish families. 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.’ To go on where I left off, if my grandfathers started life modestly they ended it sumptuously. My stable-born grandfather, Mr Seligman, came to America in steerage, with forty dollars in his pocket. He began his fortune by being a roof shingler and later by making uniforms for the Union Army in the Civil War. Later he became a renowned banker. Socially he got way beyond my other grandfather, Mr Guggenheim the peddler, who was born in Ober-Lengnan in German Switzerland. Mr Guggenheim far surpassed Mr Seligman in amassing an enormous fortune and buying up most of the copper mines of the world, but he never succeeded in attaining Mr Seligman’s social distinction. In fact, when my mother married Benjamin Guggenheim the Seligmans considered it a mésalliance. To explain that she was marrying into the well-known smelting family, they sent a cable to their kin in Europe saying, ‘Florette engaged Guggenheim smelter.’ This became a great family joke, as the cable misread, Guggenheim smelt her.

  By the time I was born, the Seligmans and the Guggenheims were extremely rich. At least the Guggenheims were, and the Seligmans hadn’t done so badly. My grandfather, James Seligman, wa
s a very modest man who refused to spend money on himself. He lived sparsely and gave everything to his children and grandchildren. Most of his children were peculiar, if not mad. That was because of the bad inheritance they received from my grandmother. My grandfather finally had to leave her. She must have been objectionable. My mother told me that she could never invite young men to her home without a scene from her mother. My grandmother went around to shopkeepers and, as she leaned over the counter, asked them confidentially, ‘When do you think my husband last slept with me?’

  My mother’s brothers and sisters were very eccentric. One of my favourite aunts was an incurable soprano. If you happened to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue while waiting for a bus, she would open her mouth wide and sing scales, trying to make you do as much. She wore her hat hanging off the back of her head or tilted over one ear. A rose was always stuck in her hair. Long hatpins emerged dangerously, not from her hat, but from her hair. Her trailing dresses swept up the dust of the streets. She invariably wore a feather boa. She was an excellent cook and made beautiful tomato jelly. Whenever she wasn’t at the piano, she could be found in the kitchen or reading the ticker-tape. She was an inveterate gambler. She had a strange complex about germs and was forever wiping her furniture with lysol. But she had such extraordinary charm that I really loved her. I cannot say her husband felt as much. After he had fought with her for over thirty years, he tried to kill her and one of her sons by hitting them with a golf club. Not succeeding, he rushed to the reservoir where he drowned himself with heavy weights tied to his feet.

  My most attractive uncle was a very distinguished gentleman of the old school. Being separated from his wife, who was as rich as he, he decided to live in great simplicity in two small rooms and spend all his money on fur coats which he gave away to girls. Almost any girl could have one for the asking. He wore the Légion d’honneur but would never tell us why he had been decorated.