There are small headlines that define much of Peggy Guggenheim's personality: protofeminist nymphomaniac, abused woman, fatherless, insecure about her Jewish origin and her eggplant nose... She had seven abortions and was very different in taste from the likes of wealthy contemporaries Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke. Shielded under the surname that emerged during the golden age, the life of the most famous socialite of the Guggenheim dynasty was filled with demons.
Peggy has gone down in history as one of the most notable patrons of the 20th century. Afflicted by an unhappy childhood with absent parents, she turned her back on her bourgeois existence when she moved to Paris in 1920 as it was the cradle of avant-garde art. She could do so because when her father, Benjamin, died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 with one of his mistresses, she inherited about 2.5 million dollars. A pittance compared to her cousins.
This pleasurable existence was interrupted when she married Laurence Vail in New York in 1922, with whom she had her children Sindbad (1923) and Pageen (1925), who died by suicide in 1967. During her marriage, she suffered abuse. She recounted an episode herself: "He held me underwater in the bathtub until I felt like I was going to drown". She shared this in her first biography Out of this Century (1946), which she would expand on three decades later with Confessions of an Art Addict.
Peggy found her place in the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, where artists and intellectuals exuded poverty from every angle. She mingled with James Joyce, Coco Chanel, Diaghilev, Marcel Duchamp, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, and Oblomov, the pseudonym given in her biography to Samuel Beckett, with whom she had a secret relationship for thirteen months.
The divorce from Vail came in 1930. Shortly after, she became the lover of the married writer John Holms, with whom she had several abortions and who would pass away four years later. Feeling increasingly lonely, she began collecting more lovers than paintings. Ahead of her time and unbothered by public opinion, she boasted that Beckett was so manly that they spent four days in bed eating sandwiches and that she hooked up with Brancusi to get a discount on one of his sculptures.
With uncontrollable lust, experts estimate that around 1,000 men passed through her sheets. She also bedded women, such as writers Djuna Barnes and Antonia White. These were relationships that were cruel, emotionally complex, and laden with sexuality, yet inspiring and enriching at the same time.
After her mother's death, a descendant of the Seligman bankers, she inherited 450,000 dollars. Following Marcel Duchamp's advice, she invested in a gallery, as he considered her "the most influential person" in his life. In 1938, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune in London. Her first exhibition was dedicated to Jean Cocteau, the next to Kandinsky, and subsequently to Picasso, Tunnard, and Max Ernst, whom she was married to from 1942 to 1946. The gallery closed a year later due to financial losses.
Upon her return to Paris, she lived by her motto buy a painting a day, acquiring numerous works directly from artists for 1,000 dollars as they wanted to leave the capital as soon as possible. This is how her vast collection began. With Hitler's troops advancing on French territory, Peggy smuggled the paintings to New York among pots and bedding. She also saved some artists.
In 1942, the socialite opened The Art of this Century gallery in the city of skyscrapers. She promoted the work of then-unknown artists Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, to whom she provided a monthly salary in exchange for whatever works he felt like creating. At that time, they were not worth much, but today some can fetch up to 200 million dollars at auction. She also conceived one of the first exhibitions featuring female artists in the United States titled Exhibition by 31 Women, a milestone that the Mapfre Foundation has reinterpreted in its Madrid galleries until January 5.
In 1948, the Venice Biennale dedicated an entire pavilion to her. In love with the city, the following year she bought the 18th-century Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, previously owned by the Marchesa Luisa Casati and Doris Delevingne, great-aunt of model Cara Delevingne (32). There, she hosted dreamlike parties with Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Marlon Brando, and extensively renovated the place to turn it into a museum. She had so many works that some were in the bathrooms stained with toothpaste. Peggy passed away in 1979 at the age of 81.
Her collection of 326 works, including pieces by Picasso, Dalí, Giacometti, Calder, and Duchamp, was bequeathed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in honor of her uncle and creator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. There was one condition, to preserve the art collection in Venice. She was buried in the garden alongside her 14 Lhasa Apsos dogs, whom she loved more than her descendants.
Her grandson Sandro Rummey was blunt upon learning of her death: "I clapped and shouted". As he confessed to Vanity Fair, "I know it sounds horrible to celebrate someone's death, but Peggy brought so much misery to my life that her passing felt like a relief (...) She never hugged me, never touched me, never kissed me."