Over the course of Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s new documentary, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, the famous collector is called, or calls herself, a narcissist; an enfant terrible; a nymphomaniac, an outsider; a disturbed, liberated woman; timid; charmingly naive; a little girl; and a lone wolf.
No matter how you think of her, Peggy Guggenheim was a character. Consider her life: The niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, Peggy rejected her bourgeois German-Jewish New York family; shaved off her eyebrows to shock her high school classmates; fled to Europe; bought oodles of Surrealist, Cubist, and Abstract Expressionist art when nobody—as in the Louvre and the Guggenheim—thought it worth anything; supported Djuna Barnes and Jackson Pollock before they were famous; smuggled her art collection out of England during World War II; later bought a Venetian palazzo to display it; suffered a botched nose job that she never bothered to fix; surrounded herself with a fleet of Lhasa Apsos; became known for a style of ornate, cat-eye-meets-carnival-mask glasses that are still sold in the gift shop of her museum; slept with anyone and everyone who was intriguing to her; and, to drive the point home, published, in 1946, a tell-all memoir about her sexual exploits.
Guggenheim lived and breathed art, and behaved as creatively as the artists she adored. Yet somehow she was still plagued by a reputation that cast her as a striving dilettante, an imposter among the avant-garde, a faker of good taste, and a sort of sad, undesirable floozy. For Art Addict, Immordino Vreeland interviewed a wide array of Guggenheim intimates and art world A-listers, a few of whom casually perpetuate elements of those persistent stereotypes. But the film also offers a fascinating look at Guggenheim’s far more complex reality.
Yes, Guggenheim was incredibly promiscuous: At one point she jokes that it wasn’t worth mentioning her alleged affair with John Cage because she slept with him only once. At another she remembers that Samuel Beckett was so rambunctious, he once kept her in bed for four days with only a break for sandwiches. At yet another, she claims to have slept with Constantin Brancusi only in hopes that doing so would drive down the price of the Bird sculpture she wanted to buy. But she was also brokenhearted over the writer and critic John Ferrar Holms, who tragically died during a minor operation several years into their seemingly devoted relationship, and for whom Peggy said she endured a number of abortions.
Sure, she never went to college and lacked a formal art historical background. But Guggenheim knew when to ask questions, and she surrounded herself with the sorts of people who could teach her what she knew she didn’t know. Those mentors included Marcel Duchamp, who “taught me everything about modern art”; Howard Putzel, who helped her run her New York gallery, Art of This Century; and Piet Mondrian, who first suggested to her that there might be genius in Pollock’s drip paintings.
And while it’s true that she sometimes played the bon vivant, hosting raucous parties in her Venetian palazzo, Guggenheim’s life was also marked by grief. Her beloved father went down with the Titanic when Guggenheim was only 13. Her sister died young during childbirth. Her other sister’s children mysteriously tumbled off the roof of a New York City hotel. And her only daughter, Pegeen, committed suicide at 42.
Through it all, Guggenheim endured. “She not only embraced this group of underdogs who would become the most important artists of the 20th century,” Immordino Vreeland tells me by phone. “She just embraced life. Did she have true love? She did. Do I think she was very much alone at the end? She was. Even though she was very much a star.” Read on for more from our conversation with Immordino Vreeland about the enigmatic, resilient, and utterly eccentric Peggy Guggenheim.
You managed to track down some tapes of Peggy being interviewed by her biographer, Jacqueline Bograd Weld, tapes that had never been heard before. How did you uncover them?
I got to know Jackie Weld. You can option a book [like we did Jackie’s], but that doesn’t mean the writer has to let you into her house, let you actually work there, and go through all of her material. She had these huge archive containers full of material, and she had taken really precise notes about her conversations. She said, “I recorded Peggy, I just don’t know where the tapes are.” It was this matter of continually asking her, going through the house, opening up a closet and saying, “Do you think they’re here?” One day I asked, “Do you have a basement?” She said, “I do.” I went down there and I brought some black garbage bags to organize some things. Jackie said, “Don’t look in the boxes of books, they’re not going to be there.” That’s exactly where I found them, in the last box.
What was really interesting to me is that two or three weeks ago she said to me, “Oh, I always knew where the tapes were.” Maybe she needed to trust me? When she told me that, I said, “Wow, okay!” But it didn’t matter.
Wow! Did hearing the tapes change the way you thought about Peggy at all? Were there assumptions you’d made that the tapes challenged?
It wasn’t necessarily just the tapes. I had read her autobiography. What I didn’t realize was just how sad her life was, this profound sense of loss. The tone with which she wrote her autobiography, she had this léger feeling of things falling off her shoulders, really major things. When I listened to the tapes and read the other biographies, especially Jackie’s, I said, “This is quite different.” You really got a sense of what had happened to her and what tools she had to go out into the world with. How she really was able to adjust to things. It showed me that what she finally did achieve was so much. Despite all these emotional shortcomings, this pain she went through, it didn’t stop her. That’s for me another great sense of victory for her. It’s true, she had money and that did give her comfort, but I think she was looking for a métier in life, and once she decided on it, that was her path. But it took her some time. She didn’t discover this until she was 40.
The film mentions that at the moment she opened her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London, Peggy considered instead opening a publishing house. Had she done that, do you think she would have done the same for the avant-garde in literature that she ended up doing for the avant-garde in art?
I do. What’s clear about her is that she certainly had a sense of openness. Despite the way she was brought up, she balked at the rules. She was involved with Samuel Beckett. I think she would have achieved that, because I think she would have found, just like she did in art, the group of people who could have steered her in the right direction. She chose Marcel Duchamp to be her mentor, to teach her everything about modern art. It’s not like he was paid to do this. He was attracted to her as a human being, to her personality. That sense of openness was a very, very big part of it. It’s very modern. I think she had such a modern approach to life. That was not something women had at that time.
Do you mean beyond her unconventional attitudes toward sexuality?
Not just the sexuality. It’s about looking at the world. The world was her oyster. It’s a contemporary notion. Of course she had a little bit of money to do that. We can’t negate that. But the fact is, she decided, this is what she wanted to do. She surrounded herself with the right people. She started to do it. She also had a role that’s very different from other patrons. She played a role in many different cities, and an important one. In 1938, when she opened Guggenheim Jeune [in London], she had a very strong influence. She showed Lucian Freud for the first time. She had an influence in Paris, in New York. She had a very important influence in Italy on the Italian artists. If you think of Gertrude Stein, it was all Paris. It’s fascinating to see how big Peggy’s outreach was. It’s a very modern thought to live that kind of life. I don’t think she was really conscious of it at the time. But I think she sets such an amazing example of how to live a life, take it on, and overcome your problems.
Obviously Peggy is controversial. People like to make fun of her. They like to temper those accomplishments with ridicule. How did you think of that balance as a documentarian? Were you conscious of that in editing the film, in terms of what voices you included? You interview John Richardson, for example, and he’s brilliant, but he sometimes had a smug and, in my view, sexist way of demeaning Peggy. Sometimes I just wanted to take him down a notch.
Well, you know, first of all, Peggy was never considered an intellectual. That was her biggest downfall historically. People know Peggy as a collector, but also, she slept with a lot of men. And who she slept with has dominated many of the discussions.
John is fantastic. We know him. We love him. He was there. That’s what’s so crazy. He was there with Picasso. He was there in the palazzo with Peggy. But there’s also a little veneer of invention that’s put on those stories, and we can’t control that. He was in my [Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel] film, and will probably be in my next film as well, because he just knows all those characters. He has the ability to tell the story. But he would put in this little dig, this negative little dig at the end. It’s sexist. And there were times that I cringed. We tried to be careful with that.
Peggy had no fear. She didn’t care what other people thought. I think that was such a sign of courage and bravery, to act like that. So when we were making the film, we wanted to show her, in a sense, warts and all. She was not a very warm person. She was very uncomfortable with herself. When she started to really delve into the art, she found herself. She found her true identity. She was never really loved by her own parents. When you don’t know love, how do you give love? She had a very odd and conflicted relationship with her own children. She was never really there for them.
In the film we hear her refer to her daughter, Pegeen, as so close, she was almost like a lover. It’s quite disturbing.
It is disturbing! She wrote that in her autobiography, but she also repeated it. Back then, all these kids were really kept at a distance. They were sent to boarding schools. They had nannies. It was a very, very odd thing that she would say that about her own daughter. I guess she was trying to be her best friend, but there were some people who said that she would be competing with some of the men that Pegeen was sleeping with. And she totally advocated Pegeen sleeping around. She didn’t know how to be a mother. She really didn’t. She didn’t have the tools.
Speaking of her liberal attitudes toward sex, it’s tempting to psychoanalyze her. But what did you make of her sexuality? Was she just an extremely lusty person? Was she searching for something? Was this her attempt to be avant-garde?
This goes back to this whole sense of being a modern person. Nothing was holding her back. This was this very courageous side of her. I do think there was a side of her that was trying to replace her father. But the fact that she wrote about this in a tell-all autobiography that was published in 1946 is incredibly courageous. I love that about her. She used pseudonyms, but this is somebody who had no fear about showing who she was. She had this transparency. Frankly, there were a lot of other women who were sleeping around. She just wrote about it. And all the men were sleeping around. There’s no doubt about that. The people she was involved with: Look at them! They were absolutely fascinating. Every time I saw Marcel Duchamp on-screen, I said, “He would be my person in a moment.” Just the way that he was thinking. He was a total god!
She had this external way of doing things sometimes. The perfect example: She sued Lee Krasner after Pollock’s death because she felt that for the years that she was supporting Pollock, they had been hiding some of the paintings that she should have owned. Instead of discussing it, she sued Krasner, and eventually lost the lawsuit. Why would you do that? She wanted to live in a certain period of time. When Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were showing at the Biennale, she would not accept their work, the prices that were being paid for them. She was not interested in buying them. When Andy Warhol came to Venice, he contacted her because he wanted to visit the collection, and she would not let him in. She was unpliable. There were those aspects of her personality that were really closed. It was odd.
What haven’t I touched on that you find fascinating about Peggy Guggenheim?
The love of art: This is what drove her, ultimately. She wanted to build a modern museum and she did that. Her real driving force was that she loved the art, she identified with art. Right now the art world is a manufactured landscape. It has become an asset class. Which is really different than it was back then. She was a patron when these people weren’t even identified as great artists. I think it’s a really important message. I love the idea that you have a dream, you pursue a dream, you achieve it, you get through all your personal issues. I do think that today she could be analyzed in many different ways. But what mattered was: She had this sense of what she wanted to do. And she just persevered. I just think this is a very important message. It’s kind of silly, romantic, and idealistic, but I don’t care: I’m not going to let it go. She played a big role, and this film should really show that, and show her relevance in history. I hope that changes the way that people look at her.
You don’t even go into her signature glasses, which were my main association with her.
We totally overlooked it. There’s one picture with the glasses. She was really kind of vampy in the end, in the ’60s and ’70s—there were a lot of different photographers who shot her in the palazzo. She had this collection of furs. You would always see her leaning against Dalí or a Brancusi. She would go from room to room and change furs. She liked that. It was kind of her victory, having some attention for herself. But she didn’t do it for that. That was not her. She did it for the art.
This interview has been condensed and edited.