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Peggy Guggenheim

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Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim, Paris, photograph Rogi André (Rozsa Klein).jpg
Guggenheim in Paris, c. 1930, photograph by Rogi André (Rozsa Klein). In the background, Notre-Dame de Paris, and on the right, Joan Miró, Dutch Interior II (1928).
Born
Marguerite Guggenheim

(1898-08-26)August 26, 1898
New York City, US
DiedDecember 23, 1979(1979-12-23) (aged 81)
Known forPeggy Guggenheim Collection
Spouse(s)Laurence Vail (1922–c.1928)
Max Ernst (1941–1946)
ChildrenPegeen Vail Guggenheim
Parent(s)Florette Seligman
Benjamin Guggenheim
RelativesBarbara Hazel Guggenheim (sister)
FamilyGuggenheim

Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim (/ˈɡʊɡənhm/ GUUG-ən-hyme; August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, bohemian and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim collected art in Europe and America primarily between 1938 and 1946. She exhibited this collection as she built it; in 1949, she settled in Venice, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice.

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Bohemianism

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual pursuits. In this context, bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds. Bohemian is a 19th-century historical and literary topos that places the milieu of young metropolitan artists and intellectuals—particularly those of the Latin Quarter in Paris—in a context of poverty, hunger, appreciation of friendship, idealization of art and contempt for money. Based on this topos, the most diverse real-world subcultures are often referred to as "bohemian" in a figurative sense, especially if they show traits of a precariat.

Socialite

Socialite

A socialite is a person from a wealthy and (possibly) aristocratic background, who is prominent in high society. A socialite generally spends a significant amount of time attending various fashionable social gatherings, instead of having traditional employment.

Guggenheim family

Guggenheim family

The Guggenheim family is an American-Jewish family known for making their fortune in the mining industry, in the early 20th century, especially in the United States and South America. After World War I, many family members withdrew from the businesses and became involved in philanthropy, especially in the arts, aviation, medicine, and culture.

Benjamin Guggenheim

Benjamin Guggenheim

Benjamin Guggenheim was an American businessman, a wealthy member of the Guggenheim family. He died aboard RMS Titanic when the ship sank in the North Atlantic Ocean. His body was never recovered.

Titanic

Titanic

RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner, operated by the White Star Line, which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, United States. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, more than 1,500 died, making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship up to that time. It remains the deadliest peacetime sinking of an ocean liner or cruise ship. The disaster drew public attention, provided foundational material for the disaster film genre, and has inspired many artistic works.

Solomon R. Guggenheim

Solomon R. Guggenheim

Solomon Robert Guggenheim was an American businessman and art collector. He is best known for establishing the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his long-time art advisor, artist Hilla von Rebay. The foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preservation, and research of modern and contemporary art and operates several museums around the world. The first museum established by the foundation was The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in New York City. This became The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952, and the foundation moved the collection into its first permanent museum building, in New York City, in 1959. The foundation next opened the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, in 1980. Its international network of museums expanded in 1997 to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, and it expects to open a new museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates after its construction is completed.

Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The islands are in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay lying between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers. In 2020, around 258,685 people resided in greater Venice or the Comune di Venezia, of whom around 55,000 live in the historical island city of Venice and the rest on the mainland (terraferma). Together with the cities of Padua and Treviso, Venice is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), which is considered a statistical metropolitan area, with a total population of 2.6 million.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is an art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of Venice, Italy. It is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was the home of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim for three decades. She began displaying her private collection of modern artworks to the public seasonally in 1951. After her death in 1979, it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which opened the collection year-round from 1980.

Early life

Guggenheim's parents were of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her mother, Florette Seligman (1870–1937), was a member of the Seligman family. When she turned 21 in 1919, Guggenheim inherited US$2.5 million, equivalent to US$39.1 million in 2021. Guggenheim's father, Benjamin Guggenheim, a member of the Guggenheim family, who died in the sinking of the Titanic, had not amassed the fortune of his siblings; therefore her inheritance was far less than that of her cousins. She also had a sister, Barbara Hazel Guggenheim, who became a painter and art collector.[1]

She first worked as a clerk in an avant-garde bookstore, the Sunwise Turn, in mid-town Manhattan, where she became enamored of the members of the bohemian artistic community.[2] In 1920 she went to live in Paris, France. Once there, she became friendly with avant-garde writers and artists, many of whom were living in poverty in the Montparnasse quarter of the city. Man Ray photographed her,[3] and was, along with Constantin Brâncuși and Marcel Duchamp, a friend whose art she was eventually to promote.

She became close friends with writer Natalie Barney and artist Romaine Brooks and was a regular at Barney's salon. She met Djuna Barnes during this time, and in time became her friend and patron. Barnes wrote her best-known novel, Nightwood, while staying at the Devon country house, Hayford Hall, that Guggenheim had rented for two summers.

Guggenheim urged Emma Goldman to write her autobiography and helped to secure funds for her to live in Saint-Tropez, France, while writing her two volume Living My Life.[4] Guggenheim wrote her own autobiography entitled Out of This Century, later revised and re-published as Confessions of an Art Addict[5] which was released in 1946[6] and is now published with Harper Collins.[7]

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Benjamin Guggenheim

Benjamin Guggenheim

Benjamin Guggenheim was an American businessman, a wealthy member of the Guggenheim family. He died aboard RMS Titanic when the ship sank in the North Atlantic Ocean. His body was never recovered.

Guggenheim family

Guggenheim family

The Guggenheim family is an American-Jewish family known for making their fortune in the mining industry, in the early 20th century, especially in the United States and South America. After World War I, many family members withdrew from the businesses and became involved in philanthropy, especially in the arts, aviation, medicine, and culture.

Avant-garde

Avant-garde

In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.

Bohemianism

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual pursuits. In this context, bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds. Bohemian is a 19th-century historical and literary topos that places the milieu of young metropolitan artists and intellectuals—particularly those of the Latin Quarter in Paris—in a context of poverty, hunger, appreciation of friendship, idealization of art and contempt for money. Based on this topos, the most diverse real-world subcultures are often referred to as "bohemian" in a figurative sense, especially if they show traits of a precariat.

Montparnasse

Montparnasse

Montparnasse is an area in the south of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail. It is split between the 6th, 14th, and 15th arrondissements of the city. Montparnasse has been part of Paris since 1669.

Man Ray

Man Ray

Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.

Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and others. However, other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.

Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.

Nightwood

Nightwood

Nightwood is a 1936 novel by American author Djuna Barnes that was first published by publishing house Faber and Faber. It is one of the early prominent novels to portray explicit homosexuality between women, and as such can be considered lesbian literature.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was a Russian-born anarchist, political activist, and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row, an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company—together with Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons, acquired in 1989.

Collecting, before World War II

Guggenheim, 1937
Guggenheim, 1937

In January 1938, Guggenheim opened a gallery for modern art in London featuring Jean Cocteau drawings in its first show, and began to collect works of art. Guggenheim often purchased at least one object from each of her exhibitions at the gallery.[8] After the outbreak of World War II, she purchased as much abstract and Surrealist art as possible.[5]

Her first gallery was called Guggenheim Jeune, the name ingeniously chosen to associate her gallery with both the epitome of a gallery, the French Bernheim-Jeune, and with the name of her own well-known family. The gallery on 30 Cork Street, next to Roland Penrose's and E. L. T. Mesens' show-case for the Surrealist movement, proved to be successful, thanks to many friends who gave advice and who helped to run the gallery. Marcel Duchamp, whom she had known since the early 1920s, when she lived in Paris with her first husband Laurence Vail, had introduced Guggenheim to the art world; it was through him that she met many artists during her frequent visits to Paris. He taught her about contemporary art and styles, and he conceived several of the exhibitions held at Guggenheim Jeune.

The Cocteau exhibition was followed by exhibitions of Wassily Kandinsky (his first one-man-show in England), Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen and several other well-known and some lesser-known artists. Peggy Guggenheim also held group exhibitions of sculpture and collage, with the participation of the now-classic moderns Antoine Pevsner, Henry Moore, Henri Laurens, Alexander Calder, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brâncuși, John Ferren, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Kurt Schwitters. She also greatly admired the work of John Tunnard (1900–1971) and is credited with his discovery in mainstream international modernism.

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Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole. The National Observer suggested that, “of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.”

Bernheim-Jeune

Bernheim-Jeune

Bernheim-Jeune gallery is one of the oldest art galleries in Paris.

Cork Street

Cork Street

Cork Street is a street in Mayfair in the West End of London, England, with many contemporary art galleries, and was previously associated with the tailoring industry. It is part of the Burlington Estate, which was developed from the 18th century.

E. L. T. Mesens

E. L. T. Mesens

Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens was a Belgian artist and writer associated with the Belgian Surrealist movement.

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.

Antoine Pevsner

Antoine Pevsner

Antoine Pevsner was a Russian-born sculptor and the older brother of Alexii Pevsner and Naum Gabo. Both Antoine and Naum are considered pioneers of twentieth-century sculpture.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore

Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. As well as sculpture, Moore produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.

Henri Laurens

Henri Laurens

Henri Laurens was a French sculptor and illustrator.

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."

Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and others. However, other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.

John Ferren

John Ferren

John Millard Ferren was an American artist and educator. He was active from 1920 until 1970 in San Francisco, Paris and New York City.

Jean Arp

Jean Arp

Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist.

Plans for a museum

When Guggenheim realized that her gallery, although well received, had made a loss of £600 in the first year, she decided to spend her money in a more practical way. A museum for contemporary arts was exactly the institution she could see herself supporting. Most certainly on her mind also were the adventures in New York City of her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, who, with the help and encouragement of artist Baroness Hilla von Rebay, had created the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation two years earlier. The main aim of this foundation had been to collect and to further the production of abstract art, resulting in the opening of the Museum of Non-objective Painting (known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum after 1952) in Manhattan during 1939. Guggenheim closed Guggenheim Jeune with a farewell party on 22 June 1939, at which colour portrait photographs by Gisèle Freund were projected on the walls. She started making plans for a Museum of Modern Art in London together with the English art historian and art critic Herbert Read. She set aside $40,000 for the museum's running costs. However, these funds were soon overstretched by the organisers' ambitions.

In August 1939, Guggenheim left for Paris to negotiate loans of artworks for the first exhibition. In her luggage was a list drawn up by Herbert Read for this occasion. Shortly after her departure the Second World War broke out, and the events following 1 September 1939 made her abandon the scheme, willingly or not. She then "decided now to buy paintings by all the painters who were on Herbert Read's list. Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day."[9] When finished, she had acquired 10 Picassos, 40 Ernsts, eight Mirós, four Magrittes, four Ferrens, three Man Rays, three Dalís, one Klee, one Wolfgang Paalen and one Chagall, among others. In the meantime, she had also made new plans and in April 1940 had rented a large space in the Place Vendôme as a new home for her museum.

A few days before the Germans reached Paris, Guggenheim had to abandon her plans for a Paris museum, and fled to the south of France, from where, after months of safeguarding her collection and artist friends, she left Europe for New York in the summer of 1941. There, in the following year, she opened a new gallery—which actually was in part a museum—at 30 West 57th Street. It was called The Art of This Century. Three of the four galleries were dedicated to Cubist and Abstract art, Surrealism and Kinetic art, with only the fourth, the front room, being a commercial gallery. Guggenheim held other important shows, such as the Exhibition by 31 Women, the first documented all female art exhibition in the United States of America, at the gallery.[10] This 1943 month long exhibition gathered together artists ranging from notable figures like Frida Kahlo, Gypsy Rose Lee, Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, and Louise Nevelson, to others who were unknown artists in New York.[11] [12][13][14]

Her interest in new art was instrumental in advancing the careers of several important modern artists including the American painters Jackson Pollock and William Congdon, the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, the sound poet Ada Verdun Howell and the German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in December 1941.[15] She had assembled her collection in only seven years.[5]

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Hilla von Rebay

Hilla von Rebay

Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Freiin Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, known as Baroness Hilla von Rebay or simply Hilla Rebay, was an abstract artist in the early 20th century and co-founder and first director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She was a key figure in advising Solomon R. Guggenheim to collect non-objective art, a collection that would later form the basis of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection. She was also influential in selecting Frank Lloyd Wright to design the current Guggenheim museum, which is now known as a modernist icon in New York City.

Abstract art

Abstract art

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state of New York. Located near the southern tip of New York State, Manhattan is based in the Eastern Time Zone and constitutes both the geographical and demographic center of the Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. Over 58 million people live within 250 miles of Manhattan, which serves as New York City’s economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, and the city’s historical birthplace. Residents of the outer boroughs of New York City often refer to Manhattan as "the city". Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world, and hosts the United Nations headquarters. Manhattan also serves as the headquarters of the global art market, with numerous art galleries and auction houses collectively hosting half of the world’s art auctions.

Gisèle Freund

Gisèle Freund

Gisèle Freund was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist, famous for her documentary photography and portraits of writers and artists. Her best-known book, Photographie et société (1974), is about the uses and abuses of the photographic medium in the age of technological reproduction. In 1977, she became president of the French Association of Photographers, and in 1981, she took the official portrait of French President François Mitterrand.

Art critic

Art critic

An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogues and on websites. Some of today's art critics use art blogs and other online platforms in order to connect with a wider audience and expand debate about art.

Herbert Read

Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976.

Joan Miró

Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. He was known as Joan Miró in the art recognition. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.

John Ferren

John Ferren

John Millard Ferren was an American artist and educator. He was active from 1920 until 1970 in San Francisco, Paris and New York City.

Man Ray

Man Ray

Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

57th Street (Manhattan)

57th Street (Manhattan)

57th Street is a broad thoroughfare in the New York City borough of Manhattan, one of the major two-way, east-west streets in the borough's grid. As with Manhattan's other "crosstown" streets, it is divided into its east and west sections at Fifth Avenue. The street runs from a small park overlooking the East River in the east to the West Side Highway along the Hudson River in the west. 57th Street runs through the neighborhoods of Sutton Place, Midtown Manhattan, and Hell's Kitchen from east to west.

The collection, after World War II

Following World War II – and her 1946 divorce from Max Ernst – she closed The Art of This Century Gallery in 1947, and returned to Europe, deciding to live in Venice, Italy. In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale and in 1949 established herself in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni ('unfinished palazzo of the lions') on the Grand Canal.[5]

Her collection became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant number of works by Americans. In the 1950s she promoted the art of two local painters, Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani. By the early 1960s, Guggenheim had almost stopped collecting art and began to concentrate on presenting what she already owned. She loaned out her collection to museums in Europe and in 1969 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which was named after her uncle. Eventually, she decided to donate her home and her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a gift which was concluded inter vivos in 1976, before her death in 1979.

Guggenheim's grave, with a plaque remembering her Lhasa Apsos (dogs)
Guggenheim's grave, with a plaque remembering her Lhasa Apsos (dogs)

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is one of the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century. Pieces in her collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and abstract expressionism.[16]

Guggenheim lived in Venice until her death in Camposampiero near Padua, Italy, after a stroke. Her ashes are interred in the garden (later the Nasher Sculpture Garden) of her home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (inside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection), next to her dogs.[5]

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Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is an art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of Venice, Italy. It is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was the home of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim for three decades. She began displaying her private collection of modern artworks to the public seasonally in 1951. After her death in 1979, it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which opened the collection year-round from 1980.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976.

Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The islands are in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay lying between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers. In 2020, around 258,685 people resided in greater Venice or the Comune di Venezia, of whom around 55,000 live in the historical island city of Venice and the rest on the mainland (terraferma). Together with the cities of Padua and Treviso, Venice is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), which is considered a statistical metropolitan area, with a total population of 2.6 million.

Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of its kind. The main exhibition held in Castello, in the halls of the Arsenale and Biennale Gardens, alternates between art and architecture. The other events hosted by the Foundation—spanning theatre, music, and dance—are held annually in various parts of Venice, whereas the Venice Film Festival takes place at the Lido.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. The museum adopted its current name in 1952, three years after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim.

Inter vivos

Inter vivos

Inter vivos is a legal term referring to a transfer or gift made during one's lifetime, as opposed to a testamentary transfer that takes effect on the death of the giver.

Lhasa Apso

Lhasa Apso

The Lhasa Apso is a non-sporting dog breed originating in Tibet. It has traditionally been used as an interior sentinel.

Cubism

Cubism

Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related artistic movements in music, literature, and architecture. In Cubist works of art, the subjects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form—instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.

Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media.

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

Camposampiero

Camposampiero

Camposampiero is a town and comune in the province of Padua, Veneto, northern Italy. The 15th-century Santuario del Noce, a Roman Catholic chapel dedicated to Anthony of Padua, is located in Camposampiero.

Padua

Padua

Padua is a city and comune in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 214,000. The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE) which has a population of around 2,600,000.

Private life

According to both Guggenheim and her biographer Anton Gill, it was believed that while living in Europe, she had "slept with 1,000 men".[17] She claimed to have had affairs with numerous artists and writers, and in return many artists and others have claimed affairs with her. When asked by conductor Thomas Schippers how many husbands she had, she replied, "You mean my own, or other people's?"[18][19] In her autobiography, Peggy provides the names of some of these lovers, including Yves Tanguy, Roland Penrose and E. L. T. Mesens.[20]

Her first marriage was to Laurence Vail, a Dada sculptor and writer with whom she had two children, Michael Cedric Sindbad Vail (1923–1986) and Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (1925–1967). They divorced in about 1928 following his affair with writer Kay Boyle, whom he later married. Soon after her first marriage dissolved, she had an affair with John Ferrar Holms, a writer with writer's block who had been a war hero.[5][21] Starting in December 1939, she and Samuel Beckett had a brief but intense affair, and he encouraged her to turn exclusively to modern art.[5] She married her second husband, painter Max Ernst, in 1941 and divorced him in 1946.[15] Among her eight grandchildren is Karole Vail, who was appointed director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 2017.[22]

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Anton Gill

Anton Gill

Anton Gill is a British writer of historical fiction and nonfiction. He won the H. H. Wingate Award for non-fiction for The Journey Back From Hell, an account of the lives of survivors after their liberation from Nazi concentration camps.

Yves Tanguy

Yves Tanguy

Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy, known as just Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.

Roland Penrose

Roland Penrose

Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.

E. L. T. Mesens

E. L. T. Mesens

Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens was a Belgian artist and writer associated with the Belgian Surrealist movement.

Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire. New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Dadaist activities lasted until the mid 1920s.

Pegeen Vail Guggenheim

Pegeen Vail Guggenheim

Pegeen Vail Guggenheim was a Swiss-born American painter. Her painting combines two different artistic styles: surrealism and naïve art.

Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle was an American novelist, short story writer, educator, and political activist. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and O. Henry Award winner.

John Ferrar Holms

John Ferrar Holms

John Ferrar Holms (1897–1934) was a British literary critic.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France. He died in Paris on 1 April 1976.

Karole Vail

Karole Vail

Karole P. B. Vail is an American museum director, curator and writer. Since 2017, she has been the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Director for Italy. Prior to this appointment, she worked on the curatorial staff at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for 20 years.

Portrayal in popular culture

  • Guggenheim was portrayed by Amy Madigan in the movie Pollock (2000), directed by and starring Ed Harris, based on the life of Jackson Pollock.
  • A play by Lanie Robertson based on Guggenheim's life, Woman Before a Glass, opened at the Promenade Theatre on Broadway, New York on March 10, 2005. This one-woman show focuses on Guggenheim's later life. Mercedes Ruehl played Guggenheim and received an Obie Award for her performance.[23] In May 2011, the Abingdon Theater Arts Complex in New York featured a revival of this play, starring veteran stage actress Judy Rosenblatt, directed by Austin Pendleton.[24]
  • In Bethan Roberts' first play for radio, My Own Private Gondolier, Guggenheim's troubled daughter, Pegeen, leaves her three children behind when she travels to Venice to spend the summer with her mother. The play was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on October 19, 2010; Guggenheim was played by Fiona Shaw; Pegeen was played by Hattie Morahan.[25]
  • In April 2015, a new documentary film, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, began premiering at film festivals, including the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 26, 2015.
  • Guggenheim is a minor character in the narrative non-fiction Leonora in the Morning Light, by Michaela Carter, published in 2021
  • Kay Boyle's semi-autobiographical novel My Next Bride includes a fictionalized portrayal of Guggenheim.

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Amy Madigan

Amy Madigan

Amy Marie Madigan is an American actress. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1985 film Twice in a Lifetime. Her other film credits include Love Child (1982), Places in the Heart (1984), Field of Dreams (1989), Uncle Buck (1989), The Dark Half (1993), Pollock (2000), and Gone Baby Gone (2007).

Ed Harris

Ed Harris

Edward Allen Harris is an American actor and filmmaker. His performances in Apollo 13 (1995), The Truman Show (1998), Pollock (2000), and The Hours (2002) earned him critical acclaim and Academy Award nominations.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million in a private purchase.

Mercedes Ruehl

Mercedes Ruehl

Mercedes J. Ruehl is an American screen, stage, and television actress. She is the recipient of several accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, two Obie Awards, and two Outer Critics Circle Awards.

Obie Award

Obie Award

The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards originally given by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City. In September 2014, the awards were jointly presented and administered with the American Theatre Wing. As the Tony Awards cover Broadway productions, the Obie Awards cover off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions. It has often been considered off-Broadway's highest honor.

Austin Pendleton

Austin Pendleton

Austin Campbell Pendleton is an American actor, playwright, theatre director, and instructor.

Pegeen Vail Guggenheim

Pegeen Vail Guggenheim

Pegeen Vail Guggenheim was a Swiss-born American painter. Her painting combines two different artistic styles: surrealism and naïve art.

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, London. The station controller is Mohit Bakaya.

Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw is an Irish film and theatre actress. She is known for her roles as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2010), Marnie Stonebrook in the fourth season of the HBO series True Blood (2011), and Carolyn Martens in the BBC series Killing Eve (2018–22).

Hattie Morahan

Hattie Morahan

Harriet Jane Morahan is an English actress. Her roles include Sister Clara in The Golden Compass (2007), Gale Benson in The Bank Job (2008), Alice in The Bletchley Circle (2012–2014), Ann in Mr. Holmes (2015), Rose Coyne in My Mother and Other Strangers (2016), and Agathe/The Enchantress in Beauty and the Beast (2017).

Documentary film

Documentary film

A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland about art collector Peggy Guggenheim. The film premiered on April 20, 2015 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Source: "Peggy Guggenheim", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 22nd), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_Guggenheim.

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References

Notes

  1. ^ "The Collector". The New Yorker. 2002-05-06. Retrieved 2022-04-23.
  2. ^ Peggy Guggenheim (Marguerite Guggenheim), American art collector at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  3. ^ "Peggy Guggenheim, Man Ray, 1924". Rijksmuseum.
  4. ^ "Living My Life | The Anarchist Library". revoltlib.com. 23 January 2017. Retrieved 2017-07-31.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g Walsh, John. "The priceless Peggy Guggenheim", The Independent, October 21, 2009, accessed March 12, 2012
  6. ^ Esterow, Milton (5 January 2017). "The Bitter Legal Battle over Peggy Guggenheim's Blockbuster Art Collection". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2020-08-26.
  7. ^ "Confessions of an Art Addict". HarperCollins. Retrieved 2020-08-26.
  8. ^ Laurence, Tacou-Rumney (1996). Peggy Guggenheim : a collector's album. Paris. p. 84. ISBN 2080136100. OCLC 35396116.
  9. ^ Guggenheim 1979, p. 69.
  10. ^ Shenker, Israel (December 24, 1979). "Peggy Guggenheim Is Dead at 81; Known for Modern Art Collection". Encyclopedia Titanica.
  11. ^ Relf, Nina (2021-05-19). "31 Women: Peggy Guggenheim And Her Groundbreaking Exhibition". DailyArt Magazine. Retrieved 2023-03-01.
  12. ^ "Peggy Guggenheim Is Dead at 81; Known for Modern Art Collection". www.encyclopedia-titanica.org. 2004-09-10. Retrieved 2023-03-01.
  13. ^ "The Notorious "31 Women" Art Show of 1943". The Gotham Center for New York City History. Retrieved 2023-03-01.
  14. ^ "THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM EXHIBITION "31 WOMEN" IS HAVING A COMEBACK". Material Magazine. 2017-06-16. Retrieved 2023-03-01.
  15. ^ a b Biography, Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archived 2013-03-15 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved June 25, 2010
  16. ^ "Peggy Guggenheim Collection". guggenheim.org. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. 2004. Retrieved 14 June 2017.
  17. ^ "Thomas Messer", Telegraph obituary, 23 May 2013
  18. ^ Esterow, Milton (5 January 2017). "The Bitter Legal Battle over Peggy Guggenheim's Blockbuster Art Collection". Vanity Fair.
  19. ^ John Lahr (March 14, 2005). "Solos and Solitaries". The New Yorker.
  20. ^ Guggenheim 1979, p. .
  21. ^ Vail, Karole P. B. Peggy Guggenheim: A Centennial Celebration Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (1998), p. 78. ISBN 0-8109-6914-9
  22. ^ Barone, Joshua. "The Peggy Guggenheim Collection Names Its New Director", The New York Times, June 8, 2017, accessed July 30, 2017
  23. ^ ​Woman Before a Glass​ at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
  24. ^ Gates, Anita (May 19, 2011). "She Loved Herself, Yes, but She Also Loved Art". The New York Times. Retrieved July 17, 2021.
  25. ^ "Network Radio BBC Week 42: Tuesday 19 October 2010". BBC Press Office. Retrieved July 17, 2021.

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