Anton Gill triumphs with his latest work, ART LOVER, a richly detailed and meticulously researched biography of Peggy Guggenheim, founder of the modern art gallery that bears her name in Venice, Italy. The doyenne of the art world of postwar Europe, Guggenheim will always be remembered as an adventurer, both for her groundbreaking artistic tastes and her notorious sexual habits, thanks to Gill's exhilarating study.
Guggenheim was born in 1898 the daughter of wealthy industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, who perished aboard the Titanic. After a childhood marked by tragedy and isolation, Guggenheim defied the social conventions of her time and embarked on a bohemian life in Paris alongside such personae as Marcel Duchamp and Djuna Barnes. Her early marriage to novelist Laurence Vail was brief and violent. Gill includes a Guggenheim quote in which she discusses her husband's abuse with a detached air that later came to epitomize her onlooker attitude towards her life:
"Fights went on for hours, sometimes days, once even for two weeks. I should have fought back. He wanted me to, but all I did was weep. That annoyed him more than anything. When our fights worked up to a grand finale he would rub jam in my hair. But what I hated most was being knocked down in the streets, or having things thrown in restaurants."
She had two children with Vail, Pegeen and Sindbad, but after seven years she ran off with writer John Holms, the first in a long string of short-term lovers. She always chose men she felt were her intellectual superior, learning as much as she could from them before she moved on to her next conquest. The details of her complex romantic intrigues are worthy of a tome all their own; they include an affair with playwright Samuel Beckett and, later, a brief marriage to painter Max Ernst.
The most engaging portions of ART LOVER reveal a woman with a single-minded devotion to her collection. Through her patronage of artists ranging from Brancusi to Pollock, she amassed one of the world's finest collections of modern art at a time when few collectors were interested in avant-garde works. She funded countless artistic and literary enterprises in the last half of the 20th Century that would have no doubt failed without her support and encouragement.
Engrossing not only for juicy art world gossip that even the most thorough reader of artist biographies will be sure to find revelatory, ART LOVER also presents a side of Guggenheim far less favorable. Her globe-trotting, bohemian lifestyle didn't win her any parenting awards; her relations with both her children were always strained. Gill's portrayal of Guggenheim as a mother suggests she largely ignored her children when she wasn't switching them from country to country, boarding school to boarding school. Guggenheim is famously quoted as having told Pegeen that she'd rather own a Picasso than have a daughter. Plagued with depression and lifelong mental instabilities, Pegeen attempted suicide a dozen times before finally succeeding in 1967, a tragedy Guggenheim never recovered from despite her outward frostiness.
The last pages of ART LOVER are full of sadness, just like the final chapter of Guggenheim's extraordinary life. After settling in Venice in her later years, her palazzo slowly fell into grave disrepair, as did much of her artwork. Guggenheim's friend and associate, John Hohnsbeen, helped her care for her vast collection towards the end of her life and found the pictures in surprisingly bad condition. The damp environment of the palazzo, with a basement that flooded each winter, was a terrible place to conserve fine art, and he frequently found himself "sweeping the maggots off" the backs of paintings to save them from decay.
Along with Guggenheim's own physical collapse, Gill details the miserly habits that worsened as she neared her death. Her unrelenting lifelong trait of haggling over every penny on her restaurant bill stayed with her to the end. She even quibbled over her tab at Harry's Bar, where she was a longtime patron and received a considerable discount. In the lonely winter months, when visitors spurned Venice for warmer climes, would-be guests won her indignation for defecting to hotels to avoid the freezing conditions and downright inedible food she provided at the palazzo. Her grandchildren found Guggenheim such a difficult and penny-pinching companion that whenever they were obliged to visit her in Venice, they were ill for weeks in advance of their trip out of sheer anxiety. ART LOVER skillfully paints the portrait of a fascinating woman who was lonely and miserable during her last years. Anton Gill's book proves that Guggenheim truly was a "poor little rich girl" whose money served as her gravest impediment to happiness.
--- Reviewed by Andrea E. Hoag
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