DR Rylands Essay - Perth Catalogue

Dr.
Philip Rylands
Genesis of a Museum
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Charles Seliger, Portrait of Howard Putzel (1943), pencil and ink on paper,
12.7 x 7.6 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation), gift of the artist, 2006.78. Photo Sergio Martucci.
Five-year-old Peggy Guggenheim with her older sister Benita. Franz von Lenbach,
Benita and Peggy Guggenheim (c.1903), oil on board, 88.3 x 54.6 cm. Private
collection. Photo David Heald.
Genesis of a Museum
Opening this gallery and its collection to the public during a time when people are ghting for
their lives and freedom is a responsibility of which I am fully conscious. This undertaking will
serve its purpose only if it succeeds in serving the future instead of recording the past. Thus
Peggy Guggenheim announced the opening of Art of This Century, her museum-gallery on
the top oor of 30 West 57th Street in New York. The date was 20 October 1942, less than
a year after the entry of the USA into World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor. This
inaugural exhibition was the rst showing of her collection of contemporary European art, the
celebration of four years of collecting and the climax of months of preparation.
Peggy was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the second of three daughters of Benjamin
and Florette Guggenheim. Though named Marguerite, she was Peggy to her family from early
days. Her grandfather Simon had emigrated to the United States in steerage in 1847 to escape
the hardship of Jewish life in Lengnau, Switzerland. The family prospered, especially after 1879
when Meyer, Simons son, acquired an interest in lead and silver mines in Leadville, Colorado.
In 1901 Meyer and his sons took over the American Smelting and Mining Company; in 1903
they formed, with J.P. Morgan, a corporation to operate the Kennecott mines in Alaska. More
acquisitions followed, and it has been estimated that, by the beginning of World War I, the
Guggenheim family owned between 75 and 80 per cent of the worlds known resources of
silver, copper and lead.
Peggys father, Benjamin, had withdrawn from the family business in 1901, to travel in Europe
and develop mining and industrial manufacturing interests in America. Eleven years later, in
April 1912, he drowned on the RMS Titanics maiden voyage, and his dignied even heroic
behaviour belongs to the Titanic legend. This left Peggy not only fatherless but in nancial
difculty Benjamin had squandered his money and even though concerted action by
her uncles and the fact of her mothers own inherited wealth (as a member of the Seligman
family) improved her situation, it is worth recording that she was a relatively poor relative of her
uncles and cousins and that her support of artists and writers, and her career as a gallerist
and collector, were conducted with some sacrices to her own comfort.
Art of This Century, New York, 1942
Art of This Century was to be both a permanent exhibition of Peggys collection and a
commercial gallery. For its design, Peggys friend Howard Putzel had suggested that she
seek help from the Romanian-born architect Frederick Kiesler, who had emigrated with his
wife, Stef, to New York in 1926. Peggy acted promptly on this advice, writing on 26 February
1942 from her brownstone mansion on Beekman Place: Dear Mr Kiesler, I want your help.
1
It was characteristic of Peggy that she created an opportunity for Kiesler to carry out a project
he had rst imagined in Vienna almost twenty years earlier: an enquiry into the interaction
between architecture and art, the forging of an ideal continuity that merged art with the
space around it, uniting the psychological and physical experiences of the spectator. Kiesler
himself issued a statement on the occasion of the opening: Primitive man knew no separate
worlds of vision and of fact It is the principle of unity, primordial unity, the unity between
mans creative consciousness and his daily environment which governs the presentation of
paintings, sculptures, furnishings and enclosures in these four galleries.
2
ten
Genesis of a Museum
Three of the four galleries that comprised Art of This Century were for
Peggys collection, and the fourth, the Daylight Gallery daylight was
otherwise excluded was for the selling exhibitions. The Abstract Gallery
had undulating canvas, ultramarine in colour, covering two of its walls, and
oorboards painted in medium Thalo blue.
3
An airy, oating quality of space
was induced by the suspension of paintings and sculptures on oor-to-
ceiling ropes or straps. The biomorphic furniture (tables, chairs, benches
and sculpture stands), which Kiesler labelled Correalist and on the design
and even manufacture of which he expended a great deal of creative verve,
harmonised with the curving canvas. The removal of picture frames, which
physically and psychologically separate the world of the viewer from the
world of the image, was a clear signal of continuity. Kiesler described it as
a necessity, while Peggy claimed it was her only condition.
Kiesler was surely trying to create an amorphous and anti-gravitational space
appropriate to the Cubist and abstract visual language of the works in Peggys
collection. Rather than bafe the visitor by its novelty, the environment was to
serve the communicativeness of the art: The result achieved contrary to
ones expectation seems to be a much better possibility for concentrating
the attention of the spectator on each painting and therefore a better chance
for the painting to communicate its message.
4
In the Surrealist Gallery the unframed paintings were cantilevered from the
walls on wooden arms with universal joints, so that the angle at which they
were tipped was variable. The walls themselves, in veneered wood, were
concave, and this and a oating, lowered ceiling augmented the narrowing
effect of the intrusive paintings. Sculptures were placed on the same
curvaceous pieces of furniture that were deployed in the Abstract Gallery.
The lighting system was eccentric. Lights would turn on in different parts of
the gallery, only to extinguish themselves after seconds or minutes, even
as others turned on elsewhere. Occasionally total darkness would engulf
the viewer. Given the distress this caused Peggy was soon persuaded by
Putzel to leave the lights on permanently. The intention seems to have been
(left) The Abstract Gallery at Art of This Century, New York, 1942. Works shown (left to right): Vassily Kandinsky,
Dominant curve (1936); Georges Vantongerloo Construction of volumetric interrelationships (1924); Friedrich
Vordemberge-Gildewart, Composition no. 113 (1939); Charles Howard, Preguration (1940); Alexander Calder,
Arc of petals (1941); Antoine Pevsner, Developable surface (193839); Amde Ozenfant, Guitar and bottles
(1920); Kandinsky, White cross (1922); Pevsner, Anchored cross (1933). Photo Berenice Abbott / Commerce
Graphics Ltd, New York.
The Surrealist Gallery at Art of This Century, New York, 1942. Paintings shown (left to right): Max Ernst,
The kiss (1927), Attirement of the bride (1940), The forest (192728), The Antipope (194142);
Sculptures: Alberto Giacometti, Woman with her throat cut (1932), Woman walking (1932); Max Ernst.
Photo Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, New York.
1 Archive of the Kiesler Foundation, Vienna. It is reproduced in Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., p. 173. Jimmy Ernst
(Maxs son by his rst marriage) wrote: Andr Breton and Howard Putzel had persuaded Peggy that Frederick
Kiesler was the ideal individual to create the physical setting for her gallerymuseum (A Not-So-Still Life, New
York: St Martins/Marek, 1984, p. 228). For Howard Putzel, see below.
2 Frederick J. Kiesler, Note on designing the gallery, Archive of the Kiesler Foundation, Vienna; reproduced in
Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., pp. 174 5. For an authoritative account of the place of Kieslers design for
Art of This Century in Kieslers career, see Dieter Bogner, Staging works of art: Frederick Kieslers exhibition
design 19241957, in Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., pp. 3449.
eleven
Genesis of a Museum
to induce a sensation like the pulsing of ones blood, while the curved,
enclosing walls were in a line of descent from Surrealist calls in the 1930s
for intra-uterine architecture.
The third permanent collection space, the Kinetic Gallery, displayed works
visible in unorthodox ways. The reproductions of paintings in Duchamps Box
in a valise (1941), viewable through a spy hole, were xed to a mechanism that
the viewer set in motion by turning what Peggy called a very beautiful spidery
wheel.
5
Works by Klee were visible on a paternoster, which revolved when the
viewer walked through a light beam. Nearby, at one end of the Abstract Gallery,
Kiesler had devised a box into which paintings could be inserted, with a viewing
hole revealed when the visitor pulled a lever that opened a camera diaphragm.
Peggy recalled that the press (actually Robert Coates in The New Yorker,
31 October 1942) had compared this to Coney Island. Indeed, throughout
these galleries the sense of enchantment and displacement, surprise and
even terror (the periodic noise of an approaching express train in the Surrealist
Gallery for example) convincingly evoked the ambience of the funfair.
6
Finally, overlooking 57th Street, there was the Daylight Gallery for the selling
exhibitions a more conventional space, in which however Kiesler had
brought to bear his indefatigable inventiveness by creating racks and display
stands that would facilitate viewing additional works of art, whether for sale
or not.
twelve
Genesis of a Museum
The Painting Library of the Daylight Gallery at Art of This Century, New York, 1942. Left to right, on the wall: Oscar Dominguez, Nostalgia of space (1939); Jean Arp, Overturned blue shoe with two heels
under a black vault (c.1925); Rne Magritte, The interpretation of dreams (1935); on the stands: Berenice Abbott, Rooster faade (1937); Man Ray, Untitled (1927). Photo K.W. Hermann.
opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London the following year, could
speak of the violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists.
11
At least in his own work, Moore was determined to reconcile the two art-
critical postures, though aware of the components of the polarity: All good art
has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained
both classic and romantic elements order and surprise, intellect and
imagination, conscious and unconscious.
3 Decades of imprecision and error about the facts of the design of Art of This Century were ended with
the publication of Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., including a detailed account of the construction and
appearance of Kieslers project by Don Quaintance, Modern art in a modern setting: Frederick Kieslers
design of Art of This Century, pp. 20673.
4 Frederick J. Kiesler, Press release pertaining to the architectural aspects of the Gallery, Archive of the
Kiesler Foundation, Vienna; reproduced in Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., pp. 1767.
5 Box in a valise (1941) is a leather valise containing miniature replicas and colour reproductions
of all of Duchamps works until that date, no. 1 of an edition of 20. It is still in her collection today.
6 Peggy and Kiesler must have received help from Duchamp himself (he was staying at this time with
Kiesler and Stef in Greenwich Village) when arranging the Kinetic Gallery. There is surely a link between
Art of This Centurys voyeuristic presentation of his Box in a valise and his Etant donns, which he began soon
after: see Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous. Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition
Installations, Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 200, 201, 204 (see also Giovanni
Carandente, Marcel Duchamp in chiaro, Milan: Rizzoli, 1993, p. 46).
7 Guggenheim, Out of This Century, pp. 2756.
8 Ibid., p. 161.
9 In his opening essay for Betty Rea, ed., 5 on Revolutionary Art, London: Wishart, 1935. See also
E.H. Ramsden, Herbert Reads philosophy of art in Henry Treece, ed., Herbert Read: An Introduction,
Port Washington, NY: Kennikatt Press, 1944, p. 47, and Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism
19001939, London: Allen Lane and Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1981, pp. 3045.
10 In Surrealism the term grattage, more usual in the medical profession, refers to a technique of scraping paint
across the surface of paper or canvas in such a way as to reveal underlying layers of paint in a partial and
highly textured way. Frottage has sexual innuendoes (excitement aroused by rubbing against another body)
but in this context it refers to a technique, used by Ernst from 1925 onwards, of eliciting accidental imagery
by rubbing, with charcoal or some other material, on paper that has been placed over a textured surface,
a process very similar to brass rubbing. Like grattage, it is intended to tease the unconscious mind with
accidental formations.
11 Quoted by Harrison, op. cit., p. 302, from Henry Moore, The sculptor speaks, The Listener, 18 August 1937.
12 Dearborn, op. cit., p. 120.
13 Guggenheim, Out of This Century, p. 163.
14 See Susan Davidson, Focusing an instinct: The collecting of Peggy Guggenheim, in Davidson and Rylands,
op. cit., pp. 5189.
thirteen
Genesis of a Museum
Peggy Guggenheim with Henry Moore in his studio. c.1956. Photo Roloff Beny / National Archives of Canada.
Abstraction and Surrealism
The night of the opening of Art of This Century, Peggy wore a white evening
gown she had had made for the occasion, which contrasted with her jet-
black hair. Most interestingly, however, she wore earrings that did not match
a silver mobile by Alexander Calder and a tiny landscape by Yves Tanguy
in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract art.
7
Five
years earlier, when she was planning her London art gallery, Guggenheim
Jeune, Marcel Duchamp had taught [her] the difference between Abstract
and Surrealist art.
8
Before this, in 1935, Herbert Read, who was to play
an important role in the formation of Peggys collection, had written that
only Surrealism and abstract art offered a way forward in the development
of contemporary art.
9

Peggys comprehension of modern art and the parameters of her collecting in
its rst, heroic phase, dedicated to the European avant-garde from 1910 to
1940, were therefore predicated on the opposition of abstraction to Surrealism.
In its origins, Surrealist painting drew heavily on abstract forms as they were
developed in the 1910s upon the formal inventions of Cubism and upon the
manipulation of chance in Dada. The production of Masson, Mir, Ernst and
Arp in the mid-1920s tted readily into a repertoire of abstracting, if it was not
purely abstract imagery. More obviously gurative painters, such as Tanguy,
Delvaux, Magritte and especially Dal, came to dominate the perception and
the received denition of Surrealism from the late 1920s onwards. These
artists shifted the process for unveiling unconscious psychic activity away
from automatism (referring originally to automatic writing, which, translated into
paint, meant spontaneous, undeliberated marks) to the illustration of dream.
Max Ernsts art shifts back and forth between plausible form and space (however
bizarrely imagined) and the more two-dimensional imagery of frottage, grattage,
collage, chance linear arrangements and other technical experiments.
10

By the mid-1930s even ideological differences separated abstraction from
Surrealism the former, especially in its most geometric modes, sought
utopian harmony and an apolitical posture; the latter was committed to
Communism and revolutionary change as dened by its ideologue Andr
Breton. Writing in 1937, Henry Moore, who was to befriend Peggy when she
Viewing mechanism for Marcel Duchamps Box in a valise (193541) in the Kinetic Gallery at Art of This
Century, New York, 1942. Photo Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, New York.
fourteen
Genesis of a Museum
Guggenheim Jeune,
London, 1938
Peggy rst conceived the idea of an art gallery in May 1937, apparently in
conversation with a childhood friend, Peggy Waldman.
12
Many years later she
wrote: I was opening a modern art gallery in London [but] I much preferred
old masters. [Samuel] Beckett told me one had to accept the art of our day
as it was a living thing.
13
Guggenheim Jeune opened on 24 January 1938
with an exhibition of Jean Cocteaus designs for his play Les Chevaliers de
la table ronde. Duchamp had introduced her to Cocteau only weeks before
the event.
As Mary Dearborn documents in her biography, Peggy had had friendships
with creative people ever since she had moved to Europe and married the
remarkable Laurence Vail in Paris in 1922. Thanks to the Bohemian circles
into which Vail introduced her, she had thrived among writers and artists,
including Duchamp, for fteen years before she xed upon the idea of opening
a gallery. In retrospect it seems inevitable that her gallery should have dealt in
contemporary art rather than old masters. Duchamp made introductions and
arrangements. He was her chief adviser, Peggy having entered an exclusive
club, together with Walter and Louise Arensberg, Henri-Pierre Roch and
Katherine Dreier, whose collections and tastes were shaped by Duchamp.
14

More generally, her access to Duchamp gave a sophisticated, international
character to her new career in art, which she could not have derived from
the contemporary art scene in England, where she had been living more or
less continuously since she and Vail divorced in 1930.
15

Duchamp introduced Peggy to Vasily Kandinsky, who was living in
Paris. Kandinskys painting became the material of her second show at
Guggenheim Jeune (FebruaryMarch 1938).
16
Kandinsky himself selected
and hung the works, using plans sent through the post. The thirty-eight
paintings, from 1910 to 1937, included Dominant curve, a masterpiece
of 1936, which Peggy purchased for herself.
17
The exhibition had several
important consequences. Exhibiting societies in Bristol and Gloucester as
well as a boys school in the East Midlands (Oundle) borrowed paintings
from her after the show had closed, thus promoting the acceptance of
abstract art in England.
Yet Kandinsky was not unknown in England. Among those who visited the
exhibition was Michael E. Sadler, who was quoted in her catalogue. Sadler,
Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University from 1911 to 1923, and his son Michael
T.H. Sadler had befriended Kandinsky on a trip to Bavaria in 1912. A year
earlier the latter had purchased woodcuts by Kandinsky from the Allied Arts
Association exhibition in London. In 1914 he published his English translation
of Kandinskys ber das Geistige in der Kunst (1910) under the title The Art
of Spiritual Harmony.
18
The Sadlers built up a collection of modern art that
included, for example, Gauguins Vision after the sermon (1888). Herbert
Read was a student at Leeds University in 1914, and his passion for modern
art might have been awakened when he saw paintings by Kandinsky in the
home of the Vice-Chancellor.
19
Thus it was predictable that Read would
seek an opportunity to review Kandinskys exhibition, his rst in England, at
Guggenheim Jeune, and it was probably this that brought him together with
Peggy a meeting that was to be decisive for her career in art.
Early in 1938, during her Kandinsky exhibition, Peggy wrote to her uncle
Solomon R. Guggenheim offering to sell him Red spot no.2. By this time
Solomon had been dissuaded from buying Kandinskys work in favour of that
of Rudolf Bauer, the lover of his museum director and artistic adviser Hilla
Rebay. Rebay herself responded to Peggys offer with an insulting letter, to
which Peggy replied with a spirited defence. This initiated a breach between
uncle and niece that was not to be fully resolved until thirty years later (after
the deaths of both Solomon and Rebay) when in 1969 Peggy was invited
to show her collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by Thomas
Messer, and when she subsequently agreed to donate her collection and
Venetian palace to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Peggy persuaded her sister, Hazel, to buy a Kandinsky painting in
order to make a gi ft to the Tate Gal l ery. After l ong del ays and a
change of director (from J.B. Manson to John Rothenstein), Cossacks,
of 191011, was reluctantly accepted by the trustees in November 1938.
It was the single most advanced work of art in the Tate collections at that
time. This vicarious generosity on Peggys part is surprising given the battle
she had waged against the Tate earlier in the same year. This had been
precipitated by her next important exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune after
Kandinsky, again suggested to her by Duchamp. Contemporary Sculpture Peggy Guggenheims rst husband, the writer and artist Laurence Vail.
(AprilMay 1938), presented Cubist and abstract work by Constantin
Brancusi, Henri Laurens, Antoine Pevsner, Raymond Duchamp-Villon,
Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
It was another major event in Londons pre-war cultural history.
Duchamp had arranged for sculptures to be shipped from Paris. However,
a 1932 law to protect English stonecutters from foreign competition required
the director of the Tate to certify Peggys importations as art if they were to
be exempted from duty, which he declined to do. Peggys energetic secretary,
Wyn Henderson, arranged for a letter of protest from the faculty of the Chelsea
Polytechnic, signed by Moore and Graham Sutherland among others.
This led to controversy in the pages of the Daily Telegraph in which Manson was
quoted as saying In my opinion, the works submitted were not works of art
They were the sort of stuff which has played havoc with our young art students
in recent years When I am told that an ostrich egg in marble represents
the birth of the world, something must be wrong.
20
The matter reached the
oor of the House of Commons. In the end Peggy won her right to customs
duty exemption, and when, a few months later, Manson was dismissed from
his position at the Tate she claimed some of the credit. Although nothing sold
from the exhibition, it is clear that Peggy was once again a force for promoting
the acceptance of modern and abstract art in England.
Peggy herself had no difculty distinguishing between ostrich eggs and
sculptures by Brancusi. She had met him as early as 1924, through Vail, and
he had been her rst choice for the inaugural exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune.
She had exhibited the work of Cocteau only because Brancusi was away
from Paris. In 1940 she was to buy two works by Brancusi (Maiastra, 1912
and Bird in space, 1932-40) and between 1942 and 1945 she also owned
Fish (1922), now in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art. She wrote: Brancusi was a marvellous little man with a beard and
piercing dark eyes. He was half astute peasant and half real god. He made
you very happy to be with him. It was a privilege to know him; unfortunately
he got too possessive, and wanted all of my time. He called me Pegitza.
21

The rst exhibitions at Guggenheim Jeune had been weighted toward
Cubism and abstraction, but at the end of May 1938 Peggy presented an
exhibition of paintings by the Danish Surrealist Rita Kernn-Larsen. This was
followed by a large exhibition combining both abstraction and Surrealism
(Kandinsky and Max Ernst, Picasso and Ren Magritte, Laurens and Arp,
along with many others), and in July 1938 by an exhibition of paintings
by Yves Tanguy. Guggenheim Jeune was making a decisive turn towards
Surrealism, which it sustained until its closure in June 1939.
Duchamp had been a central gure in Dada art activities. His readymades,
despite his insistence on their banality and their purely casual identity as
works of art, accrued irrational, sometimes sinister, even erotic meanings
to themselves, and in this way authorised one of the principal strategies
for setting in motion unconscious thought: that of the dislocated and
metamorphosed object. His intellectual contributions to any context in which
art denitions were attempted made of him one of the inuential forces in
Surrealist circles. It has been said that Duchamp remained one of the few
people [Andr] Breton truly revered.
22
Inevitably, therefore, his sway over
Peggy opened her eyes to Surrealism.
Yet Peggys introduction to Surrealism was at rst an English affair. British
Surrealism sprang to life full-grown in 1936, when a committee of writers
and artists organised the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New
Burlington Galleries, London.
23
As early as 1929 a literary and artistic group
had formed in Cambridge around the magazine Experiment. This drew
together a number of undergraduates who were later to contribute to British
Surrealism, including Julian Trevelyan, Humphrey Jennings, Hugh Sykes
Davies and George Reavey. From 1932 the review This Quarter, which was
overseen by Breton, was available at Zwemmers bookshop in London, and
from 1933 the Mayor Gallery in London exhibited European Surrealists such
as Arp, Mir, Ernst and Dal. The British artists Moore and Paul Nash were
sensitive to the formal and plastic possibilities of Parisian art at this time. In
1927 the English art critic R.H. Wilenski, in his The Modern Movement in Art,
was apparently unaware of Surrealism, but by 1933 Read was beginning to
take notice, preferring the tag Superrealism in a short section of his Art Now.
24
The International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, instigated by Breton and
Paul Eluard, drew together all those who were to be active in the British
Surrealist movement: the cosmopolitan artist Roland Penrose friend of
Eluard and Picasso and nancier of the London Gallery in Cork Street
15 Peggys rst contact with modern art, even before she moved to Europe, took place when she was aged
22, in the autumn of 1920. She had volunteered at the Sunwise Turn Bookshop near Grand Central Station,
New York, which was much frequented by contemporary writers and artists. While working there she was
befriended by Helen and Leon Fleischman. They took her to Alfred Stieglitzs Gallery, where for the rst time
she held a modern painting in her hands an abstraction by Georgia OKeeffe. She met the poet Margaret
Anderson, who was raising money to support The Little Review, celebrated for serialising James Joyces
Ulysses. Peggy wrote: [Anderson] said that if people believed in preventing wars the best possible thing to
do was to subscribe to the arts. Being young and innocent, I hoped I had put off the next World War by
several years by contributing ve hundred dollars to The Little Review (Guggenheim, Out of This Century,
p. 22.). This was the rst episode of Peggys altruism and generosity to the arts.
16 For documentation of all Peggys Guggenheim Jeune exhibitions, see Rudenstine, op. cit., pp. 74661.
17 Peggy later sold Dominant curve to Karl Nierendorf, because she had listened to people saying it was a
Fascist picture (Guggenheim, Out of This Century, p. 317). It entered the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York, together with Nierendorfs estate, in 1945.
18 Published by Constable and Company Ltd, London, this was the rst translation into another language of
Kandinskys seminal text, now generally known as Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In his short contribution
to Peggys catalogue, Sadler described Kandinskys abstractions by quoting Wordsworth: an independent
world created out of pure intelligence.
19 See James King, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990, p. 26.
20 Daily Telegraph, 23 March 1938, quoted in Dearborn, op. cit., p. 142.
22 Ruth Brandon, Surreal Lives, New York: Grove Press, 1999, p. 440.
23 Peggy claimed not to have visited this exhibition because she was tired of Surrealism (Dearborn, op. cit.,
p. 126), evidence that her claim to be uninformed about modern art in 1937 was disingenuous.
Her awareness of the French avant-garde goes as far back as her marriage to Laurence Vail and her
life in Paris in the early 1920s. Vails sister Clotilde had an affair at that time with Bretons close friend
and later sworn enemy the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon.
24 R.H. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art, London: Faber & Faber, 1927, and Herbert Read, Art Now,
London, Faber & Faber, 1933. Wilenski, in a revised edition of his book in 1935, confused Surrealism with
the art of Giorgio de Chirico, while Read, in the second edition of Art Now (1936) considerably expanded
his account of Surrealism.
fteen
Genesis of a Museum
sixteen
Genesis of a Museum
as well as his gallery manager, the Belgian E.L.T. Mesens, who was
an early promoter of Magritte; Read, who was to play an important role
in Peggys rst museum project; and Jennings, an artist whose output
included both paintings and ingenious Surrealist collages and who was
soon to be a pioneering documentary lmmaker. Peggy met Jennings in
July 1936 through her friend Emily Coleman. In September they travelled
to Paris, where Jennings introduced her to Breton, while Peggy in turn
introduced Jennings to Duchamp. Together they called on Yves Tanguy,
whose paintings Peggy was to show a year later at Guggenheim Jeune. They
visited the Exposition Universelle, where Peggy took pleasure in studying
the modern art that was on display: the Spanish Pavilion (with Picassos
Guernica and works by Calder and Mir), the Jeu de Paume, the Petit Palais
and the Palais de Tokyo. It is possible that Jennings steered Peggy, in her
search for a venue for her gallery, towards Cork Street, London, where
the Mayor Gallery was located, as well as the London Gallery, which also
exhibited the continental avant-gardes.
Surrealist artists that Peggy exhibited at Guggenheim Jeune included Kernn-
Larsen, the American automatist Charles Howard,
25
Wolfgang Paalen from
Austria (shortly before he left for New York, where Peggy was to give him a
second exhibition
26
), and the Welshman Julian Trevelyan. Penrose installed
a pioneering exhibition of collages, papiers-colls and photo-montages.
Perhaps Peggys most courageous foray into British Surrealism was her
exhibition in January 1939 of the art of the eccentric husband-and-wife
team Reuben Mednikoff and Grace Pailthorpe. They had shown at the
1936 International Exhibition, where they had caught the attention of Breton.
Pailthorpe, who was trained as a psychoanalyst, had met the much younger
Mednikoff in 1935. Together they conducted experiments, using automatist
drawing and painting, as an instrument for mutual analysis. Peggys exhibition
was the crowning of their four years of psychoanalytical research.
27
They
subsequently travelled to New York, California and Vancouver, where they
continued their work and proselytised their form of scientic Surrealism.
Finally, there was John Tunnard, to whom Peggy gave a show in MarchApril
1939. Though he never declared himself a Surrealist, he bridged the divide
in his paintings between the organic and the constructivist, abstraction and
landscape, in a way comparable to Moores work in sculpture. Apart from
Tanguy, he was the only Surrealist artist of Peggys Guggenheim Jeune
exhibitions whose work she was to retain in her collection.
Guggenheim Jeune closed its doors on 23 June 1939 after a successful
run of twenty-one shows.
28
At this time Peggy was introduced to Gisle
Freund by Duchamp: She wanted to photograph Read and me in color.
She had a large collection of celebrities she had already photographed,
and was doing more in London, where she had succeeded in making
everyone in the intellectual world pose for her. I thought it would be amusing
to give her a chance to show her slides in my gallery. I combined this with a
farewell party.
29

Gisle Freund, Herbert Read and Peggy Guggenheim (1939). Photographed at Guggenheim Jeune under
Yves Tanguys The sun in its jewel case (1937), London. (detail)
(left) Peggy Guggenheim wearing earrings made for her by Alexander Calder, Venice, 1950s.
Photo Archivio CameraphotoEpoche. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation), gift of Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, 2005.
(right) Peggy Guggenheim with one of the earrings painted for her by Yves Tanguy, Venice, 1950s.
Photo Archivio CameraphotoEpoche. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation), gift of Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, 2005.
A Museum of Modern Art, 1939
Guggenheim Jeune was successful despite the paucity of its sales.
However, in the rst weeks of 1939 Peggy began planning the closure of
the gallery and the opening instead of a London museum of modern art. She
convinced Read to leave his position as editor of The Burlington Magazine
and to become instead curator and director of the future museum. As an
art critic and historian, Read consciously adopted a posture of impartiality
between the abstract and Surrealist camps, though as a Romantic he was
instinctively drawn into the Surrealist orbit.
30
The list he drew up for an
opening exhibition that would survey the modern movements was to guide
Peggy in her purchases when she began collecting in earnest:
His rst idea was to have an opening show in which we would exhibit
borrowed paintings of the whole eld of art we were to cover. Most of these
were to be brought from Paris. This list, which was later revised by Marcel
Duchamp, Nelliy van Doesburg, and myself because it contained so many
mistakes, became the basis of my present collection. [Read] wanted to
start with the rst Abstract and Cubist paintings from 1910, but every now
and then he would relapse into Czanne, Matisse or Rousseau and other
painters whom I thought we ought to omit.
31

Today Peggys collection opens with Cubism and abstraction. The oldest
works are Pablo Picassos The poet (August 1911) and a group of works
on paper c.191012 by Frantiek Kupka the one the central gure with
Georges Braque in the formulation of the Cubist pictorial vocabulary, the
other a pioneer of abstraction, or pure painting as Apollinaire called it.
Peggy acquired Picassos The poet in 1941 from George L.K. Morris, himself
a painter in a group known as the Park Avenue Cubists. It was the rst
work by Picasso to enter her collection, and she paid a relatively high price:
$4400 according to Morris himself.
32
It had been shown in Alfred Barrs
historic Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York in 1936. As a majestic example of the rst, analytical phase of
Cubism, it anchors other Cubist works in the Collection by Braque, Albert
Gleizes, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger and Fernand Lger and is essential
for understanding much that follows in terms of the progress of the avant-
garde, whether the De Stijl abstraction of Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian
or the armatures of black lines that survive in Jackson Pollocks work as
late as 1946. Soon after, Peggy swiftly acquired other works by Picasso: a
collage of 1914 (a papier coll titled Pipe, glass, bottle of Vieux Marc) and
The studio of 1928.
33
The distinctive formal vocabulary of Cubism the
fugitive intersecting and overlapping planes, the architectonic black lines,
the multiplicity of readings deant of unambiguous equivalents in nature
constitutes a language that could be adapted and evolved into abstraction.
Robert Delaunay, Lger, Mondrian and Gino Severini all followed this path
and, even while others such as Kandinsky and Kupka ignored Cubism,
their imagery relied on spatial and formal ambiguity in a parallel way.
25 Peggy was later to acquire two works by Howard, which she gave to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the
University of Iowa Museum of Art. See Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., p. 87, note 79.
26 17 April 12 May 1945. See Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., pp. 3223.
27 Remy, op. cit., p. 205.
28 For the full roster of shows and reproduction of the printed handlists and catalogues at Guggenheim Jeune,
see Rudenstine, op. cit., pp. 74658.
30 For example, Hilton Kramer, The contradictions of Herbert Read, The New York Times, 30 June 1968, p. 23;
E.H. Ramsden, Herbert Reads philosophy of art, in Henry Treece, ed., Herbert Read: An Introduction, Port
Washington, NY: Kennikatt Press, 1944, pp. 4251.
31 Ibid., pp. 19899.
32 Virginia Dortch Dorazio, Peggy Guggenheim and Her Friends, Milan: Berenice Art Books, 1994, p. 12, note 3.
33 It was not until 1947 that Peggy purchased one of the paintings she loved best in her collection,
Seurats La baignade of 1937. See Dorazio, op. cit., p. 13, note 4, for Peggys enthusiasm for this painting.
34 Antony Penrose, Roland Penrose: The Friendly Surrealist, Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001,
esp. p. 97.
seventeen
Genesis of a Museum
Pablo Picasso, The poet (1911), oil on linen canvas, 131.2 x 89.5 cm. Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) 76.25531. Photo David Heald.
eighteen
Genesis of a Museum
The small works by Kupka in Peggys collection were acquired in the 1960s,
suggesting that this reclusive painter had been omitted both from Duchamps
counsels and from Reads vanished list. They included a Study for Amorpha,
warm chromatism and for Fugue in two colors (c.191011) and Study for
Organization of graphic motifs I (c.191112). The three paintings for which
these two drawings are preparatory were shown in consecutive Salons
dAutomne in Paris, 1912 and 1913, and were the rst purely abstract
paintings to be exhibited publicly. Kupkas abstraction was a Promethean
attempt to represent the merging of the individual spirit and psyche with
the universe without resort to symbol and allegory, and therefore without
the limitations of the intellect and of the dogmas of belief systems. He felt
that one of the ways of doing this was through engaging a paradox: the
representation of movement on a static canvas, since movement was the
manifestation of the life force. Kupkas purpose was to create images that,
by contemplation, could raise the viewer to a super-conscious state.
By 1939 Peggy was no longer an ingnue: her taste had developed under the
guidance of Duchamp and her awareness of Surrealism had been heightened
thanks to her Cork Street neighbours and her Guggenheim Jeune exhibitions.
She had already purchased sculptures by Arp and Moore and paintings by
Kandinsky, Tanguy and Tunnard as well as an important Surrealist work by
Paul Delvaux (acquired from Mesens). Peggys museum project with Read
excited Mesenss jealousy, and he successfully deterred Penrose from joining
their venture as a trustee and as a full participant in the project with his own
collection of Surrealist art, which he had acquired from Eluard.
34

Because of the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Peggys London
museum never opened. In retrospect, this was fortunate. The funds that
were destined for operating the museum could be expended instead on the
formation of her collection, which she now actively began to pursue, using
Reads list. She made a new friend, Nelly (Petro) van Doesburg, the widow
of the Dutch abstract painter and theorist Theo van Doesburg. Nelly van
Doesburg seems to have alerted her to the omission of Futurism from Reads
list, and sold to her paintings of her own by Giacomo Balla and Severini as
well as two by her husband. She introduced Peggy to Pevsner, Delaunay
and Jean Hlion. She is likely to have been responsible for Peggy acquiring
works (no longer in the collection) by Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart and
Csar Domela, both of them linked to the De Stijl movement, which Theo
van Doesburg and Mondrian had founded in 1917.
35
One of the rst shows that Peggy planned at Art of This Century, as early
as 1942, was a memorial exhibition for van Doesburgs late husband. She
sold a painting by Klee and a sculpture by Laurens in order to pay for Nelly
van Doesburgs ight to America although in the end the First American
Retrospective Exhibition of Theo van Doesburg did not take place until April
1947. Indeed this was the show with which Peggy closed her New York
gallery. Nelly van Doesburg seems thus to have been important to Peggys
collection in helping her to maintain a balance between its abstract and
Surrealist components.
Frantiek Kupka, Study for Organization of graphic motifs I (c.191112), pastel on paper, 32.9 x 31.6 cm
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) 76.255315. Photo David Heald.
Frantiek Kupka, Study for Amorpha, warm chromatism and for Fugue in two colors (c.191011),
pastel on paper, 46.8 x 48.3 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)
76.255313. Photo David Heald.
nineteen
Genesis of a Museum
Peggy Guggenheim and her close friend Nelly van Doesburg in the library of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice, 1960s. Photo Roloff Beny / National Archives of Canada.
twenty
Genesis of a Museum
A typical example of how Peggy brought together her collection in the early
months of World War II is told in her autobiography:
I wanted to buy a painting by Jean Hlion, and heard that he was in the
Army, stationed near Paris. Nelly wrote to him and he came in on a ying trip
to sell me one. As he had been in the Army and deprived of the company
of women he was delighted to be with Nelly and me. We appeared very
feminine and brilliant to him with all our make-up, and he said that we were
the rst paintings he had seen for a long time. We rushed all over Paris to
nd his works that were stored in various places and I bought an enormous
canvas that we found in the attic of a friends house.
3637
Such friendships and we have mentioned Read, Beckett, Duchamp,
Brancusi and Nelly van Doesburg as well as Hlion were important in the
formation of Peggys collection. Another voice to which Peggy listened was
that of Mondrian, whom she met when he visited Guggenheim Jeune in 1939.
The following year when she asked Read to choose an important abstraction
for her collection from Mondrians London studio, he chose Composition No.
1 with grey and red 1938 / Compositon with red 1939, (193839). Mondrian
emigrated to New York in 1940 after the fall of Paris to Germany, and Peggy
re- established contact with him when she herself returned to America in
July 1941, settling in New York in September.
Back in the USA
Peggys return to the United States was in the company of the German
Dada and Surrealist artist Max Ernst. Peggy, aware of Ernsts celebrity as a
Surrealist painter, had visited his studio in the winter of 193839. They met
again early in 1941 at the Villa Air-Bel near Marseilles, where Varian Fry was
helping artists and writers to escape to America. She was to marry him in
December 1941. Major paintings by him entered her collection, including
The Antipope (194142) and its preparatory study, in which Ernst portrayed
Peggy herself: as a young girl in profile in the smaller painting, and as the
fearful creature in the red robe on the left of the completed work. Throughout
this period in New York, from late 1941 to March 1943, when Ernst left
her for Dorothea Tanning, his presence as well as Bretons in Peggys
household signalled that she was at the heart of the circle of Surrealists
in exile in New York.
37
Ernst made an original drawing for the cover of
Peggys collection catalogue, which was to give its title to her New York
gallery Art of This Century.
Peggy had begun cataloguing her collection, and planning its publication,
during a seven- or eight-month sojourn in Grenoble from September 1940.
By then numbering almost a hundred objects, the collection had been stored
by the kindly, heroic (given the risk that the Nazis might discover this cache
of degenerate art) director of the local museum, Pierre Andry-Farcy. Even
at this early stage she had prevailed upon Breton, then in Marseilles, to help
her. In New York, during 194142, the book was brought to completion.
Peggys enthusiasm for this publication conveys her excitement about the
collection as a whole:
Theo van Doesburg, Composition in gray (rag time) (1919), oil on canvas, 96.5 x 59.1 cm. Peggy
Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) 76.255340. Photo David Heald.
I was rather worried about the book, however, and decided it was rather dull.
I asked Breton to save it. He was always telling me it was catastrophique.
It probably would have been if it had not been for him. He spent hours of
research and found statements made by each artist; we included these
and photographs of their eyes. Bretons preface was excellent, containing
a whole history of Surrealism. I got Mondrian do another preface for me,
which Charmian [sic] Wiegand put into English, and I included the one
Arp had done for me in Europe. Besides that Breton told me to add the
manifestos of the different movements in art of the last thirty years, and
twenty one
Genesis of a Museum
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 1 with grey and red 1938 / Compositon with red 1939, 193839,
oil on canvas, mounted on wood support, canvas 105.2 x 102.3 cm, wood support 109.1 x 106.0 x 2.5 cm.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) 76.255339.
Photo David Heald.
then we included statements by Picasso, Max, Chirico and others. In the
end the book turned out exceedingly well, being an anthology of modern
art rather than a catalogue.
38
Art of This Century showed the same even-handedness between the
abstract and Surrealist trends in art as would the earrings she wore on the
occasion of her gallery opening soon after. The focus of Mondrians preface
was on the nature of plastic experience.
39
He was not referring to sculpture
(as the term plastic might imply) but the perception of form in painting or any
other medium. It was necessary, he argued, to deprive form of any reference
to real objects, which could smother such perception. But Mondrian went
further: the natural appearance of things must be transformed in order to
evoke aesthetic sensation. There was a hint of loyalty to Peggy strongly
aware of the presence in mid-town New York of Solomon R. Guggenheims
and Hilla Rebays rival Museum of Non-Objective Painting when he seemed
to criticise the notion of the non-objective as a synonym for abstraction:
We come to see that the principal problem in plastic art is not to avoid the
representation of objects, but to be as objective as possible. Again:
Intuitively, plastic art has always aimed at the universal expression of reality
But Abstract art, in opposition to naturalistic art, can do this more clearly
and in conformity with modern times.
35 Illustrated in Peggy Guggenheim, ed., Art of This Century: Objects, Drawings, Photographs, Paintings,
Sculpture, Collages 1910 to 1942, New York: Art Aid Corporation, 1942, pp. 92, 94. Peggy gave her painting
by Vordemberge-Gildewart to the Tel Aviv Museum in 1952. It is worth noting that Peggys collection is thin
on works of the Bauhaus, though she was certainly aware of it. The absence of paintings or sculptures by
Feininger, Moholy-Nagy, Albers and Schlemmer, for example, may perhaps be explained by the absence of any
of the Bauhaus artists, or even Walter Gropius himself, from Paris and New York in the critical years in which
Peggy was forming her collection.
36 Guggenheim, Out of This Century, p. 212. The painting she bought was The chimney sweep (1936),
which she donated to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1954. Hlion was a war hero. In June 1940,
soon after the escapade with Peggy and Nellie, he and two thousand other Frenchman were rounded up by
the German army and imprisoned. Hlion made a spectacular escape and by 1942 was in New York with
the help of the money he had received earlier from Peggy. He was to be the subject of her third exhibition
at Art of This Century (8 February 3 March 1943). At the opening, he was struck by the beauty of Peggys
daughter, Pegeen (they married two years later). Hlion wrote about his war adventures in They Shall Not
Have Me, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1943, reprinted 2007.
37 Peggy and Ernst divorced on 21 October 1946 and Ernst married Dorothea Tanning three days later.
38 Guggenheim, Out of This Century, pp. 26263. The manifestos were: Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,
1910, Realist Manifesto, signed by Naum Gabo and Pevsner, 1920, Inspiration to Order, signed by Max
Ernst, 1932, and Notes on Abstract Art, signed by Ben Nicholson, 1941.
39 Guggenheim, Art of This Century, 1942, pp. 323.
Peggy Guggenheims daughter, Pegeen, with her husband, the artist Jean Hlion, 1940s.
twenty two
Genesis of a Museum
directly and not through an interpreter. But then nothing is less abstract than
Abstract art. This is why Van Doesburg and Kandinsky have suggested that
Abstract art should be called Concrete art.
Clearly Arps work, and his statements, blurred the distinctions between
abstraction and Surrealism that lay behind Peggys initial denition of
contemporary art. As the years went by and Peggys exploits in contemporary
art multiplied, she certainly developed a more sophisticated and nuanced
understanding of what motivated the artists she was supporting.
43

Finally Bretons preface, Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism, included the
rst denition of automatism to be printed in English.
44
This was momentous,
for while New York artists at this time instinctively rejected the Frenchness
of Breton, the spectacular antics of Dal, the belle facture of Surrealist dream
imagery and much else that was associated with European Surrealism,
they took on board automatism not as a psychoanalytic process, nor as
a literary practice, but as a way of reaching the wellsprings of creativity.
American artists were familiar with Surrealism from at least the time of Alfred
Barrs exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism in 1936 at New Yorks
Museum of Modern Art, a show that also travelled to the Midwest, and thanks
to periodicals such as Minotaure, in which they studied the illustrations even
if they could not read the texts. In 1938 William Baziotes and Gerome
Kamrowski had experimented with automatism, and on one occasion in the
winter of 1940-41 Jackson Pollock joined them for an evening of dripping and
brushing paint onto cheap canvases with quick-drying lacquer. Five years
later this was to be the basis of Pollocks revolutionary new technique of
drip painting.
45
Roberto Sebastian Matta, another member of Peggys circle,
attempted (though unsuccessfully) to pull together a group of American
Surrealists around the practice of automatism. Meanwhile, as early as
194041, artists such as Richard Pousette-Dart, John Graham, Adolph
Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Pollock had already adopted non-Christian myth
as subject matter in a way comparable to the iconography of European
Surrealism, though with reference to Jung and James Frazers The Golden
Bough rather than to Freud.
Breton was very much a part of Peggys circle in New York. She had paid
his airfare to escape from France and gave him $200 monthly until he
could nd work. She participated in his favourite Surrealist game, Le jeu
de la verit, and he appears in photographs in Peggys Beekman Place
mansion.
46
Nonetheless Bretons pride and capacity to alienate his friends
eventually overcame him, and he and Peggy argued over VVV magazine, the
Surrealist review with which he both engaged artists such as Ernst, Matta,
Charles Henri-Ford, David Hare, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Kurt Seligmann, and
Duchamp and simultaneously antagonised them with his authoritarian ways:
We [Peggy and Breton] got into arguments about VVV magazine
Max had promised me a free ad in it for my gallery and now Breton refused to
Max Ernst,The Antipope (c. 1941), oil on cardboard, mounted on board, 32.5 x 26.5 cm.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation) 76.2553-79.
Photo David Heald.
The second preface was by Arp, who had been a friend since Duchamp
brought Peggy and him together early in 1938 in Meudon. Arps work was
included in the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, and Peggy
was in France at that time in order to see the show as part of her education
in modern art. Soon after this Arp stayed with Peggy in England at the time
of her exhibition of contemporary sculpture. He accompanied her on a visit
to the studio of Jacob Epstein.
40
Peggy recalled that This greatly enraged
Epstein who barely wished to admit Arp until we protested that he was a
great admirer. Epstein hated the Surrealists and thought Arp should not be
interested in his work.
41
Ernst, arch-Surrealist, wrote a short catalogue text
for Peggys exhibition of Arps work in January 1944 at Art of This Century.
Yet in 1941 we nd that Arps essay for Peggys collection catalogue bore
the title Abstract Art Concrete Art.
42
It included the following apologia for
non-realistic art:
artists do not wish to copy nature. They do not wish to reproduce but
to produce. They wish to produce as a plant which produces a fruit and is
unable to reproduce a still life, a landscape or a nude. They wish to produce
twenty three
Genesis of a Museum
More important than her friendships with either Ernst or Breton was that with
Putzel. This little known and short-lived writer and dealer has been described
as a gure of major importance for the development of American art.
49
In the
early 1930s Putzel had come to know Duchamp and the collectors Walter
and Louise Arensberg. He organised a series of exhibitions in California
revealing a precocious (for the United States) knowledge of European
Surrealism, rst in San Francisco (193435) and later in Los Angeles
(193538). He moved to Paris in 193839 and befriended Peggy, whom
he advised on purchases as she accumulated her collection. Interestingly,
as a connoisseur of contemporary art Putzel wearied of the European avant-
garde, and when he relocated to New York in the summer of 1940 his
interest turned to nding new, native talent. Peggy re-established contact
with Putzel when she herself arrived in New York a year later. In March 1943
Peggy and Ernst separated, and this and the unrelated circumstance that
Jimmy Ernst (Maxs son by an earlier marriage, and Peggys secretary at Art
of This Century) simultaneously left to set up his own gallery opened the way
for Putzel to become secretary of the gallery and to exercise considerable
inuence. This signalled the beginning of Peggys patronage henceforth of
American rather than European art.
Between November 1943 and February 1945 she gave solo exhibitions to
Pollock, Irene Rice-Pereira, Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Hare and Rothko.
She recalled that, thanks to Putzel, she became aware of several other New
York artists whose work she was to exhibit before she closed her gallery in
1947: Pousette-Dart, Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Charles Seliger, Robert de Niro Sr
and his wife Virginia Admiral.
50
Putzel forged contacts between these artists
let me have it. I wanted it on principle, as I felt I had done so much for the
Surrealists. But Breton maintained that all his life he had sacriced to truth,
beauty and art, and he expected everyone else to do as much.
47
When Peggy had rst met Breton, with Jennings, she had likened him to
a caged lion, and now he roared at her.
New York Artists
Peggy helped to introduce Surrealism to the artists who were eventually to
coalesce as the New York School, but this contamination of New York art
by the European avant-garde was a much wider and deeper phenomenon.
With the benet of hindsight in 1956, Clement Greenberg wrote that by
1940 (before Peggy left Europe) New Yorkers had caught up with Paris as
Paris had not yet caught up with herself, and a group of relatively obscure
American artists already possessed the fullest painting culture of their time.
48

Perhaps most concretely, Peggy provided the New Yorkers with opportunities
to exhibit, to be noticed by the press and to earn money from sales.
Max Ernst, cover of Art of This Century: Objects, Drawings, Photographs, Paintings, Sculpture,
Collages 19101942 (New York: Art Aid Corporation, 1942).
40 In the mid 1930s, Peggys companion had been Douglas Garman, brother of Jacob Epsteins partner and
future wife, Kathleen.
41 Guggenheim, Out of This Century, 1979, p. 172. The small bronze sculpture she bought from
Arp at the time of their rst meeting, Shell and head of 1933, was the rst work of art to enter her collection.
42 Guggenheim, Art of This Century, 1942, pp. 2931.
43 Jimmy Ernst tells of a dinner party in Peggys New York house in the spring of 1942. Ernst, Duchamp and
Breton had decided to provoke Mondrian, with Tanguy looking on. In response to a question from Duchamp,
Mondrian remarked Yves work is much too abstract for me, causing Breton to sputter Too abstract?
For you? Mondrian retorted My dear Breton, you seem to have a very xed idea about Abstraction.
See Jimmy Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life, New York: St Martins/Marek, 1984, pp. 2278.
44 Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1995, p. 213. Andr Breton, Genesis and perspective of Surrealism, in Art of This Century,
1942, pp. 1327.
45 Ibid., p. 168.
46 In Le jeu de la verit players took turns to be asked questions, usually of a highly personal nature involving
love and sex. The verit refers to the truthfulness of the players answer. If the answer was judged evasive
or false, the player would be obliged to perform something embarrassing in front of the other players.
48 Clement Greenberg, New York painting only yesterday, Art News, LVI, no. 4 (Summer 1956), p. 85.
49 Melvin Lader, Peggy Guggenheims Art of This Century: The Surrealist milieu and the American avant-garde,
19421947, PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 1981, p. 141. Published by University Microlms
International, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Lader dedicates a chapter of this thesis to Howard Putzel, pp. 14191.
50 For details of the exhibitions of Art of This Century 194247, see Rudenstine, op. cit., pp. 76199, and
Jasper Sharp, Serving the future: The exhibitions at Art of This Century in Davidson and Rylands, op. cit.,
pp. 288362.
51 At this time, Pollock had only rarely exhibited his work: on the invitation of the Russian intellectual and artist
John Graham, he had shown Birth (c.1941, Tate, London) at the McMillen Gallery, New York, in January
February 1942.
twenty four
Genesis of a Museum
from New Yorks Bohemia and the sophisticated, European-seeming heiress
and celebrity that was Peggy. As so often in the past whether we think of
Duchamp, Jennings, Read, Ernst, Kiesler or Breton Peggy had drawn to
her an adviser: Putzel, supremely qualied to x her gaze unswervingly on
the evolving avant-garde, even as the nerve centre of Modernism, thanks
to geo-political processes of which she herself was a part, transferred
from Paris to New York. Surrealism rst in its European guise and later as
transmuted by the new Americans was the most vivid manifestation of
this cultural process.
In the early spring of 1943, at the suggestion of Putzel, Peggy invited Pollock
to contribute to her International Collage show, which opened on 16 April.
51

The moment was propitious. He persuaded her to allow Pollock to submit
works for a juried Spring Salon for Young Artists, which opened on 18 May
1943. He even selected paintings from Pollocks studio and brought them to
the gallery. The jurors were Duchamp, Mondrian, James Thrall Soby, James
Johnson Sweeney and Peggy herself.
Mondrian on this occasion convinced Peggy of the talent of Pollock a story
told by Jimmy Ernst in his memoir, A Not-So-Still Life.
52
The curiosity of this is
less the fact of Mondrian admiring and promoting an artist who represented,
in style and content, everything that he had purged from his own art, but that
it would be years before Pollock shook off the residual inuence of Picasso
and Cubism, and matured a highly original abstract style of his own (in
1947). When he did so he would full at last the Orphist program of Kupka,
in the creation of images of the inner consciousness that could induce the
loss of self in an awareness of the universe, and of Delaunay, whereby
the contemplation of ceaselessly shifting lines, planes and colours could
generate an enhanced state of being. Pollock would create an abstract
language diametrically opposed to the geometry of Mondrian, Hlion and
most abstract artists in America in the generation before him.
It seems likely that Sweeney, who had met Peggy in Paris in 1938 or 1939
and who became a lifelong friend, had introduced Pollocks work to her
early in 1942 and, like Matta and Putzel, was keen to convince her of
his talent.
53
He in turn had met Pollock through the Swiss photographer
Herbert Matter.
54
Peggy regarded the launching of Pollocks career as her
greatest achievement. However, in accounts of Abstract Expressionism
as well as of Pollock, she is often conned to footnotes and sometimes
omitted altogether, something of which she herself complained in the
years after her return to Europe in 1948.
55
In the light of this she was both
truthful and generous when she shared with Sweeney the credit for her
prescient support of Pollock. Here is what Peggy wrote about Pollock in
her autobiography:
After the rst spring salon [MayJune 1943] it became evident that Pollock
was the best painter When I rst exhibited Pollock he was very much
under the inuence of the Surrealists and of Picasso. But he very soon
overcame this inuence, to become, strangely enough, the greatest painter
since Picasso. As he required a xed monthly sum in order to work in peace,
I gave him a contract for one year. I promised him a hundred and fty dollars
a month and a settlement at the end of the year, if I sold more than two
thousand seven hundred dollars worth, allowing one third to the gallery.
If I lost I was to get pictures in return. Pollock immediately became the central
point of Art of This Century. From then on, 1943, until I left America in 1947,
I dedicated myself to Pollock. He was very fortunate, because his wife Lee
Krasner, a painter, did the same, and even gave up painting at one period,
as he required her complete devotion. I welcomed a new protg, as I had
lost Max [Ernst]. My relationship with Pollock was purely that of artist and
patron, and Lee was the intermediary. Pollock himself was rather difcult;
he drank too much and became so unpleasant, one might say devilish,
on these occasions. But as Lee pointed out when I complained, He also
has an angelic side, and that was true. He was like a trapped animal who
never should have left Wyoming, where he was born [His rst exhibition]
was held in November 1943. The introduction to the catalogue was written
by James Johnson Sweeney, who helped a lot to further Pollocks career.
In fact I always referred to Pollock as our spiritual offspring.
56

In July 1943 Pollock was placed under contract to Art of This Century. Peggy
planned a solo exhibition for him in November 1943 and commissioned a
James Johnson Sweeney. Photo Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York.
twenty ve
Genesis of a Museum
and Pallucchini allocated to her the Greek Pavilion. Peggy was attered by
the attention. It was not just the rst showing of her collection but her rst
ofcial acceptance in Europe, in marked contrast to her experience in the
Bohemian milieu of the pre-war years.
60
More than any other part of the Biennale, Peggy Guggenheims collection
could claim to survey twentieth-century art to that time, and it unwittingly
chimed with the Biennales ambition for historical completeness at a time
when Impressionism and Post-Impressionism dominated the Italian Pavilion.
The strong presence of Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism concisely
anticipated what would be the role of the post-war Biennales in presenting
the European avant-gardes that had been overlooked in the Fascist period.
Nevertheless the most profound novelty consisted of her new American art.
None of the American artists had previously had works exhibited in Europe,
let alone the Biennale. The 1948 Biennale marked the European debut of
Pollock and the rst appearance outside the USA of a new generation of
American painters. Giulio Carlo Argan wrote a short preface to the catalogue
checklist, in which he grappled somewhat obscurely with what was, after all,
a difcult task: summing up in ve hundred words how Peggys collection
should be understood. He omitted any mention of the new American art,
and vexed Peggy by seeming to confuse abstraction with Surrealism, as she
had learned not to do under Duchamps tuition ten years earlier.
Argans omission of the Americans is understandable. The collection included
early works by unknowns such as Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Motherwell,
Richard Pousette-Dart (engagingly translated in the catalogue as Darte),
Rothko, Janet Sobel and Still, as well as Pollock.
61
Peggys post-1946
Pollocks had not yet arrived in Venice from New York; instead, the paintings
she showed were residually Cubist-gurative in their imagery, and their crude
technique did not yet pass for action or gestural. The cumulative effect
52 Ernst, op. cit., pp. 2412. In 1972 James Thrall Soby, fellow juror at the Spring Salon, corroborated this:
Piet Mondrian disliked pictures that came out of his own work, and usually preferred expressionist works or
works very different from his own, like those of the young Jackson Pollock. Quoted in Dortch, op. cit., p. 94.
53 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, London: Barrie & Jenkins,
1990, p. 442 (the authors give no source for this information). Peggy dedicated her autobiography to
Sweeney. See the testimonial by James Johnson Sweeney in Dortch, op. cit., pp. 5960. Sweeney,
art critic, curator and museum director, was to be Director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of
Modern Art from January 1945 to November 1946, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, from 1952 to 1961, and after this director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
54 Dortch, op. cit., 1994, p. 59.
56 Ibid., pp. 31415.
57 See Francis V. OConnor, Jackson Pollocks Mural for Peggy Guggenheim: Its legend, documentation,
and redenition of wall painting, in Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., pp. 15069.
58 Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock, London: Thames & Hudson, 1989, p. 147. Kirk Varnedoe (Comet:
Jackson Pollocks life and work, in Jackson Pollock, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998, pp. 3940) spoke of the murals extreme audacity and originality and as one
of the most salient works of fusion between the gure and abstraction in American painting. Again: There was
nothing of this power and originality being made anywhere else in the war-plagued world that dim winter.
60 The Biennale catalogue for 1948 includes a list of the works Peggy showed. For an account of this event see
Maria Cristina Bandera, Per una cronistoria dellesposizione della collezione Peggy Guggenheim alla Biennale
del 1948, Paragone, 378 (MayJuly 2001), pp. 64119.
mural for the lobby of the duplex apartment she now shared with Kenneth
MacPherson at 155 East 61st Street.
57
Pollock seems to have been the only
American artist in New York to have beneted from such comprehensive
patronage, and he was buoyed by these opportunities and incentives as
he had never been before. He was able to give up a menial job at the
Museum of Non-Objective Painting and the months that followed were
unprecedentedly productive.
It is difcult to overstate the importance of Mural, which Pollock painted
for Peggy, in the context of his own career and of American painting in
this pivotal decade. It was to be his largest painting, and the physical and
imaginative resources he needed were greater than any he had previously
summoned. He successfully came to terms with the most compelling
problem that the New York school faced the problem of subject matter.
He did so with a rhythmic all-over imagery that marked a break with
the laboured and fragmentary character of his previous work, and was
a premonition of the paintings he was to produce later in the decade. As
Ellen Landau has written:
The imagery of Mural neatly bridges the gap between Guardians [of the
secret] of mid-1943 still obviously totemic and psychological and a
new type of work to be initiated the following year, in which more abstract
energies would be substituted for the resolution of Jungian problems
Bolstered perhaps by his experience with the Guggenheim mural, he
began to move more denitely away from dependence on therapeutic
sources, combined with the innovations of modern European art, to a rapidly
increasing non-objectivity and self-reliance.
58

Art of This Century closed at the end of May 1947, and Peggy began to
plan her return to Europe. She succeeded in convincing Betty Parsons to
take on the task of exhibiting Pollocks work, while she herself was obliged
to continue his monthly payments, even after her departure from New
York. This was fortunate, as the contract brought to her the numerous drip
paintings of Pollocks greatest achievement, of which two remain in her
museum today Alchemy and Enchanted forest, both of 1947.
Venice, from 1948
In 1947 Peggy decided to take her collection and herself to Venice. Her rst
acquaintances were the painters Giuseppe Santomaso and Emilio Vedova,
both signatories of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, a Cubist-Expressionist avant-
garde launched in Venice in 1946. Peggy noted their eagerness to learn of
artistic developments abroad: They were very much interested in modern
art, and knew about my uncles collection, which surprised me. In fact they
even had the catalogue.
59
Santomaso suggested to Rodolfo Pallucchini,
Secretary General of the Venice Biennale, that her collection, awaiting
shipment in New York, be brought to the rst post-war Biennale, in 1948,
twenty six
Genesis of a Museum
might well have been to enforce the sense of continuity with a Cubist-
inspired expressionism and Surrealism, rather than offer any startling sense
of novelty. In particular the works of Baziotes and Seliger, with a kind of
cloisonn improvisation, and of Sobel and Pousette-Dart, with scintillating
manipulations of liquid paint, would have looked more advanced at that
time than the early Pollocks, and could justiably have been classied as
products of Surrealist psychic automatism.
The 1948 Venice Biennale was an occasion for Peggy to meet old friends:
Alfred and Margaret Barr, for example, and Henry Moore, whose exhibition
in the British Pavilion won him the Grand Prix for Sculpture. Read wrote
the introduction to Moores pavilion catalogue and in the same year issued
an expanded edition of his book Art Now, rst published in 1933. He had
travelled to the United States for the rst time early in 1946, and the new
edition of Art Now had an injection of American artists that was clearly
inuenced, in a reversal of their previous roles, by Peggy, with illustrations
of works by Seliger, Rice-Pereira, Pollock and Hare, all of which had been
exhibited at Art of This Century.
62

Following the closure of the Biennale, Peggys collection entered a two-year
nomadic phase. It travelled to Florence, where Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti
showed it in the Palazzo Strozzi (February and March 1949), and to Milan
(the Palazzo Reale, June 1949). In the former Peggy was shocked by the
lack of space and decided with Ragghianti to show the collection in three
consecutive exhibitions. In this way the new American art was presented
by itself for the rst time. In Milan there was an abundance of space in the
meandering chambers of the Palazzo Reale. In between shows, it was
housed in Venices modern art museum, C Pesaro, where Giulio Lorenzetti
and Guido Perocco, director and curator respectively, took the opportunity
to exhibit parts of the collection.
In September 1949, Peggy Guggenheim opened her garden with an
exhibition of sculpture, and invited Giuseppe Marchiori, theorist and critic
of the Fronte Nuovo, to borrow works from a small number of Italian artists
(Pietro Consagra, Mirko Basaldella, Salvatore and Alberto Viani) to add
to her own sculptures. At about the same time she lent her collection of
British art to the British Institute in Florence. In July 1950 Bruno Aleri,
together with Oreste Ferrari and Giuseppe Marchiori, organised with Peggy
an exhibition in the Ala Napoleonica of twenty-three paintings by Jackson
Pollock. This was the rst solo exhibition of Pollocks work outside America,
and it included at last the great poured paintings, nine from 1947 and a
tenth from 1949. By this time she had already donated two of his paintings
to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
63
We do not know what impact this
short-lived exhibition had upon those who saw it Peggy claimed it drew
10,000 visitors in three weeks, from 22 July to 12 August. In an enthusiastic
essay by Aleri attached to the printed exhibition checklist, he confessed
to preferring the early to the later works. In a later unpublished essay,
he voiced a suspicion that Marchioris mysterious absence on the opening
day reected the hostility of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, and that in general
it was perceived as the extravagance and folly of the newly arrived and
eccentric American heiress. While the presence of three 1949 Pollocks in
the US Pavilion of the 1950 Venice Biennale would have seemed to justify
Peggys taste, it is also true that not just the Italian but the popular American
press continued to treat Pollocks art as risible. Meanwhile, an enterprising
Venetian dealer, Carlo Cardazzo, borrowed paintings from Betty Parsons,
thanks to Peggys mediation, and showed them in October 1950 at his
Galleria Naviglio in Milan. Little is known about this exhibition, but it counts
as Pollocks rst gallery show in Europe.
64

Early in 1951 Peggy Guggenheims collection travelled to Amsterdam (Stedelijk
Museum), to Brussels (Palais des Beaux-Arts) and to Zurich (Kunsthaus).
It was after this, in the late spring of 1951, that the collection was at last installed
in her Venetian residence, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which she had acquired
earlier in July 1949 from the heirs of Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse.
The exhibition of Peggys collection, rst itinerant and then from 1951
permanently in Venice, surely contributed to the general education of both
Italian artists and the Italian public in the kind of art, now perceived as
mainstream avant-garde, that her collection contains. Her importance for Italy
consisted also of her patronage of a small number of Venetian artists. Her
early sympathies, following her meeting with Santomaso and Vedova, were
with the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti. A 1947 Still life by Renato Birolli, probably
her rst post-New York purchase, was on display in her 1948 pavilion.
She bought a single painting from the Biennale itself, selecting Armando
Pizzinatos May Day (1948) from the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti exhibition.
65

In 1952 Peggy met Tancredi, a young painter from Feltre, through the
American artist William Congdon. From this time onward her principal
afnity would be with Spazialismo, a current in Italian painting founded by
Lucio Fontana and the dealer-collector Cardazzo. Her account of Tancredi
indicates her continuing commercial activity and at the same time her
renewed desire to promote young artists:
[Tancredis] rst [paintings] were very geometrical and resembled Theo van
Doesburgs (which greatly pleased Nelly, his widow), but gradually he evoked a
Pollock style, and then nally his own. He is what is called in Italy a spazialista,
a spatial artist. His gouaches soon lled my house. They were so delicate and
airy, and were very easy to sell after the rst year, when I had given them away
as presents. As there was no room other than a guest room to show and sell
them in, they had to be piled up on a bed. When James Sweeney came to
Venice and saw them, he at once said Get that boy canvas and paints and let
him expand, he needs space. I did as I was told, and then my spatial problems
grew to such an extent that I no longer knew where to show the canvases.
Tancredi had one of the studios in the cellar for many years.
66

twenty seven
Genesis of a Museum
The second artist promoted by Peggy in her early years in Venice was Edmondo
Bacci: a very lyrical painter in his mid forties, whose work was inspired by
Kandinsky. He had a very organised way of life and with him [in contrast to
Tancredi] everything went calmly and successfully. In this case she was not
obliged to offer studio space. Peggys gift to Bacci was to compensate for his
shyness and modesty by exhibiting his works and by showing them to visiting
collectors and museum directors. For example, the Giornale di Sicilia (15 April
1961) reported at length on a meeting that she brokered between Bacci and
Alfred Barr. In 1958 Peggy wrote an introduction for an installation of Baccis
Events series, 16 Avvenimenti, in the Biennale catalogue:
[The paintings] are dynamic. They are the atomic bomb on canvas. They
burst with light, energy and color. Each new one is more vital than the last.
I feel that they are so explosive that they endanger the safety of my palace.
Every time an enthusiastic American takes one away with him I feel my
palace is in less danger. But then Bacci brings me a new one.
67
That Peggy brought Tancredi and Bacci to the attention of people like
Sweeney, Barr and Read as well as innumerable others, largely American,
who passed through Venice and through her salon, represented a unique
opportunity for these artists. Much later, in 1969, a whimsical catalogue
note by Peggy for a third Venetian painter, Gino Morandis, captured this
process: In the Spring Gino Morandiss paintings y away like birds, this
time to New York It is sad that so much of the essence of Venice departs,
thus impoverishing this beautiful city, but he will paint more and they in
their turn will y away never to return. The combined charisma of Peggy,
her collection and her Grand Canal house functioned as a magnet for the
international art world.
Jackson Pollock, Mural (1943), oil on canvas, 243.0 x 603.2 cm. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1959.6.
61 Other Americans were also on display: Peter Busa, Alexander Calder, John Ferren, Charles Howard,
David Hill and Barbara Reis.
62 Jackson Pollock, Totem lesson I, pl. 121, Charles Seliger, Don Quixote, pl. 122, Irene Rice Pereira,
White lines, pl. 192, and David Hare, Two, pl. 103. Art Now also illustrates paintings by Dal and Ernst
from Peggys collection.
63 Peggys principal service to Pollock, after her departure from New York, was to spread his fame by donating
his paintings to museums, though she was later to regret this (Guggenheim, Out of This Century, p. 317).
There is no complete list, to this writers knowledge, of the many works by many artists that Peggy gave away.
She donated 27 works in 1952 and at least three others in 1955 to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. A contribution
to this is Fred Licht, Peggy Guggenheims donations, in Peggy Guggenheims Other Legacy, catalogue of
the exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,
Venice, 1987, pp. 1923. See Davidson and Rylands, op. cit., especially the contributions by Davidson and
Sharp. Peggy professed to have given several Pollock gouaches away as Christmas presents in the mid-
1940s. Her autobiography species that she gave away 18 paintings by him presumably works on canvas
rather than works on paper. Beneciaries of Pollocks include: Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
(Galaxy), The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City (Mural and portrait of H.M.), The Tel Aviv Museum
(Earth worms, The dancers and Prism), Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna, Rome (Undulating paths),
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (Burning landscape), The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle
(Sea change), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Full fathom ve), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School
of Design, Providence, Rhode Island (Magic lantern), Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy,
Andover (Phosphorescence).
64 See Luca Massimo Barbero, ed., Carlo Cardazzo. Una nuova visione dellarte, exh. cat., Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice, 1 November 2008 9 February 2009, Milan: Electa, 2008, esp. Francesca Pola, Carlo
Cardazzo verso il futuro, tra Nord Europa e Stati Uniti, pp. 3535.
65 Pizzinatos switch to politically motivated realism in about 1950 disillusioned Peggy, and she later gave
May Day (1948) to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it still is today.
67 Catalogo. XXIX Biennale Internazionale darte di Venezia, Venice, 1958, pp. 667, and Bacci, exh. cat.,
Venice: Edizioni del Cavallino, 1958. In 1951 Peggy purchased a glass sculpture, Bomba atomica by
Vinicio Vianello. Peggys metaphor of the atomic bomb for Baccis paintings indicates the compelling
presence of this new weapon in the artistic psyche of the period.
68 This was included in her donation to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and resides in Venice.
It was catalogued and exhibited outside of Peggys home for the rst time at the Galleria Gottardo,
Lugano, and the Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Milan, in 2008. See exh. cat. by Francesco Paolo Campione,
Ethnopassion. La Collezione darte etnica di Peggy Guggenheim, Milan: Mazzotta, 2004.
twenty eight
Genesis of a Museum
Civica dArte Moderna) and Paris (Jeu de Paume). But what mattered most
then and now was the passive but galvanising and enduring presence of
the collection itself in Peggys Venetian home.
Dr. Philip Rylands
Director, and Director for Italy
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Peggys activity as a dealer and collector waned in the 1960s, and virtually
ceased in 1967, the year her daughter, Pegeen Vail, died. She instinctively
disliked Pop Art, the antithesis of the American Abstract Expressionism to
which she had dedicated herself in the 1940s, and was incredulous of the
inated monetary values for art. To compensate, she assembled a small
collection of African, Oceanic and Pre-Colombian art.
68
Nevertheless her
collection of Western art was gradually enriched, above all with its component
of the European post-war: paintings by the CoBrA artists and by Dubuffet
and Bacon, sculptures by Germaine Richier, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Consagra,
Heinz Mack and Gunther Uecker, the works of a group of British artists
(Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Alan Davie, Ben Nicholson,
Graham Sutherland and Leslie Thornton) and much else. She added to her
American collection with paintings by Grace Hartigan, Congdon, Willem de
Koooning, Mark Tobey and Sam Francis. She acquired works periodically
from Cardazzo (by Matta for example) and from the Biennale (Arp, Magritte
and Mirko). She actively promoted the art of her talented daughter, Pegeen.
Peggys inuence on Venice, and Italy, functioned in several different ways:
presenting a full repertoire of pre-war avant-gardes at the 1948 Biennale,
offering alternatives to the Fronte Nuovo orthodoxy in the early 1950s,
introducing Vedova and Tancredi to the art of Pollock, and Bacci to the
art of Kandinsky, and helping to create an international audience for these
artists. The collection travelled in the 1960s when Peggy closed her home to
the public during the winters: to London (Tate Gallery), New York (Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum), Stockholm (Moderna Museet), Turin (Galleria
Arshile Gorky, Untitled (1944), oil on canvas, 167.0 x 178.2 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation) 76.2553152. Photo David Heald.
Important sources for this essay are the contributions to Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands, eds, Peggy
Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century, New York: Guggenheim Publications, 2004,
with essays by Dieter Bogner, Susan Davidson, Francis V. OConnor, Don Quaintance, Valentina Sonzogni and
Jasper Sharp as well as this writer. The essay by Susan Davidson, Focusing an instinct: the collecting of Peggy
Guggenheim, pp. 5089, is the best chronicle of how Peggys collection was formed. For this essay, the writer
has drawn from his own essay in the same book, The Master and Marguerite, pp. 1831, and essays previously
published by him in Italian: Peggy Guggenheim in Venezia, in Spazialismo, Arte astratta Venezia 19501960, exh.
cat., Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza, 12 October 1996 19 January 1997, pp. 10815; Jackson Pollock e Peggy
Guggenheim, in Jackson Pollock in Venezia, exh. cat., Museo Correr, Venice, 23 March 30 June 2002, Milan:
Skira, pp. 2131; Peggy Guggenheim e il Surrealismo, in Peggy Guggenheim e limmaginario surreale, exh. cat.,
Arca, Vercelli, 11 November 2007 16 March 2008, Milan: Giunti, 2007, pp. 1825; Peggy Guggenheim e Art
of This Century, in Peggy Guggenheim e la pittura americana, exh. cat., Arca, Vercelli, 21 November 2008 15
March 2009, Milan: Giunti, pp. 3243; Peggy Guggenheim e lAstrattismo, in Peggy e Solomon R. Guggenheim:
Le avanguardie dellastrazione, Arca, Vercelli, 20 February 30 May 2010, Milan: Giunti, pp. 24-33. The best
sources for Peggy Guggenheims life are her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict,
New York: Universe Books, 1979, and Mary V. Dearborns biography, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy
Guggenheim, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifin, 2004. The catalogue raisonn of the collection is Angelica
Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985.
twenty nine
Genesis of a Museum
Peggy Guggenheim outside the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim exhibition at the Greek Pavilion, XXIV Biennale, Venice, 1948. Work shown: Antoine Pevsner, Developable surface (1942). Photo Archivio CameraphotoEpoche.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation), gift of Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, 2005.

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