Peggy Guggenheim, a millionaire heiress with a surname with a collecting tradition, is considered the bridge between the European and North American avant-garde of the 20th century. The peculiar story of the dealer, who lived on both sides of the Atlantic, is generating new interest thanks to the documentary Addicted to Artan exhibition at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid and a reissue in October of his memoirs. They are all initiatives that value the visibility that it gave to female artists in 1943 with the exclusive exhibition for female creators, 31 Womenwhich is now recreated in Spain. It had never been seen in New York, but it also condemned many of the participants to a specific category, in addition to later rejecting the abstract expressionists.
“The relaunch of this book, together with the Mapfre Foundation exhibition, restores the importance of a key figure in the art of the last century and of a pioneering voice at a time when women’s voices are gaining literary prominence. unpublished,” says Teresa Gras, editor of the new edition of Confessions of an art addict (Lumen). Thanks to that women’s exhibition held at the Guggenheim gallery, Art of This Centurymany of the previously unknown artists’ works are preserved through the project undertaken by inspired collector Gina Segal. However, on the posters of the Madrid exhibition it is noted that it is “difficult to definitively attribute a feminist approach to Guggenheim.”
“We must be careful with projecting a contemporary view on the characters of the past. While supporting initiatives like this, Guggenheim also had a contradictory attitude towards women artists; He did not support the representatives of abstract expressionism at all,” says the curator of the Mapfre exhibition, Patricia Mayayo. A negative that weighs more if one considers that Art of This Century It was the seedbed of the movement, mainly of Jackson Pollock. But Mayayo assures that the gallerist declared “very clearly” her interest in highlighting the work of women and breaking the myth of the muse.
Authors under the criteria of men
The women’s exhibition in New York was the idea of Marcel Duchamp, Guggeheim’s mentor in modern art and a close friend of his. The list of participants was drawn up by Alfred Barr, founder of MoMA, while the submitted pieces were evaluated by a committee composed, with the exception of Peggy herself, entirely of men: the artists Max Ernst, Duchamp and André Breton, and the critics of art James Johnson Sweeney, James Soby, Howard Putzel and Jimmy Ernst. Practically the same team made up the jury for a summer salon that was held in 1941 at the gallery, and they repeated as curators in a second exhibition of women in Art of This Century in 1945, titled The Women.
For art historian Griselda Pollock, a pioneer in studies with a feminist focus, Guggenheim’s invitation to participate in its exclusive exhibition left many of the authors between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if they did not accept, they would be excluded from the circles of art socialization, and if they did, they would carry the label of “woman artist.” “And they were much more than that. They were founders of the abstract movement, students of Hans Hofmann, co-creators of modern art who worked in the same studios with their male colleagues. The only one who refused to be part was Georgia O’Keeffe, because she was already very famous; the others had to take the risk.”
Pollock remembers the tragic story of one of the authors who was part of 31 Womenthe Swiss Sonja Sekula. “She was a brilliant abstract painter, but she was sick and her parents couldn’t afford her health care expenses in the United States, so she had to return to Switzerland. He was never able to get another exhibition and, at the age of 45, he committed suicide. So, the price of this was real,” says the author of the book. former teachers.
Protector of exiles
Curator Mayayo defends that the women’s collective exhibitions were not an isolated initiative. Guggenheim organized solo exhibitions of artists such as Irene Rice Pereira or her daughter Pegeen Vail Guggenheim. “Another very important job she did was serve as a connection between the women artists of the moment; He helped many of them financially and they attended the meetings he organized in New York.” However, in her memoirs, the patron only mentions regular monetary aid during her stay in New York to Bretón and Pollock. But his support for artists, men and women, to flee Europe and the Nazis remains true. That is the facet for which Peggy also passed down to posterity: giving shelter to the exiled artists whom she called her “war children.”
The rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II surprised Guggenheim while he was living in Europe. The gallery that opened in London in 1938, Guggenheim Youthhad to close, but that did not stop it from continuing to acquire works. What’s more, while the Germans marched on Paris, she bought “a painting a day,” as she notes in her book: “In Paris everyone knew that I was buying works of art and, I suppose, because of the war, They were more eager than ever to sell paintings. They pursued me in a ruthless manner. My phone rang all the time and people brought me paintings to bed before I got up in the morning.”
In another passage, she remembers that the day Hitler entered Norway, she was buying a painting for $1,000 from the cubist Léger: “She never understood how he could be buying paintings on a day like that.” At that time he also bought pieces from Leonora Carrington and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. In any case, he could not resist the advance of the Third Reich and in 1941 he had to return to New York with his collection, returning seven years later to the old continent, to Venice, where he would remain until his death. Guggenheim always felt more at home in Europe than in the US, and he expresses this frankly in his memoirs. In fact, that is the tone that sets the entire text.
Private image of artists
Confessions of an art addict was originally published in two parts: the first in 1946, under the name Out of this Century (Out of this century), and the second in 1960, with the current title. Critical reception was mixed due to the frankness of its pages. “She was criticized for lack of focus on the art itself, favoring on many occasions anecdotes about the artists rather than their work and the various relationships that the author had with them,” comments the editor of this edition, Gras. So much so, that in the first versions pseudonyms were used to mention the artists, a characteristic that changed with a 1979 release that united both parts.
Guggenheim describes Pollock as “quite difficult, he drank too much and when he did he was unpleasant, not to say diabolical”; a humble Yves Tanguy, but who, when he began to gain notoriety, “used to roll one pound notes into balls and throw them at the nearest tables. Sometimes he went so far as to burn them”; or a Kandinsky “wonderful old man, very practical, who looked like a Wall Street stockbroker.” But, above all, there are the disagreements of the surrealist movement, that group where great egos collided and Bretón decided who entered and who did not. “The person who most opposed Bretón was Dalí, because of his vulgar and commercial attitude towards advertising,” the book reads.
It is also appreciated, having been written over several years, an evolution in the personality and character of Peggy Guggenheim. From the insecurities she carried as a child from being homeschooled until she was 15, a failed cosmetic nose job or the “burden” that being 23 years old and a virgin caused her, to the full awareness of her power of influence, with a network that spanned all of Western Europe to the United States. But, above all, a maturity is evident in his vision of art. She began by opening her first gallery because “she was bored in the English countryside” and ended up confessing that “one’s duty is to protect the art of one’s time.”
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