Two new biographies about Peggy Guggenheim have recently been published, offering very different perspectives on the art patron's remarkable journey from a sheltered girl to a liberated feminist spirit and from a wealthy patron to a central female figure of modernism. These works trace her transformation into one of the most influential art collectors of the 20th century.
With her oversized sunglasses, abundant jewelry around her neck, and surrounded by adorable Lhasa Apso terriers, Peggy Guggenheim's distinctive image immediately comes to mind. This eccentric lady with a famous surname created a museum monument to herself in Venice. While Guggenheim typically refers to her uncle Solomon, who founded what is now an international museum empire with branches in New York, Bilbao, and Abu Dhabi, many would argue that a film about the poorer but more influential niece Peggy would be far more compelling.
The source material for such a biographical film may have appeared this year in a book aptly titled "Peggy." Behind this work lie two touching destinies: first, the sometimes dramatically embellished emancipation of a wealthy but thoughtful girl from the Jewish New York upper class, whose father drowned in the Titanic disaster. Second, the fate of the author herself, Canadian writer Rebecca Godfrey, who worked on the book for ten years before dying of cancer at just 54 years old. Her friend Leslie Jamison completed the manuscript.
The authors succeed in creating vivid images that go beyond mere clichés. They particularly emphasize the dark sides of Guggenheim's personality, where her lost father repeatedly appears—the man who once had his daughter explain paintings in the Louvre for show-off purposes. The self-doubts of a young Jewish heiress during the interwar period are portrayed with appropriate ambivalence: she desperately wanted to belong, but was deeply hurt when she learned her Parisian nickname was "Miss Moneybags."
The failed bohemian eventually emerged, through considerable emotional and physical pain, as the eccentric libertine who would later become a pioneering avant-garde gallery owner and museum founder. However, the novel doesn't extend that far chronologically. For that broader perspective, readers must turn to the simultaneously published biography by Mona Horncastle.
It's no coincidence that both books appeared this year, though no particular anniversary prompted their publication. Rather, it reflects the current cultural tendency to reevaluate the previously under-researched roles of female artists and patrons. Such a reevaluation is explicitly the goal of art historian Horncastle, who previously co-authored a Klimt biography with Alfred Weidringer. She wanted to write about Peggy Guggenheim as if she were a man—without gossip about her love life and without questions that would never be asked of a male collector, such as how many muses he had kissed or whether he was a good father.
But why would anyone want to portray such a remarkable woman like a man? And what man today can escape those supposedly typically feminine questions? Fortunately, Horncastle didn't entirely succeed in this already outdated approach. A figure like Peggy Guggenheim simply cannot be portrayed without her eccentricity, which she used as a form of revolt.
One might have wished for even more details and deeper analysis instead of some unnecessary banalities, including stylistic ones like explaining the difference between New York and Venice. Nevertheless, readers close the book with a crucial understanding: modernism would look different if Peggy Guggenheim hadn't exhibited, collected, and essentially financed essential artists—especially female artists—so early in their careers. Her mantra on the eve of the Nazi invasion was to buy one painting a day from "degenerate" artists.
Guggenheim created spaces of visibility for modern art through her galleries in London and New York, and after the war, at the central point of art's internationalization in Venice. Her impact on the art world was transformative, supporting artists who might otherwise have remained unknown or struggled to find recognition.
The book concludes with what may be the best of all Guggenheim quotes: "I am not an art collector. I am a museum." This statement perfectly encapsulates her understanding of her role not just as someone who acquired art, but as someone who became a living institution dedicated to preserving and promoting modern art for future generations.
