Film Review: Peggy Guggenheim, Art Addict

Peggy Guggenheim, Art Addict
Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Release date February 25

This documentary on the life of Peggy Guggenheim has the subtitle of Art Addict. It should have been Art Addict and Sex Addict. As well as collecting a vast quantity of art, she also amassed a remarkable collection of lovers.

Her career as a socialite, collector and patron of the arts saw her become one of the pivotal figures of 20th-century art and Lisa Vreeland’s film creates a multi-layered portrait of the woman, interviewing art critics, historians and others who knew her.

There are also the intriguing interviews with Guggenheim herself, who talks openly about her relationships with artist and dealers and as well as the problems with others in the Guggenheim dynasty. Her uncle founded the Guggenheim in New York and refused her request to show her collection at the gallery.

She was not from the extremely wealthy Guggenheim side of the family and started life with only a modest $500,000. However, she became a collector with a great eye and great business acumen, buying many of the great modern works in the days leading up to World War II and getting many bargains from fleeing artists and dealers. At the time she amassed a major collection of works for just $40,000. She also managed toget her treasures out of the Europe ahead of the advancing Nazis.

On her return to the US in 1942 she opened her gallery, Art of This Century, which was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City. She collected and promoted unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, (actor Robert de Niro’s father) Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock.

She established galleries in London, New York and finally Venice where her museum still stands containing the collection she put together.

In 1947 she decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion exposing the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko to a European audience.

Her numerous lovers including Samuel Beckett with whom she notoriously spent four days in bed and she went to bed with Brancusi because she thought she might get his “Bird in Flight” sculpture more cheaply. She also had relationships with Max Ernst, Man Ray and dozens of others, possibly even James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

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