Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict. Anton Gill

       Foreword

      This book is made up of material derived from private and public archives and collections, published works, unpublished works, letters, diaries, interviews, gossip, e-mails, telephone conversations, videotapes, faxes, websites and so on. Despite the fact that the subject is recent, a number of discrepancies of spelling have cropped up in proper names. Where that has happened, I have used the version most commonly used by others.

      I have not tampered with usage, grammar or spelling in direct quotations from original material such as letters, though I have tidied up typographical errors – for many years Peggy Guggenheim used an ancient typewriter with a faded blue ribbon, and her typing was not accurate. I have left eccentricities of spelling alone (Peggy habitually spelt ‘thought’ ‘thot’, and ‘bought’ ‘bot’), and have provided an explanation only if the level of obscurity seemed great enough to warrant one. Round brackets in quoted passages belong to the passage; glosses within such passages are in square brackets.

      Titles of artworks in Peggy’s collection are generally the same as those used by Angelica Z. Rudenstine in her catalogue of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Other paintings and sculptures are given the names they’re most commonly known by.

      I’d like to express my thanks here at the outset to all who helped. A lot of people had a profound personal contact