Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict. Anton Gill
with the Georgia O’Keeffe abstract kindled an interest in modern art or not, a desire to know more about painting was growing within Peggy by now.
She sailed with her mother and Valerie to Liverpool. From there they visited the Lake District, then took a tour of Scotland, and meandered through England before crossing to France and ‘doing’ the châteaux of the Loire. By the time they arrived in Paris Florette was exhausted and only too happy to settle down in the Crillon, then as now one of the most expensive and most agreeable hotels in Paris, and a far cry from the Left Bank as it was then. Peggy had quickly developed a passion for travel and the new experiences it brought. Valerie, already an experienced traveller, shared her enthusiasm, and guided her through Belgium and Holland, and afterwards Italy and Spain. In 1920–21, they were in the vanguard: Europe lay before them unspoilt and unexplored.
Above all, their exploration was centred on art. Just as she had felt at home among the people who had frequented the Sunwise Turn, now Peggy felt at home in Europe, the land of her grandparents, which she had liked as a child, and after four years’ separation because of the war, now found that as an adult she adored. ‘I soon knew where every painting in Europe could be found, and I managed to get there, even if I had to spend hours going to a little country town to see only one.’
Valerie may have been a valuable cicerone, but as far as art was concerned another figure was more significant. He was Armand Lowengard, the nephew of Sir Joseph Duveen. (Duveen, later elevated to the peerage, was a noted art dealer and a friend of the English branch of the Seligman family. His name is commemorated in the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum, his gift to that institution, which house the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon.) Armand was a great aficionado of Renaissance Italian painting, but when they met in France, he told Peggy that she would never be able to understand the work of the art historian Bernhard Berenson. This fired her up: ‘I immediately bought and digested seven volumes of that great critic.’ She read about what to look for in a painting – tactile values, space-composition, movement and colour – absorbed her lessons and tried to apply them. Later in life she met the great man himself, who was horrified by modern art (though he noted a tapestry-like quality in the work of Jackson Pollock), and was able gently to tease him.
No doubt Peggy was sincere in her desire to learn, but she was also no slouch when it came to self-aggrandisement. From the well-used library she left at her death, one can see that she’d read all the great art historians and critics of her day, but along with her interest in paintings, she was becoming equally interested in sex. She was certainly too much for Armand: ‘My vitality nearly killed him and though he was fascinated by me, in the end he had to renounce me, as I was entirely too much for him.’
In Paris there were other diversions and at least one other boyfriend. Peggy mentions a boy called Pierre who was ‘a sort of cousin of my mother’s’. Whoever he was, she boasts that she kissed him on the same day as she kissed Armand, and displays a naïve guilt at being so daring. There were the fashion houses to explore and enjoy with a Russian girlfriend she had made, Fira Benenson. Peggy took Russian lessons so that Fira could have no secrets from her, but did not get very far. They visited Lanvin, Molyneux and Poiret, dressed to kill and vied with each other in collecting proposals of marriage. But they had a good, conventional, rich-girl time at the Crillon, under the protective eye of Florette. As far as Peggy’s interest in art was concerned, there was no problem. Uncle Solomon’s wife, Aunt Irene (Valerie’s cousin), was a collector of Old Masters and had a good eye.
This pleasant idyll, which lasted the better part of nine months, was interrupted by a brief return home to attend the wedding of Peggy’s younger sister Hazel. Hazel was marrying within ‘the Crowd’: Sigmund M. Kempner was a respectable graduate of Harvard, and Florette was probably relieved to see her maverick youngest daughter safely wed. Peggy remained a bit of a wild card, but with luck she would soon follow her sisters’ examples. Meanwhile, Benita was failing to produce an heir, and, given her delicate constitution, that was a worry.
Hazel’s wedding took place at the Ritz-Carlton in New York at the beginning of June 1921. The marriage lasted a year, and for her it was the first of seven. For the moment, though, Florette was content.
Back in New York, Peggy renewed some old acquaintances, among them the Fleischmans. Leon had by now resigned from Boni and Liveright, and the couple had produced a baby. They had little money and no clear idea of what to do next, so when Peggy suggested that they join her when she returned to Paris, they accepted her invitation gladly.
Peggy couldn’t wait to get back. In Europe, and especially in Paris, she had encountered none of the stuffiness and none of the anti-Semitism she associated with home. It is true that she hadn’t entered the vie bohème at all, but the Fleischmans would be more stimulating companions than her mother or even her second cousin. However, Florette and Valerie were not left behind when Peggy returned to Paris, and the only immediate change was of hotel – instead of the Crillon, they stayed at the Plaza-Athénée.
Paris itself was changing fast. Americans of Peggy’s generation were forming colonies in Montparnasse, where the rents were low, and around what was then the Hôtel Jacob in the rue Jacob just north of the boulevard St Germain, but as we’ve seen, arrivals in 1921 were still in the vanguard. US land forces had only taken an active part in the fighting for the last four or five months of the war. The traumatic losses sustained by the British, French and Germans over four years had not been experienced by the Americans, who came to the Old World fresher, richer and more innocent than the people they discovered there. In return for their curiosity they learned to be more cosmopolitan, to shed prejudices and to lose their fear of the unknown. They came into contact with the artistic influences that were part of their heritage, but from which distance had set them apart. The United States, just over 140 years old in 1920, was confident enough to start tracing its own roots. The people born around 1900 were the ones to do it, and at the same time to throw off the bourgeois and materialistic values of their parents. More prosaically, they could live very well indeed on a very few dollars, and unlike at home they could get a decent drink without risking their livers on bathtub gin. Many of them lived on allowances from those same ‘rejected’ parents.
The war had shaken many beliefs to the core. No longer could anyone say that ‘history is bunk’, or get away with a blind belief in scientific progress. The flower of young European manhood had been killed off. There was a surge of interest in mysticism. Theosophy, which leant towards Buddhism in an attempt to synthesise man’s aspirations with the greater forces of nature and the supreme being, and theories of universal brotherhood, already promoted in the nineteenth century by Helen Blavatsky and later on by Annie Besant and Sir Francis Younghusband, was much in vogue. Brancusi, Kandinsky and Mondrian were all Theosophists; there were few practising Christians among the modern artists. Besant declared the Indian Jiddu Krishnamurti to be the new saviour, and for a time he enjoyed a huge following. Charlatans like Ivan Gurdjieff and Raymond Duncan (the brother of Isadora) flourished as the idea of communes and a return to the simple life took root. Spiritualism became such a vogue in the United States that Harry Houdini made a second career out of exposing fake mediums. The Dadaist movement, born in Zürich during the war, mocked and questioned everything, but the old order was its particular target. There were other potent influences. The Communist revolution had taken place in Russia, and in 1913 Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which was to have such an influence on the Surrealists, appeared in an English translation.
The term ‘lost generation’, which was applied to the young post-war American émigrés in Europe, to whom Peggy was soon to attach herself, derives from a disparaging remark Gertrude Stein made to Hemingway when he and the painter André Masson and the poet Evan Shipman arrived late and drunk at one of her salons. As Masson and Shipman later related the story to Matthew Josephson, Stein had said, ‘Vous êtes tous une génération fichue.’ Stein got the expression from her garage mechanic, who used it to describe his apprentices.
Stein had arrived way ahead of the post-war émigrés, and as a patron of painters she quickly established friendships with many of them, notably Picasso, Matisse, Masson, Picabia, Cocteau and Duchamp. Among the other pre-war arrivals in Europe were the poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle (‘HD’) and Robert Frost. In England Eliot integrated completely and later