• Complain

Mary V. Dearborn - Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim

Here you can read online Mary V. Dearborn - Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2004, publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, genre: Non-fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Mary V. Dearborn Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim
  • Book:
    Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2004
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggys visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking happening at the center of its time.
Dearborns unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight to Peggys traumatic childhood in German-Jewish Our Crowd New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggys last years as lultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year.
Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.

Mary V. Dearborn: author's other books


Who wrote Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston New York 2004


Copyright 2004 by Mary V. Dearborn

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dearborn, Mary V.
Mistress of modernism : the life of Peggy Guggenheim /
Mary V. Dearborn.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-618-12806-9
1. Guggenheim, Peggy, 18981979. 2. ArtCollectors and
collectingUnited StatesBiography. 3. ArtCollectors
and collectingEuropeBiography. I. Title.
N 5220. G 896 D 43 2004
709'.2dc22 2004047485

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Printed in the United States of America

MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following works:

Letters and other writings of Djuna Barnes: By permission of the Author's League Fund, as literary executor of the estate of Djuna Barnes; Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland at College Park Libraries.

Letters and other writings of Emily Coleman: By permission of Joseph Geraci, literary executor of the estate of Emily Holmes Coleman; Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Letters and other writings of Peggy Guggenheim, as well as accounting books for Art of This Century: By permission of Sandro Rumney and Karole Vail.


For Meryl Altman and Mary B. Campbell


Acknowledgments

I HAVE BEEN WORKING on this book for a long five years, mostly because I have enjoyed the work so thoroughly that I did not want it to end. It was the people who made writing the life of Peggy Guggenheim such an interesting and congenial project. The list of those to thank is long, and inevitably I have left people out; my apologies to those I've overlooked.

I made new friends: John Hohnsbeen, an indispensable source, a kindred soul, and a believer in Peggy; Anne Dunn; Charles and Lenore Seliger; the extraordinary Francis V. O'Connor; the late David Gascoyne and his wife, Judy; Sara Havelock-Allen; Domingo de la Cueva (who introduced me to prosecco); and the incomparable Lyle Bong of Biloxi. Relatives of Peggy whom I have interviewed include John King-Farlow, Nicolas Hlion, and Barbara Benita Shukman. Pegeen Vail's second husband, Ralph Rumney (19342002), was a dear and unforgettable resource. His son, Sandro Rumney, and Karole Vail, Sindbad Vail's daughter, were both extremely helpful and always gracious and insightful about my project; I am particularly grateful to them for their generosity in supplying or authorizing the use of photographs, and for granting me permission to quote from their grandmother's unpublished writing.

Art historians who helped me include Avis Berman, Ingrid Schaffner, Roger Conover, Francis Nauman, Mel Lader, Francis V. O'Connor, Helen Harrison, Roberta Tarbell, and Dore Ashton. Artists whom I have interviewed, some of whom showed at or visited Peggy's New York gallery, include Paul Resika, Charles Seliger, Peter Ruta, David Loeffler Smith, Al Kroesch, and Philip Pavia. Thanks also to Ethel Baziotes, the late Lillian Kiesler, Suzanne Ruta, and Natalie Pavia. I owe a great debt to other biographers, many of whom are or have become friends: Calvin Tomkins (Marcel Duchamp); Carolyn Burke (Mina Loy and Lee Miller); Marion Meade; Ken Silverman; Brenda Wineapple; John Szwed (Miles Davis); Julia Van Haafeten (Berenice Abbott); Jane Dunn (Antonia White); Cressida Connolly (the Garman sisters); Valerie Grove (Dodie Smith); Florence Rubenfeld (Clement Greenberg); Joan Mellen (Kay Boyle); William Feaver (Lucian Freud); Richard Greene (Edith Sitwell); Karl Orend (Henry Miller), and, especially, Nol Riley Fitch (Julia Child).

I am very grateful to those who knew Peggy and shared what they knew (many of whom I've mentioned above): Peter Lauritzen, Fred Licht, Tom Messer, Margot Waldman, Giselle Waldman, Colin Webster Watson, Jacqueline Ventadour Hlion, Edmund White, David and Marian Porter, Jock Stockwell, Baroness Maria Theres Rubin de Cervin, the late Charles Henri Ford (with the help of Indra B. Tanang), James Lord, John Loring, Eileen Finletter, Manina, Joan Fitzgerald, Alan Ansen, Marc Dachy, Yasmin David, Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov, Iris Owens, Yoko Ono (with the help of John Hendricks), Philip Johnson, Donald Windham, and Marilyn Sorrel.

Those who helped me with questions, untangled knots for me, or gave me good press and/or information include the late Billy Klver and Julie Martin; Jonathan Bayer; Chris Busa; Sandra Chait; Pierluigi Consagra; Ron Hogan; Laura Kuhn (and Rita Putnam); Mimi Roberts; Ron Stocker, Helen Harrison; Judith (Kiki) Malin (and Rebecca Lieb); Ben Heller; Sylvie Mettetal; Steven Beyer; Sigrid Falton; Sandra Kraskin; Judith Gutman; Kathleen Raine; Timothy Baum; Dierdre Connolly; James Mayor; Kathleen Flanagan, Richard Kostelanetz, Mary Wesley, Michael C. D. Macdonald, and Lyndall Passerini Hopkinson. Freda Hamric has been an excellent researcher at the University of Texas in Austin.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (PGC) in Venice has been more than helpful. I especially want to thank Philip Rylands and his wife, Jane Turner Rylands, who have been wonderful hosts; both also provided memories of Peggy that have been essential. The PGC mounted a show in September 2003 about Peggy Guggenheim and Frederick Kiesler, the visionary designer of Art of This Century (Peggy's New York gallery during World War II), which was extremely revelatory. My deepest thanks go to two curators who put the show together, at different Guggenheims, Jasper Sharp (of Venice) and Susan Davidson (of New York); as well as the designer who brilliantly reconstructed the gallery in models and an accomplished essay, Don Quaintance; and Dieter Bogner of the Frederick Kiesler Foundation.

Through Barbara Loeb Kennedy, in a felicitous turn, I found that I am related to the Guggenheims (by marriage only, so not at all). Barbara led me to the wonderful Susan Sandberg, who is the daughter of the gifted photographer Marjorie Content, my grandmother's first cousin. Content, part owner of Sunwise Turn, the innovative bookstore that employed Peggy in 1919, was married to Peggy's cousin Harold Loeb, Barbara Loeb Kennedy's uncle.

I happily thank some archivists: L. Rebecca Melvin Johnson in Special Collections, University of Delaware Library; Beth Alvarez in Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries; David Koch and Katy Salzman at Southern Illinois University; Judy Throm at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Christa Aube at the Art Institute of Chicago; Wim de Wit at the Getty Research Institute; Ruth Long at Cambridge University; Sara Hodson at the Huntington Library; Margaret M. Sherry at Princeton University Library; Chris Petter at the University of Victoria; and Tara Wengler at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. For help with photographs, I want to thank Carolyn McMahon from AP / Wide World Photos, Sydona Barrett from the University of Oklahoma, Lara Adler from Bettmann / Corbis, Dean Rogers of Vassar, Rona Tuccillo of Getty Images, Beth Krieger from the Calhoun School, Tara Schindler at Yale, Natalie Evans, and, most especially, Cindy Johnson at Commerce Graphics, the Berenice Abbott archive.

I was fortunate to rent, for a week in May 2003, a vacation cottage that was an outbuilding of Hayford Hall, the estate in Devon that Peggy and John Holms took for two summers in 1931 and 1932, where they held an idyllic, very literate house party, on the edge of Dartmoor. My thanks to Carol and Clive Richardson, my hosts; the Hayford Hall groundskeeper, David Wright; and Malcolm Dunstan and his wife, Kate, the current owners of Hayford Hall.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim»

Look at similar books to Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim»

Discussion, reviews of the book Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.