Guggenheim Peggy - Mistress of modernism: the life of Peggy Guggenheim

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

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.