Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

This programme contains some strong language.

Is it working?

I think... Yeah.

-I have to check the battery, that means it's working.

-How's that?

I know that you gave first exhibitions

to Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still and...

-Baziotes.

-That's remarkable.

-Motherwell.

Rothko and Pollock.

I think she was most proud of her achievement with Pollock.

Because nobody believed in Pollock the way she did.

She started with a very mixed bag of paintings.

And she bought much more cleverly as she went on.

In the end, she really seemed to know what she was doing.

It seems to me that you have an intuition for talent,

even before it's realised.

Yes. Maybe.

You know, I became an addict, and I sort of couldn't help it any more.

She wanted to come into her own as her own person,

and art became the vehicle.

She wanted this art as a mirror for her own strangeness.

It's a very fulfilled career, to be involved with the surrealists

and then the abstract expressionists.

So she begins in one place

and she ends up in another place.

She's a bridge character.

You don't have to paint a figure in order to express human feelings.

Modern art, it seems to me,

is working, isn't it?

And expressing an inner world.

Did you feel it was a crazy life?

Definitely, yes.

I think that she did remarkably well

for someone who had no art historical training,

who had no, really, sort of innate taste or flair for things,

but who had a passion

to use art to promote herself

and turn herself into a personality, to a star.

She could... Because of her lack of beauty,

she was never going to make it as a siren,

as a desirable, glamorous, social figure.

But, by God, she made it as a collector

and as a kind of collector that had never quite existed before.

Peggy, being a bit of a narcissist,

was absolutely delighted at the idea of having a biographer.

She called me her "last great friend"

and when people would call in the afternoon

or come to see her, she'd say, "I'm with my biographer!"

Peggy appealed to me because of her eccentricities.

And she had just a wonderfully colourful family.

Both sides of Peggy's family came over and started off

as peddlers, really, selling door-to-door.

In the case of her mother's family, the Seligmans,

they went into banking.

And her father's family, the Guggenheims, they went into mining.

And within 50 years,

they progressed from selling door-to-door

to having these enormous fortunes.

Even though the Guggenheims became much wealthier than the Seligmans,

the Seligmans looked down on them, because they had come later.

Her mother Florette

was one of the youngest of the James Seligman children,

and they were all highly eccentric.

Florette would repeat everything three times.

Peggy's aunts and uncles were all famously off their rockers.

There was another aunt, Fanny,

who used to sing all her phrases.

And so she'd arrive at somebody's house and say...

-IN SING-SONG VOICE:

-"Hello! I'm here!"

Her husband was driven so nuts by her

that he tried to kill her with a baseball bat.

And since that didn't work,

he then drowned himself with weights

in the New York City reservoir.

Ben, Peggy's father,

was highly established by the time that Peggy was born.

She had two sisters, Benita and Hazel,

and she adored Benita.

I had no other friends.

Didn't your mother invite little girls over to play with you?

Never.

They lived like royalty.

They had beautiful carriages,

mansions on Fifth Avenue,

nannies, servants galore.

Joseph Seligman was great friends of Ulysses S. Grant,

and would entertain him.

The Guggenheim brothers,

in addition to being known for their financial acumen and money,

were also known to have multiple affairs.

When Ben Guggenheim went down in the Titanic

and his brothers went to see who was rescued on the Carpathia -

down came his mistress,

who was paid off by the Guggenheims to keep quiet.

-You must have been extremely shocked when he died on the Titanic?

-Yes.

Did you feel angry and mad at your father

for not trying to save himself more?

He gave away his life vest!

How could I be angry? I thought he was very noble.

And she wasn't a rich Guggenheim.

People thought she was,

but she wasn't anything like as rich as most of the Guggenheims.

Well, I'm sure that the poor Guggenheim was relative.

I mean, she wasn't in any way poor.

I first met Peggy Guggenheim... in the '70s...

Early '70s.

I liked her because I sort of felt sorry for her.

I mean, there was a kind of vulnerability about her.

She had this very strange accent, and I once said to her,

"Where did you get that weird way of talking?"

And she said, "There was one school on West 72nd Street

"that about nine of us went to,

"and we were all super-rich Jewish girls

"and we all learned to talk this way and we still do."

Peggy loved to shock and be the centre of attention.

She shaved off her eyebrows when she was in school,

and that became a cause celebre

because that was so avant-garde, and so Peggy was always a rebel.

She was supposed to inherit money

and marry someone who also inherited money.

And she, at some point early in her life,

decided that that was not going to be who she was.

When she was in her early 20s,

she went to work at that bookstore Sunwise Turn.

It's very strange, you move through life in a kind of dream.

Paris. It was just the most exciting place, culturally,

in the world, at that point.

And not only in the visual arts,

it was going on in music and ballet

and theatre and everything else.

Dada! Italique!

Metallique! Mysterique!

Dadaism is really coming out

of this atrocity of World War I.

Just the senseless amount of death and bloodshed

and also the sickness and twistedness of the propaganda.

So they're creating this language of disillusionment,

of this kind of utter disgust

with what the civilised world is doing.

She found the whole Bohemian life there

to be this alternative to the bourgeois,

or the haute bourgeois life,

that she'd always found herself to be an outsider in anyway.

And so she immediately felt "these are my people".

-Isn't that gorgeous?

-It's gorgeous.

-Ah, so beautiful.

I was going to ask you what you were thinking of

when you did that picture.

God knows. SHE LAUGHS

I think I must have known I looked gorgeous.

The artists from all over Europe and the United States

were making their way to Paris

as though there were some magnet pulling them.

Had you ever considered going to college?

Yes, and my sister talked me out of it.

I consider myself self-educated.

When you sat in the cafes,

you absorbed surrealism and you absorbed Cubism,

you absorbed the ideas of the time.

GENTLE GROANING AND PANTING

-Did he court you?

-Yes. He took me to the top of the Eiffel Tower,

where he proposed to me.

And then I ended up by marrying him.

And I've got two children, Pegeen and Sindbad.

We had terrible fights all the time.

The fights were so many and so awful and so insane and...

You wrote that, "Oh, husbands always get better..."

Better after divorce, yeah!

Oh, he became my best friend afterwards, yes.

Yes, when he stopped beating me up, mm-hm.

Who has been the most important man in your life,

or can you answer that question?

Yes, but that wasn't an artist, that was a writer. Someone...

Er, an Englishman who's dead, who's been dead 30 years.

He was a wonderful sportsman.

Used to climb rocks with my children.

-Was he fond of your children, was he...?

-Oh, yes.

-Did they love him?

-Yes.

Her sister Benita died in childbirth,

so Peggy was bereft.

And something that does not appear in her memoirs -

it's a glaring omission -

but her sister Hazel went up to the roof of the Hotel Surrey

and she took her three-year-old and her one-year-old up there,

but she was divorcing their father, Milton Waldman,

and she'd gone around saying,

"I'd rather see the children dead than have Milton have them."

So somehow, mysteriously,

they wind up dead over the parapet.

Playing Peggy Guggenheim,

I got hooked on something mysterious about her,

something enigmatic...

..that to this day I don't entirely understand.

She had this hunger, which is about life,

pulling against this undertow of unbeatable sadness.

So her sexual life was her way of connecting.

Humanly connecting.

Well, I had so many odd people!

I just... I don't know, because I was lonely, I guess.

I think I was sort of a nymphomaniac!

She wanted lovers.

Er, everybody else had lovers, why shouldn't she have one?

If I had one question for Peggy Guggenheim, it would probably be,

how was Samuel Beckett in bed?

His... I suppose his conversation,

his mind, probably fascinated me more than anything else.

She said that she'd never met anyone like Beckett.

They'd been in bed for four days

and the only time they separated

was when he reached out the door to get the sandwiches

the room service had sent for them!

I liked intellectual men.

I liked very tall, dark, good-looking men.

But all my lovers certainly were not that.

The artists, she loved them because they were artists,

not because they were sexy men.

I mean, they actually were sexy men...

but I think sex and art

went absolutely hand-in-hand in her brain.

She went for the bad boys and, er, it didn't do her any good.

I think art gave a meaning to her life

as well as confirmed certain...

The modern art, the avant-gardes

confirmed her sense of being, in some peculiar, way an outsider.

Art became her way of finding herself emotionally.

I was in search of an occupation

and to have an interest, something to do,

after my children were in boarding school

and I was alone in the country in England,

and I came up to London

and opened this art gallery in Cork Street called Guggenheim Jeune.

She's mulling around whether

she should start a publishing company or an art gallery,

and one of her friends says, "Well, start an art gallery, it's cheaper."

She quite early on began to show

the work of the European surrealists.

A little exhibition for Cocteau,

she was introduced to Tanguy,

she knew Andre Breton already by this time.

How did Guggenheim Jeune change your former life?

Must have been a dramatic difference.

Completely different, yes.

I always adapt myself to everything very quickly.

-Did you just plunge in and devote all your energy to it?

-Yes, yes.

Except the time that I ran to Paris to see Beckett!

surrealism decided that the subconscious mind

was the source of all great creativity

and this was the answer to the art of the future.

I think Peggy was a woman of great intuitions.

She learned quite quickly

what it meant to have an eye.

She followed her own intuitions, she had the courage to do so,

and that is a pattern that goes on throughout her life.

She wanted this outsider art,

art that was then outrageous,

that was different.

Strange art mirroring herself.

Peggy was absolutely at the cutting edge.

She gave a huge number of shows at her gallery

and that alone was a major influence

on British thinking about modern art.

The English, who really,

except for the 1936 surrealist show at the Royal Academy,

hadn't much idea about modern art.

Most people thought it was rubbish.

Mrs Guggenheim, but you might, as a patron,

acquire a collection of rubbish.

That's always possible.

Yes, of course, easily, if you have no taste

and you don't know what you're doing

and you don't take advice from the right people.

You can get yourself in an awful lot of trouble.

Peggy Guggenheim really worked with a kind of consensus of advice,

and it was only from artists

and only from people she really respected,

and the biggest voice in her head, the strongest advice,

the one she probably took most often, was from Marcel Duchamp.

I knew Marcel Duchamp since 1921.

I met him because he was a boyfriend of one of my best friends,

Mary Reynolds.

And after that we became great friends.

He taught me everything about modern art that I know today,

taught me the difference between surrealism and abstract art.

He arranged all my exhibitions, did everything for me.

I don't know what I would have done without him,

because he really was my great, great teacher.

I thought of the idea of a box,

in which they would be mounted, like in a small museum.

Practically all your work is in here.

Practically all of it,

I think very few things are missing.

And there it is.

The Mona Lisa with a moustache and a goatee.

That was, of course, a great iconoclastic gesture

on my part and...

Sacrilegious.

Sacrilegious, blasphemous, all you want.

The Bottle Rack was a perfect expression of the readymade

because it had no connection whatsoever with art.

The most mundane everyday object

could be elevated to fine art

by the mere choice of an artist,

and this is the Duchampian conceit,

that opens up a Pandora's box of...

future avenues for art.

Miss Guggenheim, in the gallery in London,

who were some of the artists whom you introduced

who created big excitement there?

Well, I suppose Kandinsky really was the most exciting.

He had his first show in England in my gallery.

During this period, Kandinsky asked me

if I would ask my uncle, Solomon Guggenheim,

to buy one of his early paintings which he'd always wanted.

So I asked him if he would like to buy this painting.

I got an answer from him saying his curator, the Baroness Rebay,

would send me her response.

And this is it, which I shall now read.

"Dear Mrs Guggenheim Jeune,

"your gallery will be the last one of our foundation to use

"if ever the need should force us to use a sales gallery."

"You will soon find you are propagating mediocrity,

"if not trash."

Peggy's nemesis in many ways, Hilla Rebay,

was the founding director of the Guggenheim here in New York.

She was Solomon Guggenheim's adviser

and Solomon was Peggy's uncle.

Hilla of course was a dynamic person,

I guess rather possessive, very assertive.

She was a bombshell,

and my grandfather was captivated by her.

They were both following different paths,

they both had different ideas.

Peggy was often considered...to be the black sheep of the family.

So I wrote to the Baroness Rebay this response.

At Peggy's gallery in London she gave a show of children's art,

and it was the first show

that anything by Lucian Freud was ever exhibited.

And what was the inspiration for the children's exhibit?

Because Pegeen painted and I thought it would be nice

to have a lot of schoolchildren's pictures also.

It was a beautiful exhibition.

No. Pegeen was really a painter.

No-one never influenced her,

she was absolutely self-taught and completely independent.

What was Pegeen like as a child?

She was always very, very beautiful.

She had a complexion like a peach,

and wonderful silver-flaxen golden hair.

How did you get along?

Was she an easy child to bring up or was she...difficult?

Well, she never wanted to leave me or her governess.

She was...very...very insecure.

I had a big show of Tanguy, and that was one of the most successful ones.

We really sold quite a lot of paintings.

What was Tanguy like?

Oh, he was adorable.

Did he paint things for you when he visited you?

Yes, he painted marvellous earrings.

Would you have become such a collector, do you think,

if you had not known so many artists personally?

-Certainly, definitely.

-Well, then, which came first -

is it the art or the people, or was it both?

No, the art came first, and the people came because of my idea

to have this gallery, and by degrees I met more and more artists.

Do you think that great artists are great people necessarily?

They're certainly much more interesting

than people who aren't intellectual,

who aren't interested in the arts, who aren't creative.

They're certainly more interesting than businesspeople.

But do they measure up, or do they equal their own work?

Sometimes they're disappointing,

but sometimes they're even better than their work.

When one meets artists, they turn out to be quite different

to what one expects.

Brancusi used to say, "Art is a fraud,"

and I even say art is a mirage.

But what I believe in

is the artist, the man.

So what to do, except to let everybody be the individual

and be as much of an individual as they can be,

and everyone for oneself,

like in a shipwreck.

And this venture only lasted about a year and a half,

because it became so expensive I thought it wasn't worthwhile

to go on trying to run a commercial gallery,

because I never sold anything.

So I decided it was better to spend the money

by having a museum of modern art,

which didn't exist in London.

Once she'd decided to close Guggenheim Jeune

she thought she'd invest a great deal more money and make a museum.

So she signs up Herbert Read

to inveigle him to leave his position

as the Burlington Magazine editor

and to be the director of her planned future museum in London.

And so it was for the opening exhibition

that he prepared this list - legendary list -

of all the major movements and artists of the 20th century.

But unfortunately the war came just at that time,

and I decided it would be impossible

to have a museum in London

that might be bombed any moment.

Most people think that everything the Nazis did was attacking,

you know, primarily the Jews,

but this was also an attack on modernism,

and it culminated in 1937

with an enormous exhibition in Munich

called Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art.

It's kind of amazing

that all this energy went into collecting and bringing together

650 examples of art that people should dislike.

Then, when the war began, you left London.

Well, I was sent to Paris to collect the pictures on the list

that Herbert Read had made for me.

During the first month of the war

I tried to buy one painting a day.

How did you go about doing that?

Well, I had friends in Paris, Madame Van Doesburg,

who was my best friend for years and years.

And I had a friend who was a sort of art dealer, called Howard Putzel,

and I had Marcel Duchamp, who introduced me to artists,

and between these three people

and I went around on my own and bought things.

People telephoned me all day long

and even came to my house in the morning

and brought me pictures in bed.

And actually the only one I literally bought in bed

was this little Dali.

She was lucky in her choice of time,

because in 1939 the artists were desperate to sell things,

and a number of the dealers were Jewish

and were getting the hell out of Paris before the Germans arrived.

During the war I wanted to buy a Brancusi.

This is Brancusi's Bird In Space.

I think it's one of Brancusi's favourite pieces of sculpture.

I used to go and see him almost every day

and he was a marvellous little man, sort of half-God and half-peasant.

When I went back to take away this Bird In Space,

Brancusi brought it out in his arms

and tears were strolling down his cheeks,

and I never knew if it was because he was parting with me

or with his favourite bird.

Do you remember Giacometti?

Oh, very well, he was wonderful.

-He looked like a lion.

-Really?

Yes, he had a very big head and shaggy hair and...

His conversation was marvellous.

How did you bargain?

I mean, how difficult was it to get paintings at that time

at the price you were prepared to pay?

Then... There was no question of bargaining in those days

because everything was so cheap.

She came in at a good moment,

I mean, so far as prices were concerned,

and she didn't have all that much money to spend,

and I think she did spend it rather cleverly and cannily.

And, God knows, she's a Guggenheim, she knew how to do those things -

I mean, that's one of the things she inherited.

She managed to put together the nucleus

of one of the great collections of modern art

for the almost laughable sum of 40,000.

For 40,000 you couldn't buy one of the paintings you have in that?

-Not today.

-Not even one of the 125?

No, not even one probably, isn't that crazy?

She just broke all the rules.

There weren't that many precedents for women working,

let alone working in the arts.

It was a very male-dominated field.

It was my freedom.

My liberation.

Peggy is a sort of model for the liberated woman.

The very disturbed liberated woman!

She did what she wanted to do,

she had the means to do it,

but I think she really was in advance of her times.

There were other women,

and there was, above all, another American Jewish woman

in the form of Gertrude Stein

whose example Peggy may have been following.

I think that Peggy would love to have had Gertrude Stein's...gifts

for words and, er, her extraordinary ability

to promote herself.

She liked helping the artists

and she liked being like Gertrude Stein

and having a good eye and picking the winners.

She also had the guts to buy Cubist paintings

which, in those days, were not valued nearly as highly

as they are today.

I seem to remember Picasso being rather vague about Peggy.

I mean, he heard about her.

She goes to Picasso and tries to buy something there

and he says, "Madam, the lingerie is on the fifth floor."

Clearly she was courageous in her choices,

she stuck to her convictions,

she listened to the right people,

but she was the subject of ridicule and disparagement

a lot of the time,

and yet that didn't seem to bother her so much.

She just...ploughed forward.

On the day that Hitler invaded Norway,

I walked into Leger's studio and bought a wonderful painting.

And then, this was in 1940,

and how did you get all that art out of Paris?

Well, that was very, very difficult.

First of all, I wanted all these things saved,

and went to talk to the Louvre people,

because Leger had suggested

the Louvre would save these works of art with theirs.

Then, after I had them all prepared,

the Louvre changed their mind, said they weren't worth saving.

And the Louvre was sure that Mondrian wasn't worth saving

and Picasso wasn't worth saving?

-Exactly!

-How extraordinary.

I bet they're sorry now.

Oh, I was, much more.

And I wouldn't leave until I got the pictures there,

but finally, a very lucky man

who had done all the shipping and packing

so I had the gallery, appeared and arranged the whole thing for me

and sent the whole thing as household objects.

We had sand sheets and blankets

and casseroles and...

Right there in the middle of the war with the submarines and everything?

Yes, incredible, isn't it?

I went to Marseille, and the Varian Fry Committee asked me

if I would save certain surrealist painters from Europe.

And among these people was Max Ernst and Andre Breton,

and all Andre Breton's family.

One of the surrealist painters

with whom you obviously were closely involved was Max Ernst,

and he makes a sort of link, doesn't he,

between your life in Europe and your life in America again?

I brought Max Ernst to America.

Then, after Pearl Harbor, I married him.

And Max Ernst was extremely good-looking

and very attractive to women.

She was much envied for having Max Ernst as a husband.

It was a good deed in that,

I mean, she got Max out of Europe and to America,

and had he been caught by the Germans

he would have been put in a concentration camp

for being a modernist artist.

I don't think he was at all faithful.

I mean, it was a clever career move,

and I think that he didn't give a damn for her.

When did you know you were in love with him?

-When you first saw him, or...?

-Right away, after a few days.

-Was he still beautiful then?

-Yes, wonderful. Terribly attractive.

Beautiful, beautiful. Had a beautiful body also.

Did Ernst love being the centre of attention?

Oh, he thought about nothing else.

You said that he could be jealous of your clothes.

He loved clothes.

He wanted to dress up always.

When I bought a fur coat once,

he was so jealous I had to buy him one also.

When Peggy Guggenheim arrives in 1941,

the art world was a small kind of gentlemen's club,

and the story was that you could fit

the entire art world in any given room.

Well, it's got a lot of people coming here.

A lot of Europeans are being displaced by the war.

-Miro was here.

-Yes, Miro was here.

-Leger, and...

-Yes.

Tanguy, Masson.

Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Mondrian.

Peggy Guggenheim was one of the links between

European and American modernism.

Between surrealism and abstract expressionism.

I think Peggy was a pollinator.

She wanted to be widely regarded

as a major figure in the art world.

What was life like during those days,

here, with all the expatriate artists in New York?

Oh, it was wonderful.

It was terribly stimulating and terribly exciting,

because New York then became the art centre of the world -

Paris no longer existed in that way.

Which comes first - Peggy Guggenheim the freethinker

who rebels and kind of moves away from home and changes her life,

or Peggy Guggenheim the person who enters into these spheres,

these artistic orbits, where everyone is like that,

and certainly informing her of even wilder ways to break the rules?

When Peggy opened Art Of This Century

on 57th Street, in October '42,

she felt very committed to the idea

of assembling a collection and opening it to the public.

And she saw that, by collecting the art of her time,

that that would set up

a path, if you will, toward the future.

Peggy Guggenheim's gallery

was one of the first international galleries in New York City

mixing American and European art.

In terms of American painting, what was the role of your gallery?

What would you say it was?

What about Putzel's role in your gallery?

It seems to me he was very important in providing people...

Terribly important.

It was in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery

called Art Of This Century.

Do you remember Motherwell?

-Very well.

-What impressed you about Motherwell?

He was very intellectual.

He used to give lectures in my gallery about the paintings.

The function of abstraction is to get rid of a lot of reality.

You start with as much richness as you want, and subtract.

Art Of This Century was an astonishing innovation.

Not only this radical group of artists who were redefining art,

but also the space was something

that no-one had ever imagined before.

What made you think of having a gallery that was all decorated?

Oh, that was because Putzel said

why don't you get Kiesler to give you a few little ideas?

And those were the few little ideas, created this marvellous gallery.

Frederick Kiesler had been a long-time friend of Duchamp's.

He was friends with Mondrian,

and he was spiritually the right visionary for Peggy.

Kiesler and Peggy felt very strongly that her art should be accessible.

All the abstract pictures were hung in halls on universal joints

so that you could actually take hold of the picture and turn it,

swivel it into the light and so on,

and really use it with the same familiarity

that one does a library.

That's how people get turned on to art,

is that they have an intimate relationship,

rather than a distant one.

And Peggy Guggenheim really understood that.

Some of the critics referred to the installation

as either a Coney Island or an amusement-park ghost train.

And it was a wacky environment.

There was a tape recording of an express train

which would go off every few minutes.

Light switch would flash on and off.

The experience was supposed to be unsettling, dreamlike.

Most people still feel safest in their contemplative gaze

when they're in the most sterile white cube possible.

The presentation of the art was really radical,

and is still radical today.

Well, it doesn't surprise me

that Peggy Guggenheim was regarded as a black sheep,

because she really did it on her own.

She really was a self-made collector,

and kind of a self-made person, in the broader sense.

I mean, she really... She was her greatest creation.

I had a wonderful figure.

I was very thin, chestnut hair, green-blue eyes.

My nose probably was always too big! SHE LAUGHS

She was one of the first people to have plastic surgery,

because she hated her nose.

And her nose was a disaster.

I love the story about your nose job. Is it quite true?

-Absolutely true, yes.

-Why would the doctors not...?

They couldn't do the one I wanted.

-So you just had them stop in the middle?

-It was so painful.

It was terrible, so I made them stop.

When her nose job was botched,

she decided not to ever have it fixed,

and just to guts it out with this kind of funny face.

And I think that was kind of a root of a lot of her complexes.

When you met Peggy, she wasn't at all forward and confident.

She was charming, she was socially adept,

but you could see that she was...

She was quite timid.

She was very insecure.

And the way she spoke, with very little bit of movement of the mouth,

and every once in a while, she would just...

do something with her tongue.

Um... It would come out.

'I'm sure she was totally unaware of it.

'The only time that I saw that she really relaxed was

'she picked up this little sculpture by Arp.'

This is the first sculpture I ever bought.

'She became a little more animated.

'She was happy when she was actually connected to the art.'

Peggy made things happen.

She did things, and other things happened as a consequence of that.

And it was absolutely true in Pollock's career.

Peggy must have met Jackson Pollock in the winter of 1942-1943,

become aware of him.

But for somebody used to

the sophistications of the European avant garde,

it was very hard to take on board,

and it was eventually Mondrian,

during the jury session for her so-called Spring Salon in 1943,

who pushed Peggy over the top.

Mondrian stood rooted to the spot

in front of two paintings,

and Peggy went over to him and merely said,

"Dreadful, aren't they?

"They're dreadful. Man has no discipline."

And he said, "No, I'd like to look at this some more."

She said, "Why?"

And Mondrian said, "I have the feeling

"that I'm looking at some of the most exciting work

"that I've seen so far in America."

Soon after exhibiting Pollock in her Spring Salon,

she offers him his first one-man exhibition,

and commissions from him what was to be his largest ever painting,

a mural for her new address on 61st Street.

I first met Jackson Pollock when he was working as a carpenter

in my uncle's museum, so I rescued him from that,

and wanted a mural for my entrance hall,

a very long wall, about 23 feet wide.

The picture seems to repeat itself all over.

It's become a staple of abstract painting now, but at the time

it was called, I say, exalted wallpaper,

and then the mural, well, it just goes on and on.

That's what made it so good.

Pollock is still taken for this example of far-out-ism,

an artist in the line of Duchamp,

someone who knocked...

Knocked you flat with his arbitrariness.

Pollock was a very self-destructive character,

and Peggy Guggenheim made an investment of genius.

Once she was convinced of Pollock's importance,

she gave him an income, she lent him the money

to buy a house out in Springs, Long Island.

Having the peace and the quiet

and the distance from the social scene

opened up a space for him,

and he was truly working as an artist in full command.

He had a lot more control than people...

Than the myth would have.

He could fling a scad of paint

with the accuracy of a cowboy with a lasso.

I gave him a small salary, 300 a month.

God knows how he lived on it and painted on it,

and bought canvases, but I suppose in those days

it was a great deal more than it would be today.

And he immediately bloomed forth

and became what I consider

one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Does she make Jackson Pollock famous? No.

Life magazine makes him famous.

But she's there beforehand in a really significant way,

and she is allowing this sense of a more heroic,

larger-than-life version of art

which was not the old-school way of doing it.

I'm connected to Peggy Guggenheim

in relation to Art Of This Century,

because my mother showed with her,

my father showed with her.

The first time my father showed was in 1945 at the Autumn Salon,

and my mother had her first one-man show with Peggy in 1946.

Yeah, when I was three.

Did you give any shows to women?

-Just one-man shows?

-Yeah, a lot of women.

Another really important exhibition that Peggy did was called 31 Women.

The first time that there had ever been an exhibition

devoted only to women artists, both American and European.

And I think it was the first show of exclusively women artists ever,

and it was, you know, Louise Nevelson,

and Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim, and so on.

It was a remarkable show.

Peggy was a sister in a lot of ways.

She had a lot of really close female friends

and, despite all of her activity with various men,

at the end of the day she really believed very strongly in women.

She marries Max Ernst,

but she's hardly his only wife.

And, in fact, he meets his next wife, Dorothea Tanning,

curating a show for Peg's place.

Artists' narcissism, you know,

"art above all", "art more than life",

you know, lead to problems.

Gala Dali once criticised you

for sacrificing your life to art.

I never gave up collecting and running my gallery,

and looking after artists.

When I was married to Max Ernst, even, I continued.

Probably didn't help the marriage very much,

but I continued nevertheless.

Peggy Guggenheim was a lonely lady.

I sensed that, and I invited her to come for a simple meal.

And she was so grateful,

because nobody ever thought

that they should invite the great Peggy Guggenheim

just for a common, ordinary pasta dinner, or something.

And so she and I became quite friendly.

I think that, in many ways,

she didn't understand how much others tried to exploit her.

And they did. They really did.

And took advantage of her like mad.

Including artists. That's why I called her "charmingly naive".

Peggy and I were very good friends.

She was a very open, genuine person,

she was completely without any guile.

She had no hidden agenda.

You could always assume that what she said was what she really meant,

and she wrote exactly the way she spoke.

Everybody went mad when I wrote that book,

I had 25 dreadful criticisms.

They were terrible.

They were very funny, though.

I don't see why they should have been so upset,

because I didn't say anything awful about the Guggenheims.

My book is all about... All about fucking!

On many levels, it's a very brilliant, insightful book.

Getting the record clear

and her feelings clear was very bold, very daring...

I think her motivation in writing about exactly what she'd done,

and who she'd slept with,

was cos she didn't really care who knew,

because it was just part of her innate being, that -

she wasn't ever covering anything up.

I came and spent the night with Paul Bowles once.

I... I don't put in my book that I had an affair with him,

but I think it's pretty obvious.

-Fairly.

-And we lay on a fur on the ground, and...

And he put perfume on my wrists, and...

-It all sounds very sort of sexy, doesn't it?

-Very exotic.

-Yes.

-Was he very exotic?

-Yes, very.

Many of the men with whom she hung out

were extremely promiscuous.

But she was talked about as such a slut

for doing the same thing that all the men around her were doing.

That Mary McCarthy story is all about her promiscuity.

Mary saw her as a wonderful target,

and she wrote this merciless short story about Peggy.

It's called The Cicerone. Polly Grabbe, I think she's called.

And she talks about her life as a series of skids on banana peels,

as represented by the various lovers she'd had.

It's a bit two-dimensional and... a little too sharp.

What about Mary McCarthy? How friendly were you with her?

-She wrote something...

-Oh, very, very friendly, yes.

Mary McCarthy was hardly a Puritan herself,

so why would that be the thing she focused on?

Well, everyone focused on that.

And I don't think Peggy Guggenheim

did anything to discourage that focus.

I mean, she was...quite proud of it.

Did you ever have an affair with Mondrian?

-Or was he too old?

-No, never.

I don't think he was too old,

because I went to his studio one night

and he showed me his paintings and then he kissed me,

and when he kissed me he had an erection,

which surprised me very much. INTERVIEWER LAUGHS

-For someone that age.

-Wonderful.

-How old was he?

-About 70, yes.

I found her attractive.

There was this extraordinary sense of self,

there's something...

Something really beautiful about an older woman..

who knows who she is.

Who has a great accomplishment.

That, already, is sexy.

I think Peggy had a very strange sort of form of sexiness.

She wasn't...

She didn't exude sexuality,

but she had a kind of sexual aura

that people did respond to.

And she was a kind of...

A mixture of old-fashioned and very, very modern.

She was kind of testy if people assumed

that she would tell you dirty stories

or talk about sex or things like that.

I think she was a little like a character in Proust

called Madame de Villeparisis

who, when she's young, recklessly throws away her reputation

and thinks it's fun to do that.

And then when she's older,

she spends all of her time trying to recover her lost position,

and I think Peggy was a little like that.

Assembling her great collection and starting a museum -

all of that was something that would preserve her name,

and that's what she wanted to do.

She was a Guggenheim, you know,

and she had the ego of a Guggenheim.

And she had a certain authority about her

and people were very impressed by her name -

she used the Guggenheim name to good ends

and she'd carved out a niche for herself

and she filled it,

and she seemed to be doing it very well.

When Peggy Guggenheim left New York,

in some ways her reputation

obscured her accomplishment.

That her personality,

what Clement Greenberg talks about as her gaiety -

those were actually negatives.

But I think even Greenberg knew enough

to put that aside and say that she identified key artists

in the New York School.

She showed them first,

she helped build their career,

she helped to make it possible for them to do their work,

and that was a huge accomplishment.

There is no normal life in Venice.

Here everything and everyone floats.

It is this floatingness which is the essential quality of Venice.

The reflections are like paintings -

more beautiful than any painted by the greatest masters.

Venice was really a place of passage,

and so for someone like her to choose a place like Venice

doesn't come at all as a surprise.

The place really calls for

that mix of people coming and going.

However, what made her, I think, so different

is that she stayed.

I could understand coming back to Paris or to London, but why...?

I couldn't go to London because I was afraid that my memoirs

would cause me too much trouble.

So I came to Venice, which I'd always adored,

which had been my dream city.

At last I could achieve my dream.

She thought it was a funny little palace that she lived in

because it didn't have a second floor.

And she got it at a bargain, I think, right after the war.

It didn't cost her much.

I think Peggy's great achievements in Venice

all stemmed from lending her collection to the Biennale

when it reopened after World War II in 1948.

Douglas and I went to Venice at that time to pay a call on Peggy.

Now, this was a very tricky call to pay,

because Douglas had written about Peggy's loan of her collection

and Douglas had ripped it apart

and said this was typical of the bad taste of rich American women

who didn't know what they were buying.

But Peggy was very forgiving,

so we were very warmly received.

I think she helped bring international modern art to Venice,

and this had an enormous effect

on the future of the Biennale.

There were always a tumble of dogs around her feet like thistledown,

five or six of them whom she adored.

You've had everybody here in your house.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

I like it when they draw something.

Yes, so do I, much better.

Steinberg.

I love all the doggies.

Aren't they wonderful?

It was so enjoyable staying with Peggy,

because all kinds of things went on.

There were incidents, there were rows, there was fun.

She enjoyed having a lot of gay guys around her

because they were always looking for young guys,

and she also was one of the gang in that respect.

But the food was the worst in Venice.

I mean, you know, lunch at Peggy's,

it was bad pasta, the cheapest wine.

I mean, really quite awful.

So I don't think that food or drink really mattered to her.

She was a gourmand of life, not of food.

And the food was pretty terrible.

Peggy was legendarily cheap.

Sindbad once said she could make a can of sardines go very, very far,

to which Peggy said, "Yes, especially if you don't open it."

I think people have been hard on her in a way

by saying that she was chintzy.

She had to be chintzy because she had...

She was infinitely ambitious when it came to buying paintings

and living well and having a palazzo and all that,

but on the other hand

what was so touching about Peggy,

at heart she was a little girl,

and she had a little girl's enthusiasm about her possessions

and wanting to show them.

I don't think it goes with my hair.

This is my bedroom, with the Calder bed.

Peggy wants to replace this

old brass bed she has

with something genius,

and she has this remarkable idea

to ask my grandfather to make a headboard in hammered silver,

like his beautiful jewellery.

And he doesn't do it.

And so she's after him all the time.

One day I met him at a party

and I said, "Sandy why haven't you made my bed?"

Whereupon his wife looked extremely surprised,

picked up her ears, and said, "What does that mean?"

'So, finally, I got my bed.'

There were constant triads for the role of lover.

I mean, there were local boys.

I remember when Nelly van Doesburg,

the widow of van Doesburg the Dutch modernist painter, came to stay,

and Peggy was adding on a few rooms to the palazzo.

So there were a lot of rather good-looking

young Italian stonemasons and plasterers around,

and Nelly and Peggy both lusted after the same young plasterer.

And there were terrible shrieks and rows and so on.

I remember she would like to laugh about her Marino Marini statue

in front of her palace, with the detachable penis

which she would take off when the cardinal would visit her.

Marino Marini explained to me

that it was not at all a sexual symbol

but simply the ecstasy of a young man

in the joy of living.

There's so few people single-handedly start out

to make a museum.

Yes. After trying all over the world I finally accomplished it here.

Since 1951, we opened the museum,

it's supposed to be the greatest attraction in Venice.

Even before St Mark's, some people come here.

One thing I remember clearly,

when I was about 18 I hitchhiked all over Europe.

When I got to Venice, I went to Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo

where she had her museum.

I knew my mother had a painting there,

so I walked in and I looked to the right -

the first thing I saw was hers.

I introduced myself to Peggy and we talked.

She was a big part of their lives.

She was a patron of theirs.

I didn't ask you when you started to help writers and artists out.

I started with Djuna Barnes,

and I've given an allowance to her ever since.

-Still to this day?

-Yes.

I think, when you were beginning,

there weren't things like there are now -

-fellowships and scholarships...

-No. No.

-Nothing.

-Nothing.

-So what you were doing was very unusual and very needed.

You seem to have given help and support to artists.

Do you think that they have repaid you sufficiently well?

I didn't expect to be repaid.

I think the fact that they have created

and given so much to humanity on the whole is enough.

I didn't expect any personal thing in exchange.

It's enough to enjoy their paintings.

I think my father, Sindbad,

had an intense relationship with his mother, Peggy.

I think it was a love-hate relationship.

Her life commitment happened to be her collection and not her children.

I adored my father, Sindbad.

He was quite a character.

He was a very avid sportsman.

I think it was his way of breaking away from the art world.

He ended up working for an insurance company.

My father never spoke about his sister Pegeen.

I think it was a very sore subject,

a very painful subject for him.

I have kept this room as a memorial to Pegeen,

with 13 or 14 of her paintings.

People who knew her said there was something just vacant,

something you knew was just not right with Pegeen.

And Pegeen was very troublesome as a young woman,

and was already having affairs at a very early age.

Peggy was very intrusive in Pegeen's relationships.

I think she expected Pegeen to be this beautiful love goddess

who had many affairs and would go from man to man

in a way that Peggy fantasised about.

Though she loved her,

she simply didn't know how to be a mother to Pegeen.

She was always a very unhappy girl, and terribly neurotic.

Pegeen was a tremendous problem in those days.

I'll never forget Pegeen,

we were all having dinner and Pegeen rushed in covered in blood,

followed by a man in a white dinner jacket covered in blood.

And she'd tried to commit suicide and he'd saved her,

but they all seemed to be perfectly happy about this

and they were kissing and making it up.

It was a kind of regular occurrence, the suicide attempts.

She told me she only felt safe on a plane,

cos I suppose she hoped it would crash.

I didn't often speak to her about Pegeen,

because it was such a painful subject for her.

But I did once ask her

if she felt that she'd ever managed to get it right with Pegeen,

and she said never.

She said she'd tried everything.

She tried to be soft, and to be hard, and to be strict,

to be permissive,

and to be generous,

and to be controlling,

and she said it just...

She could never find the right way.

With all the difficulties in her life,

her personal problems,

her family problems,

was the art finally compensation enough for all that?

What do these pictures mean to you yourself?

Well, they've become more or less the most important part of my life.

I can't imagine now living without them.

I had my revenge later on, of course,

when I had my show at the Orangerie in Paris,

which is part of the Louvre,

and I was very happy that I was recognised.

She had the enormous pleasure of going there

and mentioning in her speech

that her pictures had not been worth saving before the war

but now they were worth showing.

And I think that was lovely.

I was in Venice, it was my first Biennale.

I think I was 23 years old

and I was invited to come and see the collection.

As a young gallery owner,

Peggy Guggenheim was a mythic person.

There's a lovely thing about helping young people.

She discovered extraordinary artists and nurtured them,

some of the great artists of our time,

but it wasn't about money,

it was just about art.

This, of course, is a Pollock

of that period when Art Of This Century was at its height

and we were all seeing him for the first time.

In those days, what were Pollocks selling for?

Well, nothing at all.

A few hundred dollars, maybe...

Maybe 600 for one this size

would have been already a very good price.

It must make you very proud.

No, I think it's completely insane

the way it's gone up in value.

Museum directors used to come and tell me

this picture's worth so much and that picture's worth so much

I nearly had a fit - I thought of what a responsibility it was

having these expensive pictures,

I didn't like it at all.

Some of these prices are subjective

because they're so rare.

You know, there might be a number of opinions

as to what they are worth.

You're talking billions - billions of dollars. Billions.

She was being courted at the end of her life

by a number of institutions who wanted the collection.

Her one requirement was that the collection stay in Venice.

I don't think she had the resources to endow it

so, luckily, she had a rich uncle.

When I went to New York to have the exhibition in '69

it was like proposing to somebody who was dying to marry me.

And how do you feel

about walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum

and seeing your paintings in a completely different environment?

Oh, my uncle's garage, yes!

It looks like a garage, doesn't it?

I mean, all that circular business

is the way garages are built in Europe.

On circular ramps.

Nice to have an uncle with a garage like that!

I never was on very good terms with my uncle, Mr Solomon.

I think if he saw this now he'd turn in his grave.

By making the agreement that her collection

would be part of the foundation created by her uncle,

that was an extraordinary step,

it was the first step

where you had a major cultural institution

that was spread over continents.

But it also had a huge influence on the development of Venice itself.

Venice is now viewed as, of course, the city of history,

but also very much the city of contemporary art.

She was smart because, by keeping it there,

it really ensured that her personal presence

was always going to be felt.

And I think that that's the most important aspect

about going in to that museum today, is that you feel her.

If you only have three museums you can visit,

this would definitely be one.

It's like a pilgrimage.

It's everything 20th century is about, should be about.

It's just this incredible personal journey.

It's about an opinion,

it's about a taste, it's about a choice.

All these things that most museums are not about.

To me, it's her biggest contribution to history.

She was collecting because she was really attracted to this art.

She found something of herself in it.

She had tremendous courage, she had the courage of her conviction.

She was ready to take a risk

and she also understood intuitively

its art-historical significance.

Looking at Peggy Guggenheim and what she accomplished,

my biggest takeaway

is just hold on to the art.

Great art is eternal,

and if you can attach yourself to it in the right way -

and she certainly did it in the right way -

you kind of gain a certain immortality.

Everything used to be much more fun than it is nowadays.

I can't be jealous of the past.

Or know the future.

It's horrible to get old.

It's one of worst things that can happen to you.

I really felt I'd accomplished what I wanted to do,

and I've done it very successfully and I'm very happy about that.