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This programme contains some strong language. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:09 | |
Is it working? | 0:00:12 | 0:00:13 | |
I think... Yeah. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
-I have to check the battery, that means it's working. -How's that? | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
I know that you gave first exhibitions | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
to Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still and... | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
-Baziotes. -That's remarkable. -Motherwell. | 0:01:13 | 0:01:15 | |
Rothko and Pollock. | 0:01:15 | 0:01:17 | |
I think she was most proud of her achievement with Pollock. | 0:01:22 | 0:01:27 | |
Because nobody believed in Pollock the way she did. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:30 | |
She started with a very mixed bag of paintings. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:41 | |
And she bought much more cleverly as she went on. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:45 | |
In the end, she really seemed to know what she was doing. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:50 | |
It seems to me that you have an intuition for talent, | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
even before it's realised. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:08 | |
Yes. Maybe. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:10 | |
You know, I became an addict, and I sort of couldn't help it any more. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:18 | |
She wanted to come into her own as her own person, | 0:02:28 | 0:02:33 | |
and art became the vehicle. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:35 | |
She wanted this art as a mirror for her own strangeness. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:40 | |
It's a very fulfilled career, to be involved with the surrealists | 0:02:41 | 0:02:47 | |
and then the abstract expressionists. | 0:02:47 | 0:02:49 | |
So she begins in one place | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
and she ends up in another place. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:54 | |
She's a bridge character. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:56 | |
You don't have to paint a figure in order to express human feelings. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:02 | |
Modern art, it seems to me, | 0:03:03 | 0:03:05 | |
is working, isn't it? | 0:03:05 | 0:03:07 | |
And expressing an inner world. | 0:03:07 | 0:03:10 | |
Did you feel it was a crazy life? | 0:03:14 | 0:03:16 | |
Definitely, yes. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:18 | |
I think that she did remarkably well | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
for someone who had no art historical training, | 0:03:27 | 0:03:30 | |
who had no, really, sort of innate taste or flair for things, | 0:03:30 | 0:03:36 | |
but who had a passion | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
to use art to promote herself | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
and turn herself into a personality, to a star. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:47 | |
She could... Because of her lack of beauty, | 0:03:47 | 0:03:50 | |
she was never going to make it as a siren, | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
as a desirable, glamorous, social figure. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:58 | |
But, by God, she made it as a collector | 0:03:58 | 0:04:02 | |
and as a kind of collector that had never quite existed before. | 0:04:02 | 0:04:06 | |
Peggy, being a bit of a narcissist, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:27 | |
was absolutely delighted at the idea of having a biographer. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:32 | |
She called me her "last great friend" | 0:04:32 | 0:04:34 | |
and when people would call in the afternoon | 0:04:34 | 0:04:36 | |
or come to see her, she'd say, "I'm with my biographer!" | 0:04:36 | 0:04:40 | |
Peggy appealed to me because of her eccentricities. | 0:04:44 | 0:04:49 | |
And she had just a wonderfully colourful family. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
Both sides of Peggy's family came over and started off | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
as peddlers, really, selling door-to-door. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:09 | |
In the case of her mother's family, the Seligmans, | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
they went into banking. | 0:05:13 | 0:05:15 | |
And her father's family, the Guggenheims, they went into mining. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
And within 50 years, | 0:05:21 | 0:05:22 | |
they progressed from selling door-to-door | 0:05:22 | 0:05:25 | |
to having these enormous fortunes. | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
Even though the Guggenheims became much wealthier than the Seligmans, | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
the Seligmans looked down on them, because they had come later. | 0:05:31 | 0:05:35 | |
Her mother Florette | 0:05:36 | 0:05:38 | |
was one of the youngest of the James Seligman children, | 0:05:38 | 0:05:41 | |
and they were all highly eccentric. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:43 | |
Florette would repeat everything three times. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:45 | |
Peggy's aunts and uncles were all famously off their rockers. | 0:05:55 | 0:06:00 | |
There was another aunt, Fanny, | 0:06:01 | 0:06:03 | |
who used to sing all her phrases. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:05 | |
And so she'd arrive at somebody's house and say... | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
-IN SING-SONG VOICE: -"Hello! I'm here!" | 0:06:09 | 0:06:11 | |
Her husband was driven so nuts by her | 0:06:11 | 0:06:14 | |
that he tried to kill her with a baseball bat. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:17 | |
And since that didn't work, | 0:06:17 | 0:06:19 | |
he then drowned himself with weights | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
in the New York City reservoir. | 0:06:21 | 0:06:23 | |
Ben, Peggy's father, | 0:06:28 | 0:06:30 | |
was highly established by the time that Peggy was born. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:34 | |
She had two sisters, Benita and Hazel, | 0:06:36 | 0:06:40 | |
and she adored Benita. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:42 | |
I had no other friends. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:44 | |
Didn't your mother invite little girls over to play with you? | 0:06:44 | 0:06:47 | |
Never. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:49 | |
They lived like royalty. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:01 | |
They had beautiful carriages, | 0:07:02 | 0:07:04 | |
mansions on Fifth Avenue, | 0:07:04 | 0:07:06 | |
nannies, servants galore. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
Joseph Seligman was great friends of Ulysses S. Grant, | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
and would entertain him. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:15 | |
The Guggenheim brothers, | 0:07:25 | 0:07:27 | |
in addition to being known for their financial acumen and money, | 0:07:27 | 0:07:31 | |
were also known to have multiple affairs. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:33 | |
When Ben Guggenheim went down in the Titanic | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
and his brothers went to see who was rescued on the Carpathia - | 0:08:21 | 0:08:26 | |
down came his mistress, | 0:08:26 | 0:08:28 | |
who was paid off by the Guggenheims to keep quiet. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:31 | |
-You must have been extremely shocked when he died on the Titanic? -Yes. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:43 | |
Did you feel angry and mad at your father | 0:08:43 | 0:08:46 | |
for not trying to save himself more? | 0:08:46 | 0:08:48 | |
He gave away his life vest! | 0:08:48 | 0:08:50 | |
How could I be angry? I thought he was very noble. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:52 | |
And she wasn't a rich Guggenheim. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:50 | |
People thought she was, | 0:09:50 | 0:09:51 | |
but she wasn't anything like as rich as most of the Guggenheims. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:54 | |
Well, I'm sure that the poor Guggenheim was relative. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:58 | |
I mean, she wasn't in any way poor. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
I first met Peggy Guggenheim... in the '70s... | 0:10:02 | 0:10:07 | |
Early '70s. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
I liked her because I sort of felt sorry for her. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:11 | |
I mean, there was a kind of vulnerability about her. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:14 | |
She had this very strange accent, and I once said to her, | 0:10:14 | 0:10:17 | |
"Where did you get that weird way of talking?" | 0:10:17 | 0:10:20 | |
And she said, "There was one school on West 72nd Street | 0:10:20 | 0:10:23 | |
"that about nine of us went to, | 0:10:23 | 0:10:25 | |
"and we were all super-rich Jewish girls | 0:10:25 | 0:10:27 | |
"and we all learned to talk this way and we still do." | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
Peggy loved to shock and be the centre of attention. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:36 | |
She shaved off her eyebrows when she was in school, | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
and that became a cause celebre | 0:10:39 | 0:10:41 | |
because that was so avant-garde, and so Peggy was always a rebel. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:45 | |
She was supposed to inherit money | 0:10:46 | 0:10:49 | |
and marry someone who also inherited money. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:52 | |
And she, at some point early in her life, | 0:10:52 | 0:10:54 | |
decided that that was not going to be who she was. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
When she was in her early 20s, | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
she went to work at that bookstore Sunwise Turn. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:03 | |
It's very strange, you move through life in a kind of dream. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:48 | |
Paris. It was just the most exciting place, culturally, | 0:11:56 | 0:11:59 | |
in the world, at that point. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:00 | |
And not only in the visual arts, | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
it was going on in music and ballet | 0:12:03 | 0:12:05 | |
and theatre and everything else. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:07 | |
Dada! Italique! | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
Metallique! Mysterique! | 0:12:28 | 0:12:31 | |
Dadaism is really coming out | 0:12:31 | 0:12:33 | |
of this atrocity of World War I. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:35 | |
Just the senseless amount of death and bloodshed | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
and also the sickness and twistedness of the propaganda. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:43 | |
So they're creating this language of disillusionment, | 0:12:43 | 0:12:47 | |
of this kind of utter disgust | 0:12:47 | 0:12:49 | |
with what the civilised world is doing. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:52 | |
She found the whole Bohemian life there | 0:12:59 | 0:13:03 | |
to be this alternative to the bourgeois, | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
or the haute bourgeois life, | 0:13:06 | 0:13:07 | |
that she'd always found herself to be an outsider in anyway. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
And so she immediately felt "these are my people". | 0:13:10 | 0:13:14 | |
-Isn't that gorgeous? -It's gorgeous. -Ah, so beautiful. | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
I was going to ask you what you were thinking of | 0:13:21 | 0:13:23 | |
when you did that picture. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:24 | |
God knows. SHE LAUGHS | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
I think I must have known I looked gorgeous. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
The artists from all over Europe and the United States | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
were making their way to Paris | 0:13:35 | 0:13:37 | |
as though there were some magnet pulling them. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
Had you ever considered going to college? | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
Yes, and my sister talked me out of it. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:17 | |
I consider myself self-educated. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:19 | |
When you sat in the cafes, | 0:14:21 | 0:14:22 | |
you absorbed surrealism and you absorbed Cubism, | 0:14:22 | 0:14:25 | |
you absorbed the ideas of the time. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:28 | |
GENTLE GROANING AND PANTING | 0:14:50 | 0:14:53 | |
-Did he court you? -Yes. He took me to the top of the Eiffel Tower, | 0:15:08 | 0:15:11 | |
where he proposed to me. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
And then I ended up by marrying him. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
And I've got two children, Pegeen and Sindbad. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:19 | |
We had terrible fights all the time. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:23 | |
The fights were so many and so awful and so insane and... | 0:15:23 | 0:15:27 | |
You wrote that, "Oh, husbands always get better..." | 0:16:05 | 0:16:07 | |
Better after divorce, yeah! | 0:16:07 | 0:16:08 | |
Oh, he became my best friend afterwards, yes. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
Yes, when he stopped beating me up, mm-hm. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:13 | |
Who has been the most important man in your life, | 0:16:16 | 0:16:19 | |
or can you answer that question? | 0:16:19 | 0:16:21 | |
Yes, but that wasn't an artist, that was a writer. Someone... | 0:16:21 | 0:16:25 | |
Er, an Englishman who's dead, who's been dead 30 years. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:28 | |
He was a wonderful sportsman. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:00 | |
Used to climb rocks with my children. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:02 | |
-Was he fond of your children, was he...? -Oh, yes. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:06 | |
-Did they love him? -Yes. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:08 | |
Her sister Benita died in childbirth, | 0:18:44 | 0:18:47 | |
so Peggy was bereft. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:49 | |
And something that does not appear in her memoirs - | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
it's a glaring omission - | 0:18:51 | 0:18:53 | |
but her sister Hazel went up to the roof of the Hotel Surrey | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
and she took her three-year-old and her one-year-old up there, | 0:18:56 | 0:19:00 | |
but she was divorcing their father, Milton Waldman, | 0:19:00 | 0:19:02 | |
and she'd gone around saying, | 0:19:02 | 0:19:04 | |
"I'd rather see the children dead than have Milton have them." | 0:19:04 | 0:19:07 | |
So somehow, mysteriously, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
they wind up dead over the parapet. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
Playing Peggy Guggenheim, | 0:19:33 | 0:19:35 | |
I got hooked on something mysterious about her, | 0:19:35 | 0:19:40 | |
something enigmatic... | 0:19:40 | 0:19:42 | |
..that to this day I don't entirely understand. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
She had this hunger, which is about life, | 0:19:49 | 0:19:53 | |
pulling against this undertow of unbeatable sadness. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:59 | |
So her sexual life was her way of connecting. | 0:19:59 | 0:20:03 | |
Humanly connecting. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
Well, I had so many odd people! | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
I just... I don't know, because I was lonely, I guess. | 0:20:11 | 0:20:14 | |
I think I was sort of a nymphomaniac! | 0:20:14 | 0:20:18 | |
She wanted lovers. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:20 | |
Er, everybody else had lovers, why shouldn't she have one? | 0:20:20 | 0:20:23 | |
If I had one question for Peggy Guggenheim, it would probably be, | 0:20:23 | 0:20:27 | |
how was Samuel Beckett in bed? | 0:20:27 | 0:20:29 | |
His... I suppose his conversation, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
his mind, probably fascinated me more than anything else. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
She said that she'd never met anyone like Beckett. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:40 | |
They'd been in bed for four days | 0:20:40 | 0:20:41 | |
and the only time they separated | 0:20:41 | 0:20:43 | |
was when he reached out the door to get the sandwiches | 0:20:43 | 0:20:46 | |
the room service had sent for them! | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
I liked intellectual men. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:51 | |
I liked very tall, dark, good-looking men. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
But all my lovers certainly were not that. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
The artists, she loved them because they were artists, | 0:20:57 | 0:21:01 | |
not because they were sexy men. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:03 | |
I mean, they actually were sexy men... | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
but I think sex and art | 0:21:06 | 0:21:08 | |
went absolutely hand-in-hand in her brain. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:12 | |
She went for the bad boys and, er, it didn't do her any good. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:18 | |
I think art gave a meaning to her life | 0:21:18 | 0:21:22 | |
as well as confirmed certain... | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
The modern art, the avant-gardes | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
confirmed her sense of being, in some peculiar, way an outsider. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:32 | |
Art became her way of finding herself emotionally. | 0:21:32 | 0:21:36 | |
I was in search of an occupation | 0:21:42 | 0:21:44 | |
and to have an interest, something to do, | 0:21:44 | 0:21:47 | |
after my children were in boarding school | 0:21:47 | 0:21:49 | |
and I was alone in the country in England, | 0:21:49 | 0:21:51 | |
and I came up to London | 0:21:51 | 0:21:53 | |
and opened this art gallery in Cork Street called Guggenheim Jeune. | 0:21:53 | 0:21:57 | |
She's mulling around whether | 0:21:59 | 0:22:01 | |
she should start a publishing company or an art gallery, | 0:22:01 | 0:22:04 | |
and one of her friends says, "Well, start an art gallery, it's cheaper." | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
She quite early on began to show | 0:22:36 | 0:22:38 | |
the work of the European surrealists. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:40 | |
A little exhibition for Cocteau, | 0:22:40 | 0:22:43 | |
she was introduced to Tanguy, | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
she knew Andre Breton already by this time. | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
How did Guggenheim Jeune change your former life? | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
Must have been a dramatic difference. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:03 | |
Completely different, yes. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:05 | |
I always adapt myself to everything very quickly. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:07 | |
-Did you just plunge in and devote all your energy to it? -Yes, yes. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:11 | |
Except the time that I ran to Paris to see Beckett! | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
surrealism decided that the subconscious mind | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
was the source of all great creativity | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
and this was the answer to the art of the future. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
I think Peggy was a woman of great intuitions. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:46 | |
She learned quite quickly | 0:23:46 | 0:23:48 | |
what it meant to have an eye. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:50 | |
She followed her own intuitions, she had the courage to do so, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:53 | |
and that is a pattern that goes on throughout her life. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
She wanted this outsider art, | 0:23:58 | 0:24:00 | |
art that was then outrageous, | 0:24:00 | 0:24:02 | |
that was different. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
Strange art mirroring herself. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:07 | |
Peggy was absolutely at the cutting edge. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:12 | |
She gave a huge number of shows at her gallery | 0:24:13 | 0:24:17 | |
and that alone was a major influence | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
on British thinking about modern art. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:23 | |
The English, who really, | 0:24:23 | 0:24:25 | |
except for the 1936 surrealist show at the Royal Academy, | 0:24:25 | 0:24:30 | |
hadn't much idea about modern art. | 0:24:30 | 0:24:32 | |
Most people thought it was rubbish. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:35 | |
Mrs Guggenheim, but you might, as a patron, | 0:24:35 | 0:24:38 | |
acquire a collection of rubbish. | 0:24:38 | 0:24:40 | |
That's always possible. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:41 | |
Yes, of course, easily, if you have no taste | 0:24:41 | 0:24:43 | |
and you don't know what you're doing | 0:24:43 | 0:24:45 | |
and you don't take advice from the right people. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
You can get yourself in an awful lot of trouble. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:51 | |
Peggy Guggenheim really worked with a kind of consensus of advice, | 0:24:51 | 0:24:55 | |
and it was only from artists | 0:24:55 | 0:24:57 | |
and only from people she really respected, | 0:24:57 | 0:25:00 | |
and the biggest voice in her head, the strongest advice, | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
the one she probably took most often, was from Marcel Duchamp. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:07 | |
I knew Marcel Duchamp since 1921. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
I met him because he was a boyfriend of one of my best friends, | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
Mary Reynolds. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:17 | |
And after that we became great friends. | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
He taught me everything about modern art that I know today, | 0:25:21 | 0:25:25 | |
taught me the difference between surrealism and abstract art. | 0:25:25 | 0:25:28 | |
He arranged all my exhibitions, did everything for me. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:31 | |
I don't know what I would have done without him, | 0:25:31 | 0:25:34 | |
because he really was my great, great teacher. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
I thought of the idea of a box, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
in which they would be mounted, like in a small museum. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:43 | |
Practically all your work is in here. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
Practically all of it, | 0:25:46 | 0:25:47 | |
I think very few things are missing. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:50 | |
And there it is. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:53 | |
The Mona Lisa with a moustache and a goatee. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:57 | |
That was, of course, a great iconoclastic gesture | 0:25:57 | 0:26:01 | |
on my part and... | 0:26:01 | 0:26:02 | |
Sacrilegious. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:04 | |
Sacrilegious, blasphemous, all you want. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:06 | |
The Bottle Rack was a perfect expression of the readymade | 0:26:08 | 0:26:11 | |
because it had no connection whatsoever with art. | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
The most mundane everyday object | 0:26:18 | 0:26:22 | |
could be elevated to fine art | 0:26:22 | 0:26:26 | |
by the mere choice of an artist, | 0:26:26 | 0:26:28 | |
and this is the Duchampian conceit, | 0:26:28 | 0:26:30 | |
that opens up a Pandora's box of... | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
future avenues for art. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:37 | |
Miss Guggenheim, in the gallery in London, | 0:27:02 | 0:27:04 | |
who were some of the artists whom you introduced | 0:27:04 | 0:27:06 | |
who created big excitement there? | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
Well, I suppose Kandinsky really was the most exciting. | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
He had his first show in England in my gallery. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
During this period, Kandinsky asked me | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
if I would ask my uncle, Solomon Guggenheim, | 0:27:21 | 0:27:25 | |
to buy one of his early paintings which he'd always wanted. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:28 | |
So I asked him if he would like to buy this painting. | 0:27:28 | 0:27:32 | |
I got an answer from him saying his curator, the Baroness Rebay, | 0:27:32 | 0:27:36 | |
would send me her response. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:37 | |
And this is it, which I shall now read. | 0:27:39 | 0:27:42 | |
"Dear Mrs Guggenheim Jeune, | 0:27:42 | 0:27:44 | |
"your gallery will be the last one of our foundation to use | 0:27:44 | 0:27:48 | |
"if ever the need should force us to use a sales gallery." | 0:27:48 | 0:27:51 | |
"You will soon find you are propagating mediocrity, | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
"if not trash." | 0:27:55 | 0:27:57 | |
Peggy's nemesis in many ways, Hilla Rebay, | 0:27:58 | 0:28:01 | |
was the founding director of the Guggenheim here in New York. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:04 | |
She was Solomon Guggenheim's adviser | 0:28:04 | 0:28:07 | |
and Solomon was Peggy's uncle. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:09 | |
Hilla of course was a dynamic person, | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
I guess rather possessive, very assertive. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
She was a bombshell, | 0:28:17 | 0:28:18 | |
and my grandfather was captivated by her. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:21 | |
They were both following different paths, | 0:28:38 | 0:28:41 | |
they both had different ideas. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:43 | |
Peggy was often considered...to be the black sheep of the family. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:47 | |
So I wrote to the Baroness Rebay this response. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
At Peggy's gallery in London she gave a show of children's art, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:21 | |
and it was the first show | 0:29:21 | 0:29:22 | |
that anything by Lucian Freud was ever exhibited. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:24 | |
And what was the inspiration for the children's exhibit? | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
Because Pegeen painted and I thought it would be nice | 0:29:29 | 0:29:31 | |
to have a lot of schoolchildren's pictures also. | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
It was a beautiful exhibition. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:36 | |
No. Pegeen was really a painter. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
No-one never influenced her, | 0:29:41 | 0:29:43 | |
she was absolutely self-taught and completely independent. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:46 | |
What was Pegeen like as a child? | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
She was always very, very beautiful. | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
She had a complexion like a peach, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:55 | |
and wonderful silver-flaxen golden hair. | 0:29:55 | 0:29:59 | |
How did you get along? | 0:30:00 | 0:30:01 | |
Was she an easy child to bring up or was she...difficult? | 0:30:01 | 0:30:04 | |
Well, she never wanted to leave me or her governess. | 0:30:04 | 0:30:07 | |
She was...very...very insecure. | 0:30:07 | 0:30:11 | |
I had a big show of Tanguy, and that was one of the most successful ones. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:36 | |
We really sold quite a lot of paintings. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:40 | |
What was Tanguy like? | 0:30:42 | 0:30:43 | |
Oh, he was adorable. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:45 | |
Did he paint things for you when he visited you? | 0:30:45 | 0:30:48 | |
Yes, he painted marvellous earrings. | 0:30:48 | 0:30:50 | |
Would you have become such a collector, do you think, | 0:30:52 | 0:30:55 | |
if you had not known so many artists personally? | 0:30:55 | 0:30:58 | |
-Certainly, definitely. -Well, then, which came first - | 0:30:58 | 0:31:01 | |
is it the art or the people, or was it both? | 0:31:01 | 0:31:03 | |
No, the art came first, and the people came because of my idea | 0:31:03 | 0:31:07 | |
to have this gallery, and by degrees I met more and more artists. | 0:31:07 | 0:31:11 | |
Do you think that great artists are great people necessarily? | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
They're certainly much more interesting | 0:31:14 | 0:31:16 | |
than people who aren't intellectual, | 0:31:16 | 0:31:18 | |
who aren't interested in the arts, who aren't creative. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:21 | |
They're certainly more interesting than businesspeople. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:24 | |
But do they measure up, or do they equal their own work? | 0:31:24 | 0:31:28 | |
Sometimes they're disappointing, | 0:31:28 | 0:31:30 | |
but sometimes they're even better than their work. | 0:31:30 | 0:31:34 | |
When one meets artists, they turn out to be quite different | 0:31:34 | 0:31:37 | |
to what one expects. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:39 | |
Brancusi used to say, "Art is a fraud," | 0:31:39 | 0:31:44 | |
and I even say art is a mirage. | 0:31:44 | 0:31:45 | |
But what I believe in | 0:31:47 | 0:31:48 | |
is the artist, the man. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:49 | |
So what to do, except to let everybody be the individual | 0:31:51 | 0:31:57 | |
and be as much of an individual as they can be, | 0:31:57 | 0:32:00 | |
and everyone for oneself, | 0:32:00 | 0:32:02 | |
like in a shipwreck. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:03 | |
And this venture only lasted about a year and a half, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:08 | |
because it became so expensive I thought it wasn't worthwhile | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
to go on trying to run a commercial gallery, | 0:32:12 | 0:32:14 | |
because I never sold anything. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:16 | |
So I decided it was better to spend the money | 0:32:16 | 0:32:18 | |
by having a museum of modern art, | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
which didn't exist in London. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
Once she'd decided to close Guggenheim Jeune | 0:32:23 | 0:32:26 | |
she thought she'd invest a great deal more money and make a museum. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:30 | |
So she signs up Herbert Read | 0:32:30 | 0:32:34 | |
to inveigle him to leave his position | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
as the Burlington Magazine editor | 0:32:36 | 0:32:38 | |
and to be the director of her planned future museum in London. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
And so it was for the opening exhibition | 0:32:41 | 0:32:43 | |
that he prepared this list - legendary list - | 0:32:43 | 0:32:46 | |
of all the major movements and artists of the 20th century. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:50 | |
But unfortunately the war came just at that time, | 0:32:50 | 0:32:52 | |
and I decided it would be impossible | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
to have a museum in London | 0:32:55 | 0:32:57 | |
that might be bombed any moment. | 0:32:57 | 0:32:59 | |
Most people think that everything the Nazis did was attacking, | 0:33:06 | 0:33:10 | |
you know, primarily the Jews, | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
but this was also an attack on modernism, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
and it culminated in 1937 | 0:33:17 | 0:33:19 | |
with an enormous exhibition in Munich | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
called Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:25 | |
It's kind of amazing | 0:33:25 | 0:33:27 | |
that all this energy went into collecting and bringing together | 0:33:27 | 0:33:32 | |
650 examples of art that people should dislike. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:36 | |
Then, when the war began, you left London. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:53 | |
Well, I was sent to Paris to collect the pictures on the list | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
that Herbert Read had made for me. | 0:33:56 | 0:33:58 | |
During the first month of the war | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
I tried to buy one painting a day. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:05 | |
How did you go about doing that? | 0:34:07 | 0:34:09 | |
Well, I had friends in Paris, Madame Van Doesburg, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
who was my best friend for years and years. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:15 | |
And I had a friend who was a sort of art dealer, called Howard Putzel, | 0:34:15 | 0:34:20 | |
and I had Marcel Duchamp, who introduced me to artists, | 0:34:20 | 0:34:23 | |
and between these three people | 0:34:23 | 0:34:25 | |
and I went around on my own and bought things. | 0:34:25 | 0:34:27 | |
People telephoned me all day long | 0:34:28 | 0:34:30 | |
and even came to my house in the morning | 0:34:30 | 0:34:33 | |
and brought me pictures in bed. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:34 | |
And actually the only one I literally bought in bed | 0:34:36 | 0:34:39 | |
was this little Dali. | 0:34:39 | 0:34:40 | |
She was lucky in her choice of time, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:46 | |
because in 1939 the artists were desperate to sell things, | 0:34:46 | 0:34:51 | |
and a number of the dealers were Jewish | 0:34:51 | 0:34:53 | |
and were getting the hell out of Paris before the Germans arrived. | 0:34:53 | 0:34:57 | |
During the war I wanted to buy a Brancusi. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
This is Brancusi's Bird In Space. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:22 | |
I think it's one of Brancusi's favourite pieces of sculpture. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:27 | |
I used to go and see him almost every day | 0:35:27 | 0:35:29 | |
and he was a marvellous little man, sort of half-God and half-peasant. | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
When I went back to take away this Bird In Space, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
Brancusi brought it out in his arms | 0:35:48 | 0:35:50 | |
and tears were strolling down his cheeks, | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
and I never knew if it was because he was parting with me | 0:35:52 | 0:35:55 | |
or with his favourite bird. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:57 | |
Do you remember Giacometti? | 0:36:01 | 0:36:03 | |
Oh, very well, he was wonderful. | 0:36:03 | 0:36:05 | |
-He looked like a lion. -Really? | 0:36:05 | 0:36:07 | |
Yes, he had a very big head and shaggy hair and... | 0:36:07 | 0:36:10 | |
His conversation was marvellous. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:13 | |
How did you bargain? | 0:36:14 | 0:36:16 | |
I mean, how difficult was it to get paintings at that time | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
at the price you were prepared to pay? | 0:36:19 | 0:36:21 | |
Then... There was no question of bargaining in those days | 0:36:21 | 0:36:24 | |
because everything was so cheap. | 0:36:24 | 0:36:26 | |
She came in at a good moment, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:28 | |
I mean, so far as prices were concerned, | 0:36:28 | 0:36:30 | |
and she didn't have all that much money to spend, | 0:36:30 | 0:36:32 | |
and I think she did spend it rather cleverly and cannily. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:36 | |
And, God knows, she's a Guggenheim, she knew how to do those things - | 0:36:36 | 0:36:40 | |
I mean, that's one of the things she inherited. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
She managed to put together the nucleus | 0:36:43 | 0:36:45 | |
of one of the great collections of modern art | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
for the almost laughable sum of 40,000. | 0:36:48 | 0:36:52 | |
For 40,000 you couldn't buy one of the paintings you have in that? | 0:36:52 | 0:36:55 | |
-Not today. -Not even one of the 125? | 0:36:55 | 0:36:58 | |
No, not even one probably, isn't that crazy? | 0:36:58 | 0:37:01 | |
She just broke all the rules. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:05 | |
There weren't that many precedents for women working, | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
let alone working in the arts. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:09 | |
It was a very male-dominated field. | 0:37:09 | 0:37:11 | |
It was my freedom. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:15 | |
My liberation. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:17 | |
Peggy is a sort of model for the liberated woman. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:22 | |
The very disturbed liberated woman! | 0:37:22 | 0:37:24 | |
She did what she wanted to do, | 0:37:27 | 0:37:29 | |
she had the means to do it, | 0:37:29 | 0:37:31 | |
but I think she really was in advance of her times. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:36 | |
There were other women, | 0:37:37 | 0:37:39 | |
and there was, above all, another American Jewish woman | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
in the form of Gertrude Stein | 0:37:42 | 0:37:44 | |
whose example Peggy may have been following. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:48 | |
I think that Peggy would love to have had Gertrude Stein's...gifts | 0:37:51 | 0:37:56 | |
for words and, er, her extraordinary ability | 0:37:56 | 0:38:01 | |
to promote herself. | 0:38:01 | 0:38:02 | |
She liked helping the artists | 0:38:02 | 0:38:04 | |
and she liked being like Gertrude Stein | 0:38:04 | 0:38:08 | |
and having a good eye and picking the winners. | 0:38:08 | 0:38:11 | |
She also had the guts to buy Cubist paintings | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
which, in those days, were not valued nearly as highly | 0:38:14 | 0:38:19 | |
as they are today. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:20 | |
I seem to remember Picasso being rather vague about Peggy. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
I mean, he heard about her. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:25 | |
She goes to Picasso and tries to buy something there | 0:38:27 | 0:38:29 | |
and he says, "Madam, the lingerie is on the fifth floor." | 0:38:29 | 0:38:32 | |
Clearly she was courageous in her choices, | 0:38:36 | 0:38:40 | |
she stuck to her convictions, | 0:38:40 | 0:38:42 | |
she listened to the right people, | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
but she was the subject of ridicule and disparagement | 0:38:45 | 0:38:48 | |
a lot of the time, | 0:38:48 | 0:38:50 | |
and yet that didn't seem to bother her so much. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:52 | |
She just...ploughed forward. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
On the day that Hitler invaded Norway, | 0:38:58 | 0:39:01 | |
I walked into Leger's studio and bought a wonderful painting. | 0:39:01 | 0:39:05 | |
And then, this was in 1940, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:08 | |
and how did you get all that art out of Paris? | 0:39:08 | 0:39:10 | |
Well, that was very, very difficult. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:14 | |
First of all, I wanted all these things saved, | 0:39:14 | 0:39:16 | |
and went to talk to the Louvre people, | 0:39:16 | 0:39:18 | |
because Leger had suggested | 0:39:18 | 0:39:19 | |
the Louvre would save these works of art with theirs. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:22 | |
Then, after I had them all prepared, | 0:39:22 | 0:39:24 | |
the Louvre changed their mind, said they weren't worth saving. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:27 | |
And the Louvre was sure that Mondrian wasn't worth saving | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
and Picasso wasn't worth saving? | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
-Exactly! -How extraordinary. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:34 | |
I bet they're sorry now. | 0:39:34 | 0:39:36 | |
Oh, I was, much more. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:44 | |
And I wouldn't leave until I got the pictures there, | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
but finally, a very lucky man | 0:39:47 | 0:39:49 | |
who had done all the shipping and packing | 0:39:49 | 0:39:51 | |
so I had the gallery, appeared and arranged the whole thing for me | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
and sent the whole thing as household objects. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:58 | |
We had sand sheets and blankets | 0:39:58 | 0:40:00 | |
and casseroles and... | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
Right there in the middle of the war with the submarines and everything? | 0:40:02 | 0:40:05 | |
Yes, incredible, isn't it? | 0:40:05 | 0:40:06 | |
I went to Marseille, and the Varian Fry Committee asked me | 0:40:21 | 0:40:26 | |
if I would save certain surrealist painters from Europe. | 0:40:26 | 0:40:30 | |
And among these people was Max Ernst and Andre Breton, | 0:40:32 | 0:40:35 | |
and all Andre Breton's family. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
One of the surrealist painters | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
with whom you obviously were closely involved was Max Ernst, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
and he makes a sort of link, doesn't he, | 0:41:24 | 0:41:26 | |
between your life in Europe and your life in America again? | 0:41:26 | 0:41:29 | |
I brought Max Ernst to America. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
Then, after Pearl Harbor, I married him. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:35 | |
And Max Ernst was extremely good-looking | 0:41:37 | 0:41:40 | |
and very attractive to women. | 0:41:40 | 0:41:42 | |
She was much envied for having Max Ernst as a husband. | 0:41:42 | 0:41:47 | |
It was a good deed in that, | 0:41:47 | 0:41:49 | |
I mean, she got Max out of Europe and to America, | 0:41:49 | 0:41:52 | |
and had he been caught by the Germans | 0:41:52 | 0:41:54 | |
he would have been put in a concentration camp | 0:41:54 | 0:41:56 | |
for being a modernist artist. | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
I don't think he was at all faithful. | 0:42:00 | 0:42:02 | |
I mean, it was a clever career move, | 0:42:02 | 0:42:04 | |
and I think that he didn't give a damn for her. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:07 | |
When did you know you were in love with him? | 0:42:07 | 0:42:09 | |
-When you first saw him, or...? -Right away, after a few days. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
-Was he still beautiful then? -Yes, wonderful. Terribly attractive. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
Beautiful, beautiful. Had a beautiful body also. | 0:42:16 | 0:42:19 | |
Did Ernst love being the centre of attention? | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
Oh, he thought about nothing else. | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
You said that he could be jealous of your clothes. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:35 | |
He loved clothes. | 0:42:35 | 0:42:36 | |
He wanted to dress up always. | 0:42:36 | 0:42:39 | |
When I bought a fur coat once, | 0:42:39 | 0:42:40 | |
he was so jealous I had to buy him one also. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:43 | |
When Peggy Guggenheim arrives in 1941, | 0:42:49 | 0:42:52 | |
the art world was a small kind of gentlemen's club, | 0:42:52 | 0:42:56 | |
and the story was that you could fit | 0:42:56 | 0:42:58 | |
the entire art world in any given room. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:01 | |
Well, it's got a lot of people coming here. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:03 | |
A lot of Europeans are being displaced by the war. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:07 | |
-Miro was here. -Yes, Miro was here. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
-Leger, and... -Yes. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:10 | |
Tanguy, Masson. | 0:43:10 | 0:43:12 | |
Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Mondrian. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
Peggy Guggenheim was one of the links between | 0:43:17 | 0:43:20 | |
European and American modernism. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:23 | |
Between surrealism and abstract expressionism. | 0:43:23 | 0:43:27 | |
I think Peggy was a pollinator. | 0:43:27 | 0:43:29 | |
She wanted to be widely regarded | 0:43:29 | 0:43:32 | |
as a major figure in the art world. | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
What was life like during those days, | 0:43:36 | 0:43:39 | |
here, with all the expatriate artists in New York? | 0:43:39 | 0:43:42 | |
Oh, it was wonderful. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:43 | |
It was terribly stimulating and terribly exciting, | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
because New York then became the art centre of the world - | 0:43:45 | 0:43:48 | |
Paris no longer existed in that way. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:49 | |
Which comes first - Peggy Guggenheim the freethinker | 0:43:51 | 0:43:54 | |
who rebels and kind of moves away from home and changes her life, | 0:43:54 | 0:43:57 | |
or Peggy Guggenheim the person who enters into these spheres, | 0:43:57 | 0:44:02 | |
these artistic orbits, where everyone is like that, | 0:44:02 | 0:44:06 | |
and certainly informing her of even wilder ways to break the rules? | 0:44:06 | 0:44:10 | |
When Peggy opened Art Of This Century | 0:44:15 | 0:44:17 | |
on 57th Street, in October '42, | 0:44:17 | 0:44:19 | |
she felt very committed to the idea | 0:44:19 | 0:44:21 | |
of assembling a collection and opening it to the public. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
And she saw that, by collecting the art of her time, | 0:44:25 | 0:44:27 | |
that that would set up | 0:44:27 | 0:44:30 | |
a path, if you will, toward the future. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:32 | |
Peggy Guggenheim's gallery | 0:44:35 | 0:44:37 | |
was one of the first international galleries in New York City | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
mixing American and European art. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:43 | |
In terms of American painting, what was the role of your gallery? | 0:44:48 | 0:44:52 | |
What would you say it was? | 0:44:52 | 0:44:53 | |
What about Putzel's role in your gallery? | 0:45:02 | 0:45:04 | |
It seems to me he was very important in providing people... | 0:45:04 | 0:45:06 | |
Terribly important. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:08 | |
It was in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
called Art Of This Century. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
Do you remember Motherwell? | 0:45:32 | 0:45:33 | |
-Very well. -What impressed you about Motherwell? | 0:45:33 | 0:45:35 | |
He was very intellectual. | 0:45:35 | 0:45:37 | |
He used to give lectures in my gallery about the paintings. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:40 | |
The function of abstraction is to get rid of a lot of reality. | 0:45:41 | 0:45:47 | |
You start with as much richness as you want, and subtract. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
Art Of This Century was an astonishing innovation. | 0:46:29 | 0:46:34 | |
Not only this radical group of artists who were redefining art, | 0:46:34 | 0:46:39 | |
but also the space was something | 0:46:39 | 0:46:41 | |
that no-one had ever imagined before. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:44 | |
What made you think of having a gallery that was all decorated? | 0:46:53 | 0:46:57 | |
Oh, that was because Putzel said | 0:46:57 | 0:46:59 | |
why don't you get Kiesler to give you a few little ideas? | 0:46:59 | 0:47:01 | |
And those were the few little ideas, created this marvellous gallery. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:05 | |
Frederick Kiesler had been a long-time friend of Duchamp's. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:09 | |
He was friends with Mondrian, | 0:47:09 | 0:47:11 | |
and he was spiritually the right visionary for Peggy. | 0:47:11 | 0:47:15 | |
Kiesler and Peggy felt very strongly that her art should be accessible. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:37 | |
All the abstract pictures were hung in halls on universal joints | 0:47:37 | 0:47:42 | |
so that you could actually take hold of the picture and turn it, | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
swivel it into the light and so on, | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
and really use it with the same familiarity | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
that one does a library. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:54 | |
That's how people get turned on to art, | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
is that they have an intimate relationship, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
rather than a distant one. | 0:48:07 | 0:48:09 | |
And Peggy Guggenheim really understood that. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:11 | |
Some of the critics referred to the installation | 0:48:29 | 0:48:32 | |
as either a Coney Island or an amusement-park ghost train. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:35 | |
And it was a wacky environment. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:37 | |
There was a tape recording of an express train | 0:48:37 | 0:48:41 | |
which would go off every few minutes. | 0:48:41 | 0:48:43 | |
Light switch would flash on and off. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:46 | |
The experience was supposed to be unsettling, dreamlike. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
Most people still feel safest in their contemplative gaze | 0:49:00 | 0:49:05 | |
when they're in the most sterile white cube possible. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
The presentation of the art was really radical, | 0:49:08 | 0:49:13 | |
and is still radical today. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:15 | |
Well, it doesn't surprise me | 0:49:16 | 0:49:18 | |
that Peggy Guggenheim was regarded as a black sheep, | 0:49:18 | 0:49:20 | |
because she really did it on her own. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:22 | |
She really was a self-made collector, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
and kind of a self-made person, in the broader sense. | 0:49:25 | 0:49:28 | |
I mean, she really... She was her greatest creation. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:32 | |
I had a wonderful figure. | 0:49:34 | 0:49:35 | |
I was very thin, chestnut hair, green-blue eyes. | 0:49:35 | 0:49:39 | |
My nose probably was always too big! SHE LAUGHS | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
She was one of the first people to have plastic surgery, | 0:49:43 | 0:49:47 | |
because she hated her nose. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:48 | |
And her nose was a disaster. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:51 | |
I love the story about your nose job. Is it quite true? | 0:49:52 | 0:49:55 | |
-Absolutely true, yes. -Why would the doctors not...? | 0:49:55 | 0:49:58 | |
They couldn't do the one I wanted. | 0:49:58 | 0:49:59 | |
-So you just had them stop in the middle? -It was so painful. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:02 | |
It was terrible, so I made them stop. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:04 | |
When her nose job was botched, | 0:50:06 | 0:50:08 | |
she decided not to ever have it fixed, | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
and just to guts it out with this kind of funny face. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
And I think that was kind of a root of a lot of her complexes. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:20 | |
When you met Peggy, she wasn't at all forward and confident. | 0:50:21 | 0:50:24 | |
She was charming, she was socially adept, | 0:50:24 | 0:50:28 | |
but you could see that she was... | 0:50:28 | 0:50:30 | |
She was quite timid. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:32 | |
She was very insecure. | 0:50:32 | 0:50:33 | |
And the way she spoke, with very little bit of movement of the mouth, | 0:50:33 | 0:50:37 | |
and every once in a while, she would just... | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
do something with her tongue. | 0:50:39 | 0:50:41 | |
Um... It would come out. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:44 | |
'I'm sure she was totally unaware of it. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:50 | |
'The only time that I saw that she really relaxed was | 0:50:50 | 0:50:54 | |
'she picked up this little sculpture by Arp.' | 0:50:54 | 0:50:58 | |
This is the first sculpture I ever bought. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:00 | |
'She became a little more animated. | 0:51:00 | 0:51:02 | |
'She was happy when she was actually connected to the art.' | 0:51:02 | 0:51:06 | |
Peggy made things happen. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:29 | |
She did things, and other things happened as a consequence of that. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:33 | |
And it was absolutely true in Pollock's career. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:36 | |
Peggy must have met Jackson Pollock in the winter of 1942-1943, | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
become aware of him. | 0:51:40 | 0:51:42 | |
But for somebody used to | 0:51:42 | 0:51:43 | |
the sophistications of the European avant garde, | 0:51:43 | 0:51:45 | |
it was very hard to take on board, | 0:51:45 | 0:51:48 | |
and it was eventually Mondrian, | 0:51:48 | 0:51:50 | |
during the jury session for her so-called Spring Salon in 1943, | 0:51:50 | 0:51:54 | |
who pushed Peggy over the top. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:56 | |
Mondrian stood rooted to the spot | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
in front of two paintings, | 0:51:59 | 0:52:02 | |
and Peggy went over to him and merely said, | 0:52:02 | 0:52:05 | |
"Dreadful, aren't they? | 0:52:05 | 0:52:06 | |
"They're dreadful. Man has no discipline." | 0:52:06 | 0:52:09 | |
And he said, "No, I'd like to look at this some more." | 0:52:09 | 0:52:12 | |
She said, "Why?" | 0:52:12 | 0:52:14 | |
And Mondrian said, "I have the feeling | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
"that I'm looking at some of the most exciting work | 0:52:16 | 0:52:19 | |
"that I've seen so far in America." | 0:52:19 | 0:52:21 | |
Soon after exhibiting Pollock in her Spring Salon, | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
she offers him his first one-man exhibition, | 0:52:26 | 0:52:29 | |
and commissions from him what was to be his largest ever painting, | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
a mural for her new address on 61st Street. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
I first met Jackson Pollock when he was working as a carpenter | 0:52:37 | 0:52:40 | |
in my uncle's museum, so I rescued him from that, | 0:52:40 | 0:52:44 | |
and wanted a mural for my entrance hall, | 0:52:44 | 0:52:47 | |
a very long wall, about 23 feet wide. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
The picture seems to repeat itself all over. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:56 | |
It's become a staple of abstract painting now, but at the time | 0:52:56 | 0:53:00 | |
it was called, I say, exalted wallpaper, | 0:53:00 | 0:53:03 | |
and then the mural, well, it just goes on and on. | 0:53:03 | 0:53:07 | |
That's what made it so good. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:08 | |
Pollock is still taken for this example of far-out-ism, | 0:53:10 | 0:53:14 | |
an artist in the line of Duchamp, | 0:53:14 | 0:53:16 | |
someone who knocked... | 0:53:16 | 0:53:18 | |
Knocked you flat with his arbitrariness. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:23 | |
Pollock was a very self-destructive character, | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
and Peggy Guggenheim made an investment of genius. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:37 | |
Once she was convinced of Pollock's importance, | 0:54:37 | 0:54:39 | |
she gave him an income, she lent him the money | 0:54:39 | 0:54:42 | |
to buy a house out in Springs, Long Island. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
Having the peace and the quiet | 0:54:46 | 0:54:48 | |
and the distance from the social scene | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
opened up a space for him, | 0:54:51 | 0:54:53 | |
and he was truly working as an artist in full command. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:57 | |
He had a lot more control than people... | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
Than the myth would have. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:02 | |
He could fling a scad of paint | 0:55:02 | 0:55:04 | |
with the accuracy of a cowboy with a lasso. | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
I gave him a small salary, 300 a month. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:15 | |
God knows how he lived on it and painted on it, | 0:55:15 | 0:55:17 | |
and bought canvases, but I suppose in those days | 0:55:17 | 0:55:20 | |
it was a great deal more than it would be today. | 0:55:20 | 0:55:23 | |
And he immediately bloomed forth | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
and became what I consider | 0:55:26 | 0:55:28 | |
one of the great artists of the 20th century. | 0:55:28 | 0:55:30 | |
Does she make Jackson Pollock famous? No. | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
Life magazine makes him famous. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:36 | |
But she's there beforehand in a really significant way, | 0:55:36 | 0:55:40 | |
and she is allowing this sense of a more heroic, | 0:55:40 | 0:55:44 | |
larger-than-life version of art | 0:55:44 | 0:55:46 | |
which was not the old-school way of doing it. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:49 | |
I'm connected to Peggy Guggenheim | 0:55:51 | 0:55:53 | |
in relation to Art Of This Century, | 0:55:53 | 0:55:57 | |
because my mother showed with her, | 0:55:57 | 0:56:00 | |
my father showed with her. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
The first time my father showed was in 1945 at the Autumn Salon, | 0:56:04 | 0:56:09 | |
and my mother had her first one-man show with Peggy in 1946. | 0:56:09 | 0:56:15 | |
Yeah, when I was three. | 0:56:18 | 0:56:20 | |
Did you give any shows to women? | 0:56:23 | 0:56:25 | |
-Just one-man shows? -Yeah, a lot of women. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:28 | |
Another really important exhibition that Peggy did was called 31 Women. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:32 | |
The first time that there had ever been an exhibition | 0:56:32 | 0:56:36 | |
devoted only to women artists, both American and European. | 0:56:36 | 0:56:39 | |
And I think it was the first show of exclusively women artists ever, | 0:56:39 | 0:56:44 | |
and it was, you know, Louise Nevelson, | 0:56:44 | 0:56:46 | |
and Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim, and so on. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:49 | |
It was a remarkable show. | 0:56:49 | 0:56:51 | |
Peggy was a sister in a lot of ways. | 0:56:56 | 0:56:58 | |
She had a lot of really close female friends | 0:56:58 | 0:57:01 | |
and, despite all of her activity with various men, | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
at the end of the day she really believed very strongly in women. | 0:57:04 | 0:57:08 | |
She marries Max Ernst, | 0:57:11 | 0:57:13 | |
but she's hardly his only wife. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:15 | |
And, in fact, he meets his next wife, Dorothea Tanning, | 0:57:17 | 0:57:20 | |
curating a show for Peg's place. | 0:57:20 | 0:57:23 | |
Artists' narcissism, you know, | 0:57:36 | 0:57:38 | |
"art above all", "art more than life", | 0:57:38 | 0:57:42 | |
you know, lead to problems. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:44 | |
Gala Dali once criticised you | 0:58:16 | 0:58:19 | |
for sacrificing your life to art. | 0:58:19 | 0:58:21 | |
I never gave up collecting and running my gallery, | 0:58:22 | 0:58:25 | |
and looking after artists. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:26 | |
When I was married to Max Ernst, even, I continued. | 0:58:27 | 0:58:31 | |
Probably didn't help the marriage very much, | 0:58:31 | 0:58:33 | |
but I continued nevertheless. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:34 | |
Peggy Guggenheim was a lonely lady. | 0:58:37 | 0:58:39 | |
I sensed that, and I invited her to come for a simple meal. | 0:58:39 | 0:58:46 | |
And she was so grateful, | 0:58:46 | 0:58:48 | |
because nobody ever thought | 0:58:48 | 0:58:49 | |
that they should invite the great Peggy Guggenheim | 0:58:49 | 0:58:53 | |
just for a common, ordinary pasta dinner, or something. | 0:58:53 | 0:58:56 | |
And so she and I became quite friendly. | 0:58:56 | 0:59:00 | |
I think that, in many ways, | 0:59:00 | 0:59:04 | |
she didn't understand how much others tried to exploit her. | 0:59:04 | 0:59:07 | |
And they did. They really did. | 0:59:09 | 0:59:11 | |
And took advantage of her like mad. | 0:59:11 | 0:59:14 | |
Including artists. That's why I called her "charmingly naive". | 0:59:14 | 0:59:18 | |
Peggy and I were very good friends. | 0:59:20 | 0:59:23 | |
She was a very open, genuine person, | 0:59:23 | 0:59:26 | |
she was completely without any guile. | 0:59:26 | 0:59:28 | |
She had no hidden agenda. | 0:59:28 | 0:59:30 | |
You could always assume that what she said was what she really meant, | 0:59:30 | 0:59:35 | |
and she wrote exactly the way she spoke. | 0:59:35 | 0:59:39 | |
Everybody went mad when I wrote that book, | 0:59:44 | 0:59:47 | |
I had 25 dreadful criticisms. | 0:59:47 | 0:59:49 | |
They were terrible. | 0:59:49 | 0:59:50 | |
They were very funny, though. | 0:59:50 | 0:59:51 | |
I don't see why they should have been so upset, | 1:00:01 | 1:00:03 | |
because I didn't say anything awful about the Guggenheims. | 1:00:03 | 1:00:06 | |
My book is all about... All about fucking! | 1:00:06 | 1:00:09 | |
On many levels, it's a very brilliant, insightful book. | 1:00:12 | 1:00:16 | |
Getting the record clear | 1:00:16 | 1:00:17 | |
and her feelings clear was very bold, very daring... | 1:00:17 | 1:00:21 | |
I think her motivation in writing about exactly what she'd done, | 1:00:21 | 1:00:24 | |
and who she'd slept with, | 1:00:24 | 1:00:26 | |
was cos she didn't really care who knew, | 1:00:26 | 1:00:29 | |
because it was just part of her innate being, that - | 1:00:29 | 1:00:32 | |
she wasn't ever covering anything up. | 1:00:32 | 1:00:34 | |
I came and spent the night with Paul Bowles once. | 1:00:36 | 1:00:38 | |
I... I don't put in my book that I had an affair with him, | 1:00:40 | 1:00:42 | |
but I think it's pretty obvious. | 1:00:42 | 1:00:44 | |
-Fairly. -And we lay on a fur on the ground, and... | 1:00:44 | 1:00:47 | |
And he put perfume on my wrists, and... | 1:00:47 | 1:00:50 | |
-It all sounds very sort of sexy, doesn't it? -Very exotic. -Yes. | 1:00:50 | 1:00:54 | |
-Was he very exotic? -Yes, very. | 1:00:54 | 1:00:56 | |
Many of the men with whom she hung out | 1:00:58 | 1:01:00 | |
were extremely promiscuous. | 1:01:00 | 1:01:03 | |
But she was talked about as such a slut | 1:01:03 | 1:01:05 | |
for doing the same thing that all the men around her were doing. | 1:01:05 | 1:01:08 | |
That Mary McCarthy story is all about her promiscuity. | 1:01:09 | 1:01:13 | |
Mary saw her as a wonderful target, | 1:01:13 | 1:01:16 | |
and she wrote this merciless short story about Peggy. | 1:01:16 | 1:01:20 | |
It's called The Cicerone. Polly Grabbe, I think she's called. | 1:01:20 | 1:01:25 | |
And she talks about her life as a series of skids on banana peels, | 1:01:25 | 1:01:30 | |
as represented by the various lovers she'd had. | 1:01:30 | 1:01:34 | |
It's a bit two-dimensional and... a little too sharp. | 1:01:34 | 1:01:38 | |
What about Mary McCarthy? How friendly were you with her? | 1:01:38 | 1:01:41 | |
-She wrote something... -Oh, very, very friendly, yes. | 1:01:41 | 1:01:43 | |
Mary McCarthy was hardly a Puritan herself, | 1:01:50 | 1:01:53 | |
so why would that be the thing she focused on? | 1:01:53 | 1:01:56 | |
Well, everyone focused on that. | 1:01:56 | 1:01:58 | |
And I don't think Peggy Guggenheim | 1:01:58 | 1:02:00 | |
did anything to discourage that focus. | 1:02:00 | 1:02:02 | |
I mean, she was...quite proud of it. | 1:02:02 | 1:02:04 | |
Did you ever have an affair with Mondrian? | 1:02:19 | 1:02:20 | |
-Or was he too old? -No, never. | 1:02:20 | 1:02:22 | |
I don't think he was too old, | 1:02:22 | 1:02:24 | |
because I went to his studio one night | 1:02:24 | 1:02:25 | |
and he showed me his paintings and then he kissed me, | 1:02:25 | 1:02:28 | |
and when he kissed me he had an erection, | 1:02:28 | 1:02:30 | |
which surprised me very much. INTERVIEWER LAUGHS | 1:02:30 | 1:02:32 | |
-For someone that age. -Wonderful. | 1:02:32 | 1:02:34 | |
-How old was he? -About 70, yes. | 1:02:34 | 1:02:36 | |
I found her attractive. | 1:03:07 | 1:03:09 | |
There was this extraordinary sense of self, | 1:03:10 | 1:03:13 | |
there's something... | 1:03:13 | 1:03:14 | |
Something really beautiful about an older woman.. | 1:03:14 | 1:03:19 | |
who knows who she is. | 1:03:19 | 1:03:22 | |
Who has a great accomplishment. | 1:03:22 | 1:03:25 | |
That, already, is sexy. | 1:03:25 | 1:03:27 | |
I think Peggy had a very strange sort of form of sexiness. | 1:03:27 | 1:03:30 | |
She wasn't... | 1:03:30 | 1:03:31 | |
She didn't exude sexuality, | 1:03:31 | 1:03:32 | |
but she had a kind of sexual aura | 1:03:32 | 1:03:35 | |
that people did respond to. | 1:03:35 | 1:03:37 | |
And she was a kind of... | 1:03:37 | 1:03:39 | |
A mixture of old-fashioned and very, very modern. | 1:03:39 | 1:03:42 | |
She was kind of testy if people assumed | 1:03:43 | 1:03:45 | |
that she would tell you dirty stories | 1:03:45 | 1:03:48 | |
or talk about sex or things like that. | 1:03:48 | 1:03:50 | |
I think she was a little like a character in Proust | 1:03:50 | 1:03:53 | |
called Madame de Villeparisis | 1:03:53 | 1:03:55 | |
who, when she's young, recklessly throws away her reputation | 1:03:55 | 1:03:59 | |
and thinks it's fun to do that. | 1:03:59 | 1:04:02 | |
And then when she's older, | 1:04:02 | 1:04:04 | |
she spends all of her time trying to recover her lost position, | 1:04:04 | 1:04:08 | |
and I think Peggy was a little like that. | 1:04:08 | 1:04:11 | |
Assembling her great collection and starting a museum - | 1:04:11 | 1:04:14 | |
all of that was something that would preserve her name, | 1:04:14 | 1:04:17 | |
and that's what she wanted to do. | 1:04:17 | 1:04:19 | |
She was a Guggenheim, you know, | 1:04:19 | 1:04:21 | |
and she had the ego of a Guggenheim. | 1:04:21 | 1:04:24 | |
And she had a certain authority about her | 1:04:24 | 1:04:27 | |
and people were very impressed by her name - | 1:04:27 | 1:04:30 | |
she used the Guggenheim name to good ends | 1:04:30 | 1:04:34 | |
and she'd carved out a niche for herself | 1:04:34 | 1:04:38 | |
and she filled it, | 1:04:38 | 1:04:40 | |
and she seemed to be doing it very well. | 1:04:40 | 1:04:42 | |
When Peggy Guggenheim left New York, | 1:05:10 | 1:05:12 | |
in some ways her reputation | 1:05:12 | 1:05:14 | |
obscured her accomplishment. | 1:05:14 | 1:05:17 | |
That her personality, | 1:05:17 | 1:05:18 | |
what Clement Greenberg talks about as her gaiety - | 1:05:18 | 1:05:20 | |
those were actually negatives. | 1:05:20 | 1:05:22 | |
But I think even Greenberg knew enough | 1:05:22 | 1:05:25 | |
to put that aside and say that she identified key artists | 1:05:25 | 1:05:28 | |
in the New York School. | 1:05:28 | 1:05:30 | |
She showed them first, | 1:05:30 | 1:05:31 | |
she helped build their career, | 1:05:31 | 1:05:32 | |
she helped to make it possible for them to do their work, | 1:05:32 | 1:05:35 | |
and that was a huge accomplishment. | 1:05:35 | 1:05:37 | |
There is no normal life in Venice. | 1:06:10 | 1:06:12 | |
Here everything and everyone floats. | 1:06:12 | 1:06:15 | |
It is this floatingness which is the essential quality of Venice. | 1:06:17 | 1:06:21 | |
The reflections are like paintings - | 1:06:21 | 1:06:23 | |
more beautiful than any painted by the greatest masters. | 1:06:23 | 1:06:26 | |
Venice was really a place of passage, | 1:06:30 | 1:06:32 | |
and so for someone like her to choose a place like Venice | 1:06:32 | 1:06:36 | |
doesn't come at all as a surprise. | 1:06:36 | 1:06:38 | |
The place really calls for | 1:06:38 | 1:06:40 | |
that mix of people coming and going. | 1:06:40 | 1:06:43 | |
However, what made her, I think, so different | 1:06:43 | 1:06:46 | |
is that she stayed. | 1:06:46 | 1:06:47 | |
I could understand coming back to Paris or to London, but why...? | 1:06:52 | 1:06:56 | |
I couldn't go to London because I was afraid that my memoirs | 1:06:56 | 1:07:00 | |
would cause me too much trouble. | 1:07:00 | 1:07:01 | |
So I came to Venice, which I'd always adored, | 1:07:03 | 1:07:05 | |
which had been my dream city. | 1:07:05 | 1:07:08 | |
At last I could achieve my dream. | 1:07:23 | 1:07:25 | |
She thought it was a funny little palace that she lived in | 1:07:27 | 1:07:30 | |
because it didn't have a second floor. | 1:07:30 | 1:07:32 | |
And she got it at a bargain, I think, right after the war. | 1:07:32 | 1:07:36 | |
It didn't cost her much. | 1:07:36 | 1:07:38 | |
I think Peggy's great achievements in Venice | 1:07:49 | 1:07:52 | |
all stemmed from lending her collection to the Biennale | 1:07:52 | 1:07:57 | |
when it reopened after World War II in 1948. | 1:07:57 | 1:08:00 | |
Douglas and I went to Venice at that time to pay a call on Peggy. | 1:08:00 | 1:08:04 | |
Now, this was a very tricky call to pay, | 1:08:04 | 1:08:07 | |
because Douglas had written about Peggy's loan of her collection | 1:08:07 | 1:08:12 | |
and Douglas had ripped it apart | 1:08:12 | 1:08:14 | |
and said this was typical of the bad taste of rich American women | 1:08:14 | 1:08:18 | |
who didn't know what they were buying. | 1:08:18 | 1:08:20 | |
But Peggy was very forgiving, | 1:08:20 | 1:08:22 | |
so we were very warmly received. | 1:08:22 | 1:08:24 | |
I think she helped bring international modern art to Venice, | 1:08:25 | 1:08:29 | |
and this had an enormous effect | 1:08:29 | 1:08:32 | |
on the future of the Biennale. | 1:08:32 | 1:08:35 | |
There were always a tumble of dogs around her feet like thistledown, | 1:08:40 | 1:08:45 | |
five or six of them whom she adored. | 1:08:45 | 1:08:48 | |
You've had everybody here in your house. | 1:09:11 | 1:09:13 | |
I mean, it's unbelievable. | 1:09:13 | 1:09:16 | |
I like it when they draw something. | 1:09:16 | 1:09:18 | |
Yes, so do I, much better. | 1:09:18 | 1:09:19 | |
Steinberg. | 1:09:19 | 1:09:21 | |
I love all the doggies. | 1:09:21 | 1:09:22 | |
Aren't they wonderful? | 1:09:22 | 1:09:23 | |
It was so enjoyable staying with Peggy, | 1:09:37 | 1:09:39 | |
because all kinds of things went on. | 1:09:39 | 1:09:41 | |
There were incidents, there were rows, there was fun. | 1:09:41 | 1:09:45 | |
She enjoyed having a lot of gay guys around her | 1:09:45 | 1:09:48 | |
because they were always looking for young guys, | 1:09:48 | 1:09:52 | |
and she also was one of the gang in that respect. | 1:09:52 | 1:09:55 | |
But the food was the worst in Venice. | 1:09:55 | 1:09:58 | |
I mean, you know, lunch at Peggy's, | 1:09:58 | 1:10:01 | |
it was bad pasta, the cheapest wine. | 1:10:01 | 1:10:05 | |
I mean, really quite awful. | 1:10:05 | 1:10:07 | |
So I don't think that food or drink really mattered to her. | 1:10:08 | 1:10:12 | |
She was a gourmand of life, not of food. | 1:10:12 | 1:10:16 | |
And the food was pretty terrible. | 1:10:16 | 1:10:18 | |
Peggy was legendarily cheap. | 1:10:20 | 1:10:22 | |
Sindbad once said she could make a can of sardines go very, very far, | 1:10:22 | 1:10:27 | |
to which Peggy said, "Yes, especially if you don't open it." | 1:10:27 | 1:10:30 | |
I think people have been hard on her in a way | 1:10:31 | 1:10:33 | |
by saying that she was chintzy. | 1:10:33 | 1:10:35 | |
She had to be chintzy because she had... | 1:10:35 | 1:10:37 | |
She was infinitely ambitious when it came to buying paintings | 1:10:37 | 1:10:41 | |
and living well and having a palazzo and all that, | 1:10:41 | 1:10:44 | |
but on the other hand | 1:10:44 | 1:10:45 | |
what was so touching about Peggy, | 1:10:45 | 1:10:47 | |
at heart she was a little girl, | 1:10:47 | 1:10:49 | |
and she had a little girl's enthusiasm about her possessions | 1:10:49 | 1:10:53 | |
and wanting to show them. | 1:10:53 | 1:10:54 | |
I don't think it goes with my hair. | 1:10:55 | 1:10:58 | |
This is my bedroom, with the Calder bed. | 1:11:01 | 1:11:04 | |
Peggy wants to replace this | 1:11:05 | 1:11:07 | |
old brass bed she has | 1:11:07 | 1:11:09 | |
with something genius, | 1:11:09 | 1:11:11 | |
and she has this remarkable idea | 1:11:11 | 1:11:14 | |
to ask my grandfather to make a headboard in hammered silver, | 1:11:14 | 1:11:17 | |
like his beautiful jewellery. | 1:11:17 | 1:11:18 | |
And he doesn't do it. | 1:11:20 | 1:11:21 | |
And so she's after him all the time. | 1:11:21 | 1:11:24 | |
One day I met him at a party | 1:11:24 | 1:11:25 | |
and I said, "Sandy why haven't you made my bed?" | 1:11:25 | 1:11:29 | |
Whereupon his wife looked extremely surprised, | 1:11:29 | 1:11:32 | |
picked up her ears, and said, "What does that mean?" | 1:11:32 | 1:11:34 | |
'So, finally, I got my bed.' | 1:11:36 | 1:11:39 | |
There were constant triads for the role of lover. | 1:11:48 | 1:11:51 | |
I mean, there were local boys. | 1:11:51 | 1:11:53 | |
I remember when Nelly van Doesburg, | 1:11:54 | 1:11:56 | |
the widow of van Doesburg the Dutch modernist painter, came to stay, | 1:11:56 | 1:12:00 | |
and Peggy was adding on a few rooms to the palazzo. | 1:12:00 | 1:12:03 | |
So there were a lot of rather good-looking | 1:12:03 | 1:12:06 | |
young Italian stonemasons and plasterers around, | 1:12:06 | 1:12:10 | |
and Nelly and Peggy both lusted after the same young plasterer. | 1:12:10 | 1:12:14 | |
And there were terrible shrieks and rows and so on. | 1:12:14 | 1:12:19 | |
I remember she would like to laugh about her Marino Marini statue | 1:12:19 | 1:12:24 | |
in front of her palace, with the detachable penis | 1:12:24 | 1:12:26 | |
which she would take off when the cardinal would visit her. | 1:12:26 | 1:12:30 | |
Marino Marini explained to me | 1:12:33 | 1:12:35 | |
that it was not at all a sexual symbol | 1:12:35 | 1:12:39 | |
but simply the ecstasy of a young man | 1:12:39 | 1:12:42 | |
in the joy of living. | 1:12:42 | 1:12:44 | |
There's so few people single-handedly start out | 1:12:48 | 1:12:50 | |
to make a museum. | 1:12:50 | 1:12:51 | |
Yes. After trying all over the world I finally accomplished it here. | 1:12:51 | 1:12:55 | |
Since 1951, we opened the museum, | 1:12:59 | 1:13:02 | |
it's supposed to be the greatest attraction in Venice. | 1:13:02 | 1:13:05 | |
Even before St Mark's, some people come here. | 1:13:05 | 1:13:08 | |
One thing I remember clearly, | 1:13:09 | 1:13:11 | |
when I was about 18 I hitchhiked all over Europe. | 1:13:11 | 1:13:15 | |
When I got to Venice, I went to Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo | 1:13:15 | 1:13:20 | |
where she had her museum. | 1:13:20 | 1:13:22 | |
I knew my mother had a painting there, | 1:13:22 | 1:13:25 | |
so I walked in and I looked to the right - | 1:13:25 | 1:13:28 | |
the first thing I saw was hers. | 1:13:28 | 1:13:30 | |
I introduced myself to Peggy and we talked. | 1:13:32 | 1:13:34 | |
She was a big part of their lives. | 1:13:34 | 1:13:37 | |
She was a patron of theirs. | 1:13:37 | 1:13:38 | |
I didn't ask you when you started to help writers and artists out. | 1:13:40 | 1:13:44 | |
I started with Djuna Barnes, | 1:13:44 | 1:13:46 | |
and I've given an allowance to her ever since. | 1:13:46 | 1:13:49 | |
-Still to this day? -Yes. | 1:13:49 | 1:13:50 | |
I think, when you were beginning, | 1:13:50 | 1:13:52 | |
there weren't things like there are now - | 1:13:52 | 1:13:55 | |
-fellowships and scholarships... -No. No. -Nothing. | 1:13:55 | 1:13:58 | |
-Nothing. -So what you were doing was very unusual and very needed. | 1:13:58 | 1:14:04 | |
You seem to have given help and support to artists. | 1:14:24 | 1:14:28 | |
Do you think that they have repaid you sufficiently well? | 1:14:28 | 1:14:32 | |
I didn't expect to be repaid. | 1:14:32 | 1:14:33 | |
I think the fact that they have created | 1:14:33 | 1:14:36 | |
and given so much to humanity on the whole is enough. | 1:14:36 | 1:14:39 | |
I didn't expect any personal thing in exchange. | 1:14:39 | 1:14:42 | |
It's enough to enjoy their paintings. | 1:14:42 | 1:14:44 | |
I think my father, Sindbad, | 1:14:46 | 1:14:48 | |
had an intense relationship with his mother, Peggy. | 1:14:48 | 1:14:51 | |
I think it was a love-hate relationship. | 1:14:51 | 1:14:54 | |
Her life commitment happened to be her collection and not her children. | 1:14:54 | 1:14:58 | |
I adored my father, Sindbad. | 1:14:58 | 1:15:00 | |
He was quite a character. | 1:15:00 | 1:15:02 | |
He was a very avid sportsman. | 1:15:02 | 1:15:04 | |
I think it was his way of breaking away from the art world. | 1:15:04 | 1:15:08 | |
He ended up working for an insurance company. | 1:15:08 | 1:15:12 | |
My father never spoke about his sister Pegeen. | 1:15:14 | 1:15:17 | |
I think it was a very sore subject, | 1:15:17 | 1:15:20 | |
a very painful subject for him. | 1:15:20 | 1:15:22 | |
I have kept this room as a memorial to Pegeen, | 1:15:27 | 1:15:33 | |
with 13 or 14 of her paintings. | 1:15:33 | 1:15:35 | |
People who knew her said there was something just vacant, | 1:15:47 | 1:15:50 | |
something you knew was just not right with Pegeen. | 1:15:50 | 1:15:54 | |
And Pegeen was very troublesome as a young woman, | 1:15:54 | 1:15:57 | |
and was already having affairs at a very early age. | 1:15:57 | 1:16:02 | |
Peggy was very intrusive in Pegeen's relationships. | 1:16:02 | 1:16:05 | |
I think she expected Pegeen to be this beautiful love goddess | 1:16:05 | 1:16:08 | |
who had many affairs and would go from man to man | 1:16:08 | 1:16:12 | |
in a way that Peggy fantasised about. | 1:16:12 | 1:16:15 | |
Though she loved her, | 1:16:17 | 1:16:19 | |
she simply didn't know how to be a mother to Pegeen. | 1:16:19 | 1:16:21 | |
She was always a very unhappy girl, and terribly neurotic. | 1:16:25 | 1:16:28 | |
Pegeen was a tremendous problem in those days. | 1:16:47 | 1:16:50 | |
I'll never forget Pegeen, | 1:16:50 | 1:16:52 | |
we were all having dinner and Pegeen rushed in covered in blood, | 1:16:52 | 1:16:56 | |
followed by a man in a white dinner jacket covered in blood. | 1:16:56 | 1:16:59 | |
And she'd tried to commit suicide and he'd saved her, | 1:16:59 | 1:17:02 | |
but they all seemed to be perfectly happy about this | 1:17:02 | 1:17:04 | |
and they were kissing and making it up. | 1:17:04 | 1:17:07 | |
It was a kind of regular occurrence, the suicide attempts. | 1:17:07 | 1:17:10 | |
She told me she only felt safe on a plane, | 1:17:10 | 1:17:13 | |
cos I suppose she hoped it would crash. | 1:17:13 | 1:17:15 | |
I didn't often speak to her about Pegeen, | 1:17:39 | 1:17:41 | |
because it was such a painful subject for her. | 1:17:41 | 1:17:43 | |
But I did once ask her | 1:17:43 | 1:17:45 | |
if she felt that she'd ever managed to get it right with Pegeen, | 1:17:45 | 1:17:49 | |
and she said never. | 1:17:49 | 1:17:50 | |
She said she'd tried everything. | 1:17:50 | 1:17:52 | |
She tried to be soft, and to be hard, and to be strict, | 1:17:52 | 1:17:55 | |
to be permissive, | 1:17:55 | 1:17:57 | |
and to be generous, | 1:17:57 | 1:17:58 | |
and to be controlling, | 1:17:58 | 1:18:00 | |
and she said it just... | 1:18:00 | 1:18:02 | |
She could never find the right way. | 1:18:02 | 1:18:05 | |
With all the difficulties in her life, | 1:18:40 | 1:18:43 | |
her personal problems, | 1:18:43 | 1:18:45 | |
her family problems, | 1:18:45 | 1:18:47 | |
was the art finally compensation enough for all that? | 1:18:47 | 1:18:51 | |
What do these pictures mean to you yourself? | 1:18:52 | 1:18:55 | |
Well, they've become more or less the most important part of my life. | 1:18:55 | 1:18:58 | |
I can't imagine now living without them. | 1:18:58 | 1:19:01 | |
I had my revenge later on, of course, | 1:19:07 | 1:19:09 | |
when I had my show at the Orangerie in Paris, | 1:19:09 | 1:19:11 | |
which is part of the Louvre, | 1:19:11 | 1:19:13 | |
and I was very happy that I was recognised. | 1:19:13 | 1:19:17 | |
She had the enormous pleasure of going there | 1:19:19 | 1:19:23 | |
and mentioning in her speech | 1:19:23 | 1:19:25 | |
that her pictures had not been worth saving before the war | 1:19:25 | 1:19:30 | |
but now they were worth showing. | 1:19:30 | 1:19:32 | |
And I think that was lovely. | 1:19:32 | 1:19:34 | |
I was in Venice, it was my first Biennale. | 1:19:41 | 1:19:44 | |
I think I was 23 years old | 1:19:44 | 1:19:46 | |
and I was invited to come and see the collection. | 1:19:46 | 1:19:50 | |
As a young gallery owner, | 1:19:52 | 1:19:54 | |
Peggy Guggenheim was a mythic person. | 1:19:54 | 1:19:57 | |
There's a lovely thing about helping young people. | 1:19:57 | 1:20:01 | |
She discovered extraordinary artists and nurtured them, | 1:20:01 | 1:20:05 | |
some of the great artists of our time, | 1:20:05 | 1:20:07 | |
but it wasn't about money, | 1:20:07 | 1:20:10 | |
it was just about art. | 1:20:10 | 1:20:13 | |
This, of course, is a Pollock | 1:20:23 | 1:20:26 | |
of that period when Art Of This Century was at its height | 1:20:26 | 1:20:29 | |
and we were all seeing him for the first time. | 1:20:29 | 1:20:31 | |
In those days, what were Pollocks selling for? | 1:20:31 | 1:20:34 | |
Well, nothing at all. | 1:20:34 | 1:20:36 | |
A few hundred dollars, maybe... | 1:20:36 | 1:20:38 | |
Maybe 600 for one this size | 1:20:38 | 1:20:42 | |
would have been already a very good price. | 1:20:42 | 1:20:44 | |
It must make you very proud. | 1:20:45 | 1:20:47 | |
No, I think it's completely insane | 1:20:47 | 1:20:48 | |
the way it's gone up in value. | 1:20:48 | 1:20:50 | |
Museum directors used to come and tell me | 1:20:50 | 1:20:51 | |
this picture's worth so much and that picture's worth so much | 1:20:51 | 1:20:54 | |
I nearly had a fit - I thought of what a responsibility it was | 1:20:54 | 1:20:57 | |
having these expensive pictures, | 1:20:57 | 1:20:58 | |
I didn't like it at all. | 1:20:58 | 1:21:00 | |
Some of these prices are subjective | 1:21:00 | 1:21:02 | |
because they're so rare. | 1:21:02 | 1:21:03 | |
You know, there might be a number of opinions | 1:21:03 | 1:21:05 | |
as to what they are worth. | 1:21:05 | 1:21:07 | |
You're talking billions - billions of dollars. Billions. | 1:21:07 | 1:21:10 | |
She was being courted at the end of her life | 1:21:22 | 1:21:25 | |
by a number of institutions who wanted the collection. | 1:21:25 | 1:21:28 | |
Her one requirement was that the collection stay in Venice. | 1:21:29 | 1:21:32 | |
I don't think she had the resources to endow it | 1:21:32 | 1:21:35 | |
so, luckily, she had a rich uncle. | 1:21:35 | 1:21:38 | |
When I went to New York to have the exhibition in '69 | 1:21:38 | 1:21:42 | |
it was like proposing to somebody who was dying to marry me. | 1:21:42 | 1:21:46 | |
And how do you feel | 1:22:03 | 1:22:04 | |
about walking down the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum | 1:22:04 | 1:22:06 | |
and seeing your paintings in a completely different environment? | 1:22:06 | 1:22:09 | |
Oh, my uncle's garage, yes! | 1:22:09 | 1:22:11 | |
It looks like a garage, doesn't it? | 1:22:11 | 1:22:13 | |
I mean, all that circular business | 1:22:13 | 1:22:16 | |
is the way garages are built in Europe. | 1:22:16 | 1:22:18 | |
On circular ramps. | 1:22:19 | 1:22:22 | |
Nice to have an uncle with a garage like that! | 1:22:22 | 1:22:24 | |
I never was on very good terms with my uncle, Mr Solomon. | 1:22:26 | 1:22:30 | |
I think if he saw this now he'd turn in his grave. | 1:22:32 | 1:22:35 | |
By making the agreement that her collection | 1:22:42 | 1:22:45 | |
would be part of the foundation created by her uncle, | 1:22:45 | 1:22:49 | |
that was an extraordinary step, | 1:22:49 | 1:22:51 | |
it was the first step | 1:22:51 | 1:22:52 | |
where you had a major cultural institution | 1:22:52 | 1:22:55 | |
that was spread over continents. | 1:22:55 | 1:22:58 | |
But it also had a huge influence on the development of Venice itself. | 1:22:58 | 1:23:02 | |
Venice is now viewed as, of course, the city of history, | 1:23:02 | 1:23:07 | |
but also very much the city of contemporary art. | 1:23:07 | 1:23:10 | |
She was smart because, by keeping it there, | 1:23:11 | 1:23:15 | |
it really ensured that her personal presence | 1:23:15 | 1:23:19 | |
was always going to be felt. | 1:23:19 | 1:23:20 | |
And I think that that's the most important aspect | 1:23:22 | 1:23:24 | |
about going in to that museum today, is that you feel her. | 1:23:24 | 1:23:27 | |
If you only have three museums you can visit, | 1:23:39 | 1:23:41 | |
this would definitely be one. | 1:23:41 | 1:23:43 | |
It's like a pilgrimage. | 1:23:43 | 1:23:44 | |
It's everything 20th century is about, should be about. | 1:23:44 | 1:23:49 | |
It's just this incredible personal journey. | 1:23:52 | 1:23:55 | |
It's about an opinion, | 1:23:55 | 1:23:57 | |
it's about a taste, it's about a choice. | 1:23:57 | 1:24:00 | |
All these things that most museums are not about. | 1:24:00 | 1:24:04 | |
To me, it's her biggest contribution to history. | 1:24:04 | 1:24:07 | |
She was collecting because she was really attracted to this art. | 1:24:13 | 1:24:16 | |
She found something of herself in it. | 1:24:16 | 1:24:19 | |
She had tremendous courage, she had the courage of her conviction. | 1:24:19 | 1:24:22 | |
She was ready to take a risk | 1:24:22 | 1:24:24 | |
and she also understood intuitively | 1:24:24 | 1:24:27 | |
its art-historical significance. | 1:24:27 | 1:24:30 | |
Looking at Peggy Guggenheim and what she accomplished, | 1:24:32 | 1:24:35 | |
my biggest takeaway | 1:24:35 | 1:24:37 | |
is just hold on to the art. | 1:24:37 | 1:24:40 | |
Great art is eternal, | 1:24:41 | 1:24:44 | |
and if you can attach yourself to it in the right way - | 1:24:44 | 1:24:48 | |
and she certainly did it in the right way - | 1:24:48 | 1:24:52 | |
you kind of gain a certain immortality. | 1:24:52 | 1:24:55 | |
Everything used to be much more fun than it is nowadays. | 1:25:13 | 1:25:16 | |
I can't be jealous of the past. | 1:25:38 | 1:25:40 | |
Or know the future. | 1:25:41 | 1:25:43 | |
It's horrible to get old. | 1:25:47 | 1:25:49 | |
It's one of worst things that can happen to you. | 1:25:50 | 1:25:53 | |
I really felt I'd accomplished what I wanted to do, | 1:25:54 | 1:25:57 | |
and I've done it very successfully and I'm very happy about that. | 1:25:57 | 1:26:01 |