Peggy Guggenheim

Peggy Guggenheim was one of the 20th century's most prominent collectors of modern art. Born in 1898 into the Jewish-American Guggenheims, Peggy lost her father on the Titanic and inherited a fortune. She moved to Paris in the 1930s, involved herself in the bohemian lifestyle of the American expatriate community and used her money to gain a foothold in the male art world by supporting artists and writers and assembling a formidable collection of works by Cubists and Surrealists. An independent woman, she also had relationships with, among others, Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst, whom she married. After her escape from Vichy France, she opened the pioneering Art Of This Century Gallery in 1940s New York. Here, she was one of the first collectors to champion the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Jackson Pollock, and her salons allowed exiled European avant-garde painters to meet their younger American counterparts. Peggy spent the final years of her life in Venice, a city she loved, where she played host to a passing parade of the rich and famous and where, after her lonelier later years and her death in 1979, her collection was kept in her palazzo where it can now be seen. Anton Gill is a contemporary historian and provides a fast-moving and entertaining account of Peggy Guggenheim's life derived from both public and private archives. He is particularly strong on the way anti-semitism shaped her family history. The original Guggenheims moved to America to escape restrictions on Jews. Yet, ironically, Peggy preferred Europe because of the anti-semitism she encountered in the USA. Gill is also strong on art history and seems to revel in the anecdotes which surround the legend of Peggy and her many friends and lovers. This is an interesting and informative life of a formidable woman. (Kirkus UK)