The death of Peggy Guggenheim’s father did not begin with a loss of love but with a revelation. When the Titanic sank on an April night in 1912, the 13-year-old did not yet know that the father the world mourned as a hero had lived a double life. Benjamin Guggenheim, an heir to the family’s copper and silver empire, was not returning to his wife, Florette. He had traveled with his mistress, Léontine Aubart, who survived the sinking.
He left behind an estate far smaller than expected, worth less than $800,000, and his three daughters inherited only modest trust funds by Guggenheim standards. The legend of the gentleman drowning in white tie was, for Peggy, both beautiful and false. Within the most powerful Jewish family in America, the children were graded like cuts of meat. Peggy, born in 1898 at the family brownstone on East 72nd Street, was considered the least attractive of three daughters.
Her nose was hooked, her chin weak, and her manner too angular for the fashion of the time. She was told constantly that she would have to be intelligent because she would never catch attention. Her grandfather Meyer Guggenheim had transformed a $5,000 investment in two Colorado silver mines into a colossal industrial empire. The extended family was worth hundreds of millions, but neither Christian elite society nor her own Jewish circle fully accepted her.
Her mother, Florette, was cold and controlling, repeating phrases three times and correcting her daughter’s posture. Peggy escaped in small ways: a tennis instructor at 16, a near expulsion from a Massachusetts finishing school for discussing forbidden books, and later an unpaid job at a modernist bookshop in Manhattan. But her decisive humiliation came at 21, when a poorly executed rhinoplasty using a chisel left her nose worse than before. She joked that her nose was a barometer, but the wound stayed with her.
With an annual trust income worth roughly $400,000 today, she booked a one-way ticket to Paris in late 1920, leaving her mother and sisters behind without a farewell. In the legendary Paris of the 1920s, she met a wider circle of writers and painters: Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Proust’s world of cafés and studios. Her first serious lover was the sculptor Lawrence Vail, three years older and already a wanderer and problem drinker. For Peggy, love and chaos became impossible to separate.
She married Vail in March 1922, despite her mother’s telegrammed refusal. He was witty, charming, and violent. During her first pregnancy, he dragged her face down onto an ashtray in a crowded café. The pattern escalated over the years.
He threw her shoes and hats from windows, poured wine and jam into her hair, held her under water until she gasped, and once stubbed out a cigarette on her arm. Friends, including Mina Loy and Mary Reynolds, witnessed the violence but neither intervened nor condemned it. Bohemian etiquette held that a husband’s habits were a private matter. Peggy stayed because divorce would send her back to New York as a cautionary tale, but also because she believed Vail was a genius.
Their two children, Michael Cedric Sindbad and Pegeen, grew up in 17 different addresses by the time the youngest was seven. In the summer of 1928, Peggy met a man she would later call the true love of her life: John Ferrar Holmes, a decorated World War I cavalry captain of extraordinary intelligence and hopeless alcoholism. She left Vail in 1929. Vail broke down doors with an axe; police were called, and nothing resulted.
She moved to England with Holmes, to a damp manor called Hayford Hall. There, the dynamic was different. They talked endlessly, argued without violence, and read the same books. But Holmes could not finish the first chapter of a novel he had been writing for a decade.
His liver and heart were deeply damaged. In December 1934, he died on an operating table under chloroform after drinking a bottle of red wine at lunch. He was 37. Peggy lost the only man who had seen her fully and chosen her anyway.
A friend’s casual suggestion in 1937, after Holmes’s death, turned Peggy’s focus. She opened a small gallery on Cork Street in London in 1938, calling it Guggenheim Jeune as a joke aimed at her powerful uncle Solomon. The exhibition of Jean Cocteau’s work proved controversial but successful, and Peggy began the transition from socialite to patron. She soon decided to expand from gallery to museum.
At a Christmas dinner in Paris on December 26, 1939, she met Samuel Beckett. He was 12 years younger and obscure. The affair, she later wrote, lasted 12 nights with two brief interruptions. In the early hours and afternoons of that affair, Beckett gave her a piece of advice that redirected her life.
Buy the living, he said. The old can take care of themselves; the new cannot. Patronage means money for those who need it now. She acted on that advice immediately.
By February 1940, she was living in Paris, accompanied by Marcel Duchamp and the art historian Howard Putzel, buying work at astonishing speed and low wartime prices. Between October 1939 and May 1940, she spent roughly $40,000 on over 100 works, including Brancusi sculptures and Leger’s “The Men in the City. ” When the Louvre declined to evacuate her collection, insisting her artists were not important enough to protect, she framed the letter and showed it to visitors for the rest of her life. She packed her collection as domestic goods and bribed officials to ship it through Marseille, Lisbon, and finally to New York.
In July 1941, she arrived in America with her collection and a small refuge of people, among them her children, her ex-husband Lawrence Vail, and the painter Max Ernst. Ernst stood on the Nazi list of degenerate artists. Marrying him gave him a U. S.
visa. They wed in Manhattan on December 30, 1941, with Howard Putzel as witness. He was 12 years older and dissolute; he openly told friends that he married her only for the visa. She knew it and stayed for three and half more years.
In his absence, she organized shows at her new gallery, Art of This Century, on West 57th Street. Between 1942 and 1947, she gave first solo exhibitions to Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still. She paid Pollock $150 a month for exclusive rights to his paintings over five years, a contract that sustained his career and produced his early drip paintings, later valued in the hundreds of millions. Their divorce was finalized in 1946.
Ernst shortly married Dorothea Tanning. Peggy joked to friends that she had bought a small Citroën and named it “Ernst” as a private joke. Peggy moved to Venice in 1949, buying the unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal for $60,000. She took the palace’s wide stone terrace, her collection of European and American modernism, and her dogs, eventually burying 14 Lhasa apsos in the garden.
Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim lived there until her death on December 23, 1979, at 81, of congestive heart failure. She was buried in the garden at the end of the row of dog graves. The palace became a museum under the agreement she signed with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1976, which guaranteed the collection would never be moved from Venice.
It now attracts roughly 400,000 visitors a year and is among the most visited museums in the city. Her memoir, “Out of This Century,” published in 1946, named her lovers, the violence of her first husband, and the cost of each painting she bought during the war. The Guggenheim family bought up copies to suppress the book, a rumor at least partially true. That attempt made the book legend and later a canonical feminist text.
For a woman who could not express grief through paragraphs about her dead father or her dead daughter, the calculated precision of her writing about art was the only way she could explain herself. Peggy’s legacy is not merely the paintings but the careers she made possible: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and others. She used the smallest portion of the family’s extracted wealth and gave it back to the world in the form of preservation and patronage. The extraction of minerals was the family business; the extraction of life from herself was hers.
She was not a good wife, not a good mother by conventional terms, and not a good daughter. She was, by her own standards, a great collector and a great memoirist. The arithmetic was simple: she spent her lovers and kept the paintings.