Sister by Earrings: Peggy Guggenheim and Her Jewelry
About the passion for art, men and the jewelry they gave her that Peggy, the niece of the founder of the famous New York museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim, had.
The American gallery owner and collector Peggy Guggenheim was one of those women who is impossible not to notice. And it’s not about beauty. She didn’t have that. As an inheritance from her wealthy father, industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, who sank with the Titanic, the girl received not only several million, or at the current exchange rate, several tens of millions of dollars, but also a plump Jewish nose.
Peggy even tried to do something like plastic surgery, promising the doctor mountains of gold, if only he would reshape the hated “potato” into a poetic nose with an upturned tip, but the medicine of the early 20th century was powerless. American expressionist Theodoros Stamos said that it was not a nose at all, but some kind of eggplant.His colleague Charles Salinger, recalling their first meeting, admitted that he remembered only it – sunburned, red, big as an abscess: “It is difficult to imagine that anyone would want to end up in the same bed with her!” But as soon as it came – no, not to the bed, although many artists have been there – to buying paintings, both, naturally, forgot about all the shortcomings of the appearance of their generous collector. She never forgot about them for a minute, which she repeatedly admitted in her memoirs.
Guggenheim masked her complexes with flashy outfits, but mainly with the help of bulky jewelry, matching the large features of her face. She adored them and collected them with the same insatiability as art. And she eradicated self-doubt with sexual liberation: she never refused men, therefore, contrary to what Salinger said, there were always lovers in her bed. Peggy herself counted about 400 of them. More often than not, they were artists, almost always from her collection, and, knowing their priestess’s passion for costume jewelry, they presented her with designer jewelry. In the Venetian palazzo, Peggy Guggenheim allocated one of the walls in the bedroom for them: paintings on one side, earrings on the other.
Those who counted them say that there are at least a hundred of them there. And not only highly artistic, but also vintage, once belonging to Marie Antoinette or Sarah Bernhardt, and nameless, bought at a bazaar somewhere in Cairo or Morocco. Peggy’s manner of decorating herself was supported by her first husband and the father of her two children, the French sculptor and poet Lawrence Vail, a regular at the legendary “Rotonde” in Montparnasse, where the bohemian Paris of the 20s fed their brains and filled their bellies. It was here that the 23-year-old American caught Vail.
He introduced her to the local artistic circle, dressed her in the best designer ateliers of the Left Bank, and made the jewelry himself. Even during the divorce, Peggy received from her now ex-husband not curses, but a new pair of long monumental earrings. She gave him a sweater that she knitted herself. Legend has it that they mourned the divorce for a long time in one of the cafes on Saint-Germain.
Peggy Guggenheim opened her first gallery not in Paris, but in London in 1938, on the advice of Marcel Duchamp. The father of the readymade was her mentor, because at first she herself could not distinguish abstractionism from surrealism. Again on Duchamp’s advice, Peggy opened Guggenheim Jeune with an exhibition of Jean Cocteau – and she was right.
On the other side of the English Channel, the author of “The Blood of a Poet” was well known and loved. It is noteworthy that journalists at the vernissage liked not only Cocteau’s works, but also the earrings of the young gallery owner: only the lazy did not write about the six copper rings twisted together in Guggenheim’s ears. Duchamp and Cocteau introduced the young collector to Jean Arp – with his sculpture, Peggy Guggenheim’s passionate affair with modernism began. Kandinsky, Calder, Moore, Pevsner, Brancusi — she fought hard with British customs officers to transport sculptures by the most relevant artists of that time (and still do today).
Guggenheim Jeune quickly made a name for itself in London. However, journalists did not miss the opportunity to hint that the exhibitions could be used to guess not only the latest trends in artistic Europe, but also changes in the stormy personal life of the gallery owner. Only surreal poetic pictures by Roland Penrose hung, and hop, in their place are already visual abstractions by Yves Tanguy with amoebas on clouds.
From the affair with the American surrealist, Peggy left not only a dozen of his paintings, but also her most famous earrings. She met Tanguy during her infatuation with Samuel Beckett. One has a wife, the other – with his strange friendship. They say that once the cooing doves Peggy and Yves had to fly away at full speed from the enraged wife of an artist, who caught them in a Parisian cafe and threw three pieces of fried fish at her offender.
Passions ran high, Tanguy sensed that Guggenheim was playing a double game, but he put up with Beckett’s presence. Not only did she buy his paintings, but he was also sincerely in love with her. As a token of this love, Yves Tanguy gave Peggy Guggenheim a lighter with an erotic design, which she would carelessly forget in a London taxi, and a pair of beautiful earrings with his recognizable lunar landscapes.
In 1942, at the opening of her gallery The Art of this Century in Manhattan, Guggenheim posed for photographers against the backdrop of paintings by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, then very young, unknown artists, and deliberately turned her head to show the different earrings in her ears. One earring was the very one that Yves Tanguy had made for her, the second was the famous wire mobile, a gift from her beloved friend Alexander Calder.
“I am the only woman in the world who wears these huge mobile earrings,” the gallery owner declared, not without coquetry. Guggenheim explained her idea conceptually: different earrings are a symbol of her impartiality in art, her equal commitment to surrealism and abstractionism, which form the basis of her collection. Loving one thing is not for Peggy Guggenheim.
