GUGGENHEIM - Key Persons
A thin, red thread connects the life and passions of two of the most eccentric U.S. collectors of the modern era, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Peggy Guggenheim. Both women were determined to make art the cornerstone of their lives, were in love with Venice, and followed the teachings of famous art historian Bernard Berenson.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Honorary Co - Chair
One of Peggy Guggenheim's close friends was Djuna Barnes. They met in the early 1920s through Laurence Vail and their friendship lasted a lifetime.
Who is Djuna Barnes?
Barnes was a writer who is best known for Nightwood (1936), a masterpiece of Modernist literature and one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.
Barnes was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, in the United States and completed her apprenticeship as a writer in New York. She worked as a journalist and illustrator for various magazines in the city, including Smart Set and Vanity Fair, and became deeply interested in poetry and short stories. In 1915 she published The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings, which caught the attention of U.S. avant-garde literary circles. In 1921, like many other U.S. writers and artists both before and after her, Barnes left New York for Paris, where she entered the artistic circles of James Joyce and of Gertrude Stein. In Paris, over the course of the following two decades, she matured into an accomplished artist. She fell in love with the U.S. sculptor Thelma Wood, who was ultimately unfaithful to her. The end of the relationship led Barnes to depression and alcohol abuse. In the 1940s, driven by wartime events, Barnes returned to the United States and this marked the end of her public life and her explosive literary activity. As a result of her self-imposed isolation, coupled with her refusal to reprint much of her work, she never enjoyed the reputation her literary work deserves.
Although Barnes created a scant body of work, she was able to convey, through an unprecedented feminine gaze, the moods, attitudes, and concerns of the lively and irreverent European avant-garde. She published four works: A Book (1923), Ladies Almanack (1928), Ryder (1928), and Nightwood (1936). For each of these works she drew upon events and characters from the bohemian circles which surrounded her, transfiguring them, evoking them as dreams or nightmares, exorcising them in words, rhythms and images. Her poetic imagination is chiaroscuro, powerful, complex, and translates into a multifaceted style that draws on all the literary genres she had the opportunity to try throughout her life.
The first novel, Ryder, which tells the story of a man who ruins the lives of the women he loves, was an incisive work in the literary panorama of the time, not only for the courage with which Barnes delved into the most difficult expressions of human failure, but also for its structural and stylistic experimentation. Ryder's chapters do not follow a linear narrative: the narrative style changes from chapter to chapter, parodying the Bible, Geoffrey Chaucer, epistolary novels, and mystical literature.
Barnes' masterwork, Nightwood, is one of the most influential novels of the modernist period and of the twentieth century. It was published with a laudatory introduction by T. S. Eliot. The work revolves around the lives of five characters, two of whom are based on Barnes and Wood and the circumstances surrounding the end of their relationship. Barnes tells the story of Robin, a woman who has relationships with other women after leaving her husband. One of these women is Nora, whom she betrays and abandons. Dr. O'Connor, an ambiguous figure in search of his own sexual identity, is entrusted with the task of consoling the rejected suitors. Everything about the novel is radical: the story, the explicit homosexuality between women, the dizzying and incomprehensible structural complexity, and the style which makes use of poetry, visual arts, drama, and music. Barnes' style is based on Elizabethan tragedy with a surreal connection and dark humor which combines tragedy and satire. Barnes forces life to merge with language to demonstrate that the final outcome is not so much truth as literature by virtue of its visionary and symbolic nature.
Who is Emma Goldman?
Emma Goldman was an intense, courageous, and freethinking idealist. She was an anarchist and a political activist, who believed in and fought for freedom of expression, the emancipation of women, social equality, and free love.
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1869 in Kaunas, Lithuania, her childhood was marked by religious and gender oppression. Although her father opposed her intellectual training, from a very young age she managed to develop her own critical conscience by reading and observing the political and social realities that surrounded her. In 1886 she left Russia for the United States, the land of promised freedom. There she discovered the poetry of Walt Whitman, but also living conditions and a mindset she considered even more backwards than Russia, especially for the working classes and women. In the aftermath of the violent Chicago Haymarket affair that same year, Goldman decided to liberate humanity from the dominant capitalist, patriarchal, and hierarchical structures of society. In New York in 1889, she met the famous anarchist writer, Alexander Berkman, who became her lover and lifelong friend. She began giving public speeches on social and gender equality, which were regularly interrupted by the authorities. She founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth (1907-15), for which she wrote essays on socialism, war, sexuality, and feminism, later collected and published in Anarchism and Other Essays (1910).
She was imprisoned on more than one occasion for her revolutionary ideas and initiatives, and in 1919 she was deported from the United States to Soviet Russia, where she remained until 1923. She thus had the opportunity to closely observe the consequences of the Bolshevik revolution. She was deeply disappointed and became one of the few voices of the European Left to criticize the Russian experiment. She continued to support the battles of anarchists everywhere until her death in Canada in 1940. She is buried in Chicago near the graves of those executed after the Haymarket affair and other famous radicals and revolutionaries.
What made her credible was the fact that that every battle she fought in society was first and foremost a battle that she fought within herself. She was consistent in her idea that social change must be brought about by individuals. Her determined fight for the rights of women was particularly relevant and openly contrasted with the suffragist movements at the time, which she considered bourgeois and essentially ineffective. For Goldman, feminism was not an attempt to pursue social equality and political rights bestowed by external authority. Instead, it was an internal transformation that needed to take place first in women and later in men, with the knowledge that a woman was in charge of her own body and her mind. Furthermore, no one else could condition or direct her development. This process of liberation could not and would not take place against men, to their detriment, but was reciprocal-freedom for both sexes promised happiness and liberation to different, yet complementary human beings. In building relationships between the sexes, love plays a fundamental role and for this reason it must be freed from procreation. Goldman was an early advocate for educating women about contraception and birth control. Therefore, free and equal women and men can weave fair and sincere relationships, love and feel loved, and collaborate in building a better and fairer society.
During the winter of 1927, in the French coastal city of Saint-Tropez, the anarchist Emma Goldman began writing her autobiography, "Living My Life" (1931). The cottage she stayed in was provided by Peggy Guggenheim.
On October 20, 1942, Peggy Guggenheim inaugurated her New York museum-gallery, Art of This Century, designed by Frederick Kiesler, a multifaceted artist, architect, set designer, and sculptor who was best known for his utopian projects, exhibition installations, and the theory of Correalism.
Frederick Kiesler was a multifaceted artist, architect, set designer, and sculptor who was best known for his utopian projects, exhibition installations, and the theory of Correalism.
He was born in 1890 in Czernowitz, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, and trained as an architect in Vienna in the early 1900s. He was welcomed into avant-garde circles and had the opportunity to collaborate with Adolf Loos, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy and Theo van Doesburg. He began to work in theater and in 1924 he designed the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exhibition of New Theatre Technique) for the Vienna Music and Theater Festival, developing the concept of space stage. Two years later he was invited to New York to participate in the design of the International Theater Exposition at Steinway Hall and decided to establish his home in the city. While pursuing his holistic reflection on architecture, together with the students of the Columbia University School of Architecture he began a partnership with the Surrealists. In 1949 he published the "Manifesto of Correalism" and designed the installation of the "Salle Superstition" for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. In 1950 he completed and exhibited the first model of the Endless House at the Kootz Gallery in New York. During the last years of his life and together with his friend Armand Phillip Bartos, he was engaged in the conception and construction of the second architectural work he ever built, the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The building was inaugurated in April 1965, a few months before his death.
Kiesler's masterpiece was his forty years long theoretical work on the concept of the home. He envisioned the house as a womb, in that it was a protected space, free from external noise, and a space where one could recalibrate and collect oneself. The house could not remain the functional and sterile construction extolled by modernists. Instead it needed to be a circular and fluid entity which easily integrated with the surrounding natural environment and the physiological and psychological needs of its inhabitants. The house evolves just as plant and animal species do. He first applied these reflections in the Space House (1933) by utilizing an eggshell shape with no rigid vertical elements but irregular divisions between the rooms creating environments in which the automatic regulation of temperature, light, color and the combination of materials were designed to enhance human performance. His design criteria gave more importance to the nature of the space rather than the structure that encompasses it. In order to develop this project, Kiesler studied several central European theories on the effect of architecture on human metabolic energy. These were psychological, physiological, and thermodynamic studies. In the 1940s he elaborated the philosophical concept of Correalism, based on the dynamics of continual interaction between the forces governing organic and inorganic matter in this world. The architect-scientist had to capture and use these forces to convey positive charges towards man and reject negative ones. Functionality, so dear to modernists, became a shifting concept which adapted to the continuous rearrangement of the man-nature-objects balance. This theory should have favored the development of new standards for architecture and design which were no longer static but in perpetual evolution, and no longer based on aesthetics but on well-being. The Endless House embodies the concepts of Correalism: a curvilinear structure with an oval perimeter and a layout which resembles the cross section of a heart with atria and ventricles. The interior is organized in such a way that human life can, literally, flow through it. There are no walls, only movable partitions; the light expands and contracts according to the movements of people; and the infiltration of the external environment is carefully controlled. While the visionary Endless House was never constructed and remained at its design level, "it was not just a building, it was an organism subjected to the continuous evolutionary pressures of Kiesler's creative consciousness." (Endless Kiesler, edited by K. Bollinger and F. Medicus, 2015, p. 83.)
Job Titles:
- Vice - President of the Advisory Board
Villerville, Normandy in the 1920s: Peggy Guggenheim met James Joyce, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, author of an epic two-part linguistically impenetrable landmark work, "Ulysses" (1922) and "Finnegans Wake" (1939).
John Milton Cage Jr. was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and studied piano from an early age. When he was eighteen years old, he left college to travel to Europe. On this trip he was introduced to Johann Sebastian Bach and the artistic avant-garde, Igor Stravinsky and especially Erik Satie. Upon his return to California in 1931 he decided to devote himself to music and began studying initially with Henry Cowell and then with Arnold Schönberg, author of the twelve-tone technique. In 1936 he worked as a composer at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and began to experiment with percussion music. A few years later, in 1939, he composed First Construction (In Metal) based on unorthodox percussion instruments, such as cups, wheel rims, and tin containers. He also composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1, one of the first works to include recorded music. During those years he met choreographer Merce Cunningham, their artistic and romantic partnership lasted for the rest of their lives.
In 1940 Cage developed the prepared piano, altering the sound of a traditional piano by placing objects between or on its strings or hammers, making it impossible for the player to fully control its sound. This marked an important moment in his career, as he sought to eliminate the notion of authorship of a work of art. The public was shocked to hear what sounded more like a percussion orchestra than a piano. Sonatas and Interludes (1946-49) is his most highly acclaimed work using the prepared piano. His studies of Eastern philosophies, especially Zen Buddhism, and a profound understanding of Marcel Duchamp's work marked a turning point in Cage's artistic production in the mid-1940s. His notion of the experience of music was revolutionary. Cage pushed boundaries by utilizing indeterminacy techniques and seeking unknown outcomes. No distinction was made between sounds and noises, and all the perceived sounds of life and the city were freed from superfluous historical, aesthetic, mnemonic, and emotional elements. For Cage these sounds required nothing more than their own existence: they occupy the soundscape as men occupy the earth and the stars the sky. If sounds do not need to be organized, harmonious or communicative, the composer's only role is to create the conditions for them to be listened to and accepted. This was an ethical and political endevour on Cage's part. The epitome of his belief that any sound may constitute music is found in 4'33" (1952), his most important and controversial work. The keyboard cover rises, 4 minutes and thirty-tree seconds pass, then the keyboard cover is lowered: 4'33" consists of the sounds that occur in the concert hall while the performer does nothing but sit.
In the following years Cage worked on the anti-dogmatic and anarchist potential of 4'33", and ventured into works based on a combination of music, dance, poetry, theater, visual arts, audience participation and chance. As he had done with his music, he relinquished control, authorship, and determination in favor of a spontaneous and unpredictable display of creativity from all involved. Cage believed that art is the way in which life speaks of itself, that art infiltrates life and the two cannot be separated.
In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst welcomed John Cage and his wife Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff to their New York home. The time they shared together was intense, though short-lived, and filled with art, music, and parties.
After growing up in New York City, Peggy traveled to Europe in 1921. Thanks to her husband Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, who became an artist), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American expatriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes, and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
As the great-granddaughter of the late Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Guggenheim Museum in New York, it is only fitting that Mimi Lawson-Johnston Howe continues a long family tradition as Vice President and now President of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board.
After graduating as an art history major, she spent a year traveling the world and then settled in New York City. Her first job was at Go America Tours, where she created itineraries for European travelers to come to the States for vacation.
A few years later, Howe decided to teach early education at the Princeton Junior School. Until recently, she was a Relocation Consultant for international business executives relocating to the Princeton area. Together with her husband and three children, Howe recently moved to Charleston, SC.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board
Peggy acquired Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished mid-eighteenth-century building on the Grand Canal, where she spent the rest of her life. In 1949, she organized an exhibition of contemporary sculpture. In 1950, she organized the first European exhibition of works by Pollock in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Subsequently, her collection traveled to Florence and Milan, and later Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951, Peggy opened her house and her collection several afternoons a week to the public in the spring, summer and early autumn months. During her Venetian years, she continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as the Italians Edmondo Bacci, Piero Dorazio, Tancredi Parmeggiani, and Emilio Vedova, as well as works by Marina Apollonio, Karel Appel, Francis Bacon, Kenzo Okada, Graham Sutherland among others. Peggy gave Tancredi a monthly stipend and a studio space in the basement of her palazzo, and organized a solo show in her home in 1954. In 1962, her adopted city nominated her an Honorary Citizen of Venice.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board
- President
- Exhibitions
- Out of This Century ( London: Andre Deutsch, 1979 )
A high level international support group for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection created in 1980, soon after Peggy Guggenheim's death.
From that moment Peggy Guggenheim had the opportunity to spend time with the Joyce family on many occasions, as she wrote in her autobiography. "I took John [Holmes] to meet Helen Fleischman and Giorgio Joyce. We saw quite a lot of them and often with his parents, James Joyce and Nora. They lived an intense family life and it surprised John, who was so anti-family, that Giorgio should be so tied up with his parents. Lucia Joyce, Giorgio's sister, was often with them too. She was a sweet girl who was studying dancing. Giorgio had a good bass voice and used to sing for us, frequently with his father, who was a tenor. John enjoyed talking to Joyce but, since he never could have been one of Joyce's sycophants, the relationship was casual. They had both lived in Trieste, and I remember their reminiscing about the Bora wind, Trieste's worst evil." (Out of This Century, p. 99). She also wrote, "That evening we dined at Fouquet's, where James Joyce gave us an excellent dinner. Joyce inquired a lot about my gallery in London, and as usual was charming and very attractive. He wore a beautiful Irish waistcoat which had belonged to his grandfather." (Out of This Century, p. 163).
Peggy Guggenheim, Peggy Guggenheim and Her Friends, 1970-76
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on August 26, 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father Meyer (of Jewish Swiss and German origin), had created a family fortune in the late nineteenth century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper, and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. In April 1912, Peggy's father died heroically on the SS Titanic during its maiden voyage from England to the United States.
Peggy Guggenheim at home with Jackson Pollock in front of his Mural (1943), New York, ca. 1946
... I loved Europe more than America, and when the war ended I couldn't wait to go back. ... On my way there, I decided Venice would be my future home. I had always loved it more than any place on earth and felt I would be happy alone there.
Peggy Guggenheim at the opening of the exhibition of her collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1969
Peggy died aged eighty-one on December 23, 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of her museum. Since then, under the oversight of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection has become one of the finest museums of modern art in the world.
Art of This Century is inseparable from Peggy Guggenheim's claim to a place in the history of twentieth century art.
In 1943 Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock a painting, which was to be the largest Pollock ever made.
In 1948 Peggy Guggenheim exhibited her collection in the Greek Pavilion, then ravaged by the civil war.
Those who knew Peggy Guggenheim share anecdotes and personal memories of the life and personality of the American patron.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Peggy Guggenheim met Samuel Beckett in Paris during Christmas in 1937. He would make a mark in the history of twentieth-century literature and be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Truman Capote was a reporter, writer, and celebrity renowned for being the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), on which the film of the same name featuring Audrey Hepburn and directed by Blake Edwards was based. Together with Norman Mailer, he founded the genre of the non-fiction novel through his book, In Cold Blood (1966).
Capote was born in 1924 in New Orleans and developed an obsession with writing from a young age due to a childhood marked by loneliness and a cold and unaffectionate relationship with his parents. He attended prestigious schools, but at 17 decided to abandon traditional education and worked a modest job as a copyboy in the Art Department of the The New Yorker. In 1946, at the age of twenty-two, he won the prestigious O. Henry Award for his short story, Miriam. Between 1943 and 1946 he wrote a large number of short fiction novels, including Mink of One's Own, My Side of the Matter, Preacher's Legend, Shut a Final Door and The Walls Are Cold, which were published both in literary quarterlies and in well-known popular magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, Harper's Magazine, Mademoiselle, and The New Yorker. These works are rooted in the literary tradition of the Southern United States, characterized by a grotesque inclination and a fascination for violence-as found in Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O' Connor, and Carson McCullers-and the use of elaborate language-as found in many authors from Poe to William Faulkner.
In 1948 Capote released his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which maintained the Southern Gothic atmosphere of his previous writings. The work, with its implicit homosexual references, which were audacious for the time, gave him a certain notoriety and introduced him as an intellectual dandy to the social circles frequented by celebrities. Capote began the lifelong process of building his own public persona, which led him to fame as a television talk show host, but also to alcohol and drug abuse, which would eventually turn out to be fatal. Throughout the 1950s he wrote frantically, demonstrating that he knew how to create seductive characters and contrasting states of mind, and blend fantasy and the reality of social life with great skill. Breakfast at Tiffany's, published at the height of this moment in 1958, addresses topics Capote had already explored, such as heterosexual love versus homosexual love, freedom versus stability, nature versus culture. However, from a stylistic point of view, it marks a turning point. For the first time Capote abandoned a charged and elaborate writing to embrace a more linear narrative, characterized by a minimal and naturalistic prose.
It is an important step towards In Cold Blood, his most important work. Written between 1959 and 1965, the story details a real crime that occured in Kansas in 1959, the heinous murder of the Clutter family. A father, mother and two children were murdered by two criminals who had just been released from prison. Capote researched and interviewed all the people involved in the event (including the lawyer, the residents of the area, and the killers themselves). His goal was to create a new literary genre that was the opposite of fiction, in order to portray American society objectively, as in journalistic reporting, but with a wider scope. "It originated at the intersection between ‘journalism' and ‘literature' and it stemmed primarily from the choice of a subject from the real world (as opposed to one invented by the writer), which could be documented via an exhaustive research that gave credibility to the story. The ‘fictional' aspect was then provided by dramatic techniques, such as the construction of the narrated scenes with vivid descriptions of the contexts (instead of objective journalistic ones), dialogues reproduced in full (a style closer to literary prose), and refined language." (Andrea Rondini, Pianeta non-fiction, "Heteroglossia" no.14, 2016, pp. 54-55). The value of the work lies not only in its narrative construction, but also in the creation of the characters, who are narrated in all their complexity, and in the way an epoch is given voice to. It captures the spririt of the United States in the 1960s, with its strange combination of violence and compassion. Capote intended to continue this narrative style in his last work, Answered Prayers (1986), but due to his increasingly precarious state of health, the work remained unfinished.
Truman Capote was a frequent visitor to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. He visited Peggy Guggenheim for the first time in September 1950, returned in September two years later, and again in the summer of 1953. He then stayed in her home for six weeks in the spring of 1956 and for the last time in the spring of 1961.