Less well known than her uncle Solomon, Peggy Guggenheim was a passionate collector of art and bought works by Picasso, Giacometti, Jackson Pollock and many more. This is the fascinating story of her transformation from society heiress to bohemian doyenne of the art world in Europe and America.
Director Interview: Tim Niel
BBC Four: Peggy is hardly your average heiress is she?
Tim Niel: Quite the reverse, although she does start out as one. Her father, Benjamin, died on the Titanic in 1912 leaving her, her two sisters and her mother a relatively modest fortune. For the first nearly 40 years of her life she behaves exactly as you would expect. She's always looking for someone to hang on her arm, hanging her wealth over the heads of various partners and using that wealth as a manipulative tool. But suddenly, at the age of 38, she changes from this rich, not particularly useful, heiress into someone who does make a contribution. She bought ludicrously non-commercial art and made a really substantial collection out of it.
BBC Four: One of the interesting themes running through the programme is what an opportunist she was. Her wartime spending spree when she snapped up work by Max Ernst and Picasso and Miro is a remarkable episode...
TN: She certainly knew a bargain when she saw one - as long as it was art she could respect. And certainly what she does in the winter of 1939 and early 1940 is quite extraordinary. There's at least one feature film currently in preparation that will look at that particular moment in her life.
BBC Four: That's interesting, because I remember Peggy Guggenheim as a very vivid character in the Ed Harris film about Jackson Pollock...
TN: That was her, although liberties were taken in Pollock. They were very scrupulous about how they depicted Jackson Pollock but one thing you can almost certainly say about Peggy Guggenheim is that she never had sex with Pollock, whereas in the film she did.
BBC Four: He must be one of the few artists she didn't sleep with...
TN: She didn't find Pollock that attractive because he was such a heavy drinker. The other reason that Peggy gets interested in certain artists is because they are famous. She was once asked why she loved Max Ernst and replied, "Because he's so beautiful and because he's so famous". She loved fame and wanted to share in the fame of many of the artists she bedded. When she knew Jackson Pollock he was anything but famous - he was an obscurity who she'd rescued from a career as carpenter in Solomon Guggenheim's museum.
BBC Four: Her own memoir is very juicy. You were lucky to be able to draw on that...
TN: The memoir is bizarre and really poses problems for people like me and her biographers. What you expect of biographers, these days especially, is for them to find all of the scandal and indecency they can possibly discover about their subject. The irony is that Peggy Guggenheim did that herself. She wrote the most extraordinary account of her own life. It's frank in two senses: it's frank sexually and it's also frank psychologically and emotionally. You would expect her to write a memoir that artificially enlarges the importance of art in her life. She doesn't do that. If the memoir is 200 pages long, art isn't mentioned until about page 110.
Obviously we're interested in her because of her massive art collection, and we're interested in her too because of her private life, but the two halves of her life get in the way of each other. It's another of those paradoxes: she likes art that doesn't sell but tries to be a dealer; she says she's an art collector, but her memoirs show her to be female Don Juan for the first 55% of her life; she collects art in an extraordinarily passionate way but she doesn't take care of it. For instance, in Venice in the 1950s and 60s people said that the Jackson Pollock paintings in her basement were covered in damp and moss, and in one case even slugs.
BBC Four: She certainly comes across as one of kind. The description of her in the film as "the last female doge" seems spot on...
TN: She is unique and the mould is largely broken because there is a market now for the art she collected. What that means is that only certain people can afford to have an interest in acquiring a substantial art collection. Who these days can really compete with Bill Gates? There are other kinds of collectors who are much more interested in manipulating the market. Saatchi will dump Damien Hirst on the market to lower the prices when their relationship as patron-artist breaks down. Peggy never did that. She only sold pictures when she was confronted with financial necessities - like her Venetian palazzo.
BBC Four: Finally, where do you now see her sitting in the grand picture of 20th-century art?
TN: I'm not sure that I know enough to answer that, but she does represent a fundamentally different kind of collector. She has an adherence to a faith in the content of the art she collects. I don't think that is really evident in collectors today like Saatchi. They are more interested in an investment. Guggenheim, and collectors like her, were almost art historians: they were collecting something worth retaining in the memory of culture and worth guarding against obscurity. In a sense they were doing a public service. People don't seem to do that now, and if they do, it's generally because there's a tax break involved.
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