MISTRESS OF MODERNISM

Richly detailed, highly sympathetic portrait of the Guggenheim who rebelled against her family and then left to them her extraordinary collection of contemporary art.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) could not have wished for a more generous biographer than Dearborn (Mailer, 1999, etc.). Although Dearborn reminds us continually of Guggenheim’s prominent nose (“famously ugly,” “potato-ish,” “bulbous,” “putty-shaped blob”), she credits her for being a principal force in the public’s acceptance of mid-20th-century artists, especially Jackson Pollock, whom Guggenheim signed to an exclusive contract and whose works subsequently skyrocketed in value. The five years Dearborn devoted to researching and writing this text were well spent. She depicts with authority all of Guggenheim’s protégés and friends (Djuna Barnes, thank goodness, had “a lovely nose”); she comments knowledgeably on everything from modern art to early-20th-century celebrity (Emma Goldman and Isadora Duncan, among many others, make appearances); she dutifully chronicles Guggenheim’s failed marriages and leporine love life—a Herculean labor all by itself, since her bedmates were numerous, whether famous (Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett) or faceless but eager. Dearborn also keeps track of Guggenheim’s two children, Sinbad and Pegeen, seeing the latter’s death in 1967 (a drug addict, Pegeen choked on her own vomit) as a loss from which her mother never recovered. We get much family history along the way: Peggy was one of the “poor” Guggenheims (she left an estate of millions rather than hundreds of millions); her father went down on the Titanic; and fellow art collector Solomon was her uncle. The Guggenheim women were not supposed to work, so Peggy was an anomaly among them. Overall, Dearborn too often focuses on exteriors—how people looked, what they wore, where they stayed, how they tanned—and slights the more complicated and ultimately more interesting interiors.

Thoroughly, even lovingly researched. But chatty, catty, and tendentious, too. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)