“PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: ART ADDICT” My rating: B (Opens Jan. 22 at the Tivoli)
96 minutes | No MPAA rating)
She never wielded a brush or a hammer and chisel, yet Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was one of the most important art figures of the 20th century.
Born into a fabulously wealthy family — although her fortune was a mere pittance compared to that of most of her relatives — Guggenheim grew up in an environment awash with dysfunctional eccentricity. She seems to have failed in most of the so-called normal aspects of life (notably marriage and motherhood) but she had something few others possessed: a eye for recognizing great outsider art before anyone else did and the drive to push that art into the mainstream.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict” is the first full-length documentary devoted to this fascinating woman who was instrumental in the success of artists like Jackson Pollack, Wassily Kandinski, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Mark Rothko, Constantin Brancusi and many others.
The film benefits greatly from its reliance on a series of audiotaped interviews Guggenheim submitted to shortly before her death. Never before released to the public, these tapes allow her to more or less narrate her own life story.
She came from a clan of Jewish immigrants who grew from peddling to banking, amassing huge fortunes. Peggy’s father died on the Titanic. Her uncle would become the namesake for NYC’s landmark Guggenheim Museum. Murder, madness and tragic death seemed to stalk the family.
Peggy, one of the “poor” Guggenheims, enjoyed the sort of education befitting a young deb of the period. As soon as she could she fled the U.S. and her oddball relations to live in Europe, where she got a reputation for chasing “bad boys” and befriended artists like Marcel Duchamp, who lit her esthetic passions by showing how everyday objects can be art when placed in the right context.
She couldn’t make art, but she could champion it. And for 40 years she did just that by operating galleries in Paris, New York and Venice that reflected her own far-reaching tastes.
Early photos of Peggy show an amazingly stylish young woman but not a pretty one. The older she got the plainer she became, and botched plastic surgery left her with a lumpy nose worthy of W.C. Fields.
Despite two marriages (the second to artist Max Ernst) and as many as 1,000 sexual partners (she spoke in awe of the playwright Samuel Beckett), she appears to have been an emotionally lonely individual, and more than a few of her acquaintances describe her mania for art as a method of emotional self-discovery and compensation for a largely loveless life.
One leaves this film with a profound sadness for Peggy Guggenheim, but also envy for her all-consuming embrace of great art.
And when I wrote earlier that she wasn’t an artist, that wasn’t exactly true. Peggy oversaw the design of her galleries to create environments in which the art was inseparable from its surroundings. And of course she fostered an atmosphere of experimentation and creativity that sucked even dubious viewers into her enthusiasm for modern art.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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