Donna Blue Lachman has made a career of playing strong women, women whose lives are held up as models, women who inspire cultlike veneration–like Frida Kahlo, who overcame a horribly disfiguring streetcar accident and an abusive marriage to Diego Rivera to become a great artist, and Rosa Luxemburg, who sacrificed everything, including her life, for the cause of socialism in pre-Weimar Germany.
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Best known today for her vast collection of modern art, mostly housed in her palazzo in Venice, Guggenheim had her heroic moments. She’s credited with having nurtured the careers of many of this century’s best artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, and Max Ernst, to whom she was briefly married. In Paris during the early days of World War II, she saved many works of modern European art by purchasing one a day from artists like Fernand Leger and Francis Picabia, who were desperate for money to get out of France. Later, after officials at the Louvre refused to help her safeguard her collection, Guggenheim resorted to trickery. She cut the paintings from their frames, rolled up the canvases, and packed them in her car under clothing and household items. She then shipped the car to New York.
But Guggenheim’s private life was considerably less heroic. The daughter of one of the less successful sons of the rich and powerful importer-turned-industrialist Meyer Guggenheim, Peggy was in all respects a poor little rich girl.
But just because Guggenheim liked an artist didn’t mean she treated him well. In many of her dealings with Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, she drove a hard bargain. She demanded Pollock pay back a $2,000 loan by giving her every painting he created over a two-year period–a deal that ended up heavily in Guggenheim’s favor. And on one occasion, she forced Krasner to stuff and address 1,200 announcements for a Pollock show at her gallery, and then publicly upbraided her because she made a mistake on three of the cards. “She bawled the hell out of me for the nine cents I was wasting,” Krasner recalled.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
