The Trouble With Peggy:
Sometimes ambition does itself in. Peggy Guggenheim, perhaps America’s most influential champion of modern art, had enough ambition to do herself in several times over. Whether she did or not is open to debate. In amassing one of the most significant art collections of the 20th century, did she achieve greatness or merely surround herself with it, leaving her own potential undeveloped? In launching the careers of Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, was she setting renegade aesthetic standards or simply buying up what others knew to be great? In pursuing cavalier affairs with many of the century’s most important artists, was she staking her claim as a “modern woman” or running from emotional commitment? One thing is clear: by the time she died in 1979 at age 80, she’d spent years rattling around in her Venetian museum-palazzo, hated by the locals and abandoned by her children, with only her Lhasa apso terriers, her memories of abusive or indifferent lovers, and slews of gawking tourists and celebrities to keep her company.
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The trouble with Peggy is obvious, at least on one level: the most meaningful relationships she formed were with paintings, yet her love of objects left her profoundly dissatisfied. In her ambitious one-woman show, The Trouble With Peggy: Pieces of Guggenheim, Donna Blue Lachman drives this point home. Her Peggy Guggenheim leaps from seduction to seduction, art gallery to art gallery, European capital to European capital in a desperate attempt to become “necessary.” But she encounters little but disappointment, her superfluity brought into higher relief each time a new husband yawns or another art gallery closes. The only time she feels necessary is when she’s buying passage out of Nazi-occupied France for friends and associates. But in the most heartbreaking moment of Lachman’s 90-minute piece, she realizes that her money is necessary, not her. Anyone with a large enough trust fund could have done what she did.
Most curious of all, in 385 pages she never once mentions why she thinks modern art matters, or even why it excites her. The consuming passion of her life seems to have been almost accidental; she admits early in the book that when she came into her inheritance she thought she might open an art gallery or start a publishing house. This enormous hole at the center of her memoir turns her into a casual onlooker of her own life.
