Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict illustrates all that is wrong with the art world and all also all that is wrong with being an artist, to the extent that it underscores the way in which narcissistic grandiosity can camouflage itself as a spiritual quest. As she's depicted in the movie Guggenheim is truly repugnant (though the despicable nature of her character also exudes the sadness of the poor little not so rich girl). In 1939, at the outbreak of the war, she spends $40,000 to acquire the works of many artists who desperately needed money to escape the Nazi onslaught. Hitler had in fact pointed his finger at modernism in his l937 Degenerate Art Exhibition. She picked up works by the likes Leger and Brancusi and in the course bedded literally any artist who came into her path. Writers weren’t exempt. She’d once spent four days in a hotel room bed with Beckett, who only got up to get sandwiches left at the door by room service. It’s an anecdote which makes one realize that even the most brilliant and demanding of wordsmiths can still be afflicted with bad taste. She was a bottom feeder, who had a good "nose" and hung around with talents like Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst--to whom she was unhappily married. Speaking of her famed proboscis, she seemed to take pride in a botched up rhinoplasty that even Cyrano might have had second thoughts parading about. Her sister Hazel's two children      had fallen off the roof of the Surrey Hotel and the art addict, really sex addict, that Vreeland’s movie paints was not much of a mother either. Soul Murder is the title of a book by the analyst Leonard Shengold and Guggenheim’s emotional abandonment of her two children Pegeen (who died of an overdose) and Sindbad Vail fits the bill entirely. When she returned to the states in l942 she established a gallery on 57^th Street, The Art of This Century (she described her at the time scandalous book Out of This Century: Confesssions of an Art Addict as being about “fucking”) in which she showed the work of Still, Baziotes, Pollock, de Chirico, Rothko among others. She exhibited the works of both Robert de Niro’s mother and father. When asked what role she played in the development of 20th century American art she said, “I gave birth to it. I was the midwife.” She was never known for her modesty. Mary McCarthy wrote a highly critical story about Guggenheim called "The Cicerone." Merriam-Webster defines cicerone as “a guide who conducts sightseers.” The portrait the movie paints, whether intentionally or not, is of a promoter and impresario doing for modernism what Phil Spector did for rock 'n roll. Actually the two had something in common. Both had tremendous commercial instincts and an obsessional streak when it came to sex. Guggenheim said in her later years, “I wish I were young enough to have lovers.” In Spector’s case the results were a little more dire. He was convicted of second degree murder in the death of the actress Lana Clarkson. Still she succeeded in collecting some great works as well as men and her legacy, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, now resides on the site of the Venetian palazzo where she lived for 30 years.

The John Paul Jones Group

Painting of John Paul Jones by Charles Willson Peale

There are of course famous companies that are called groups. You have The Carlyle Group, a hugely successful asset management firm. The Group was also the title of popular autobiographical novel by Mary McCarthy. But some pithy social networker must have realized that there was strength in numbers and no law against adding “group" to one's name. Why be simply John Paul Jones, a free lance writer when you can be the John Paul Jones Group? Immediately the image of hundreds of consoles manned by worker bees churning out high powered position papers is suggested, rather than the image of the real John Paul Jones who dreams of achieving fame by submitting increasingly provocative screeds, for which he receives no remuneration, to organs like The Huffington Post. If you look closely at a your e mails from friends you are likely to find that a number of them have become magically turned into groups (or have taken to addressing you as if you were a group, even if you’re the kind of person who like Groucho Marx didn’t “want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member") and it can be a problem. Let’s say I write John Paul Jones and we agree to have lunch does that mean he will be arriving alone or in a group? The other side of the problem goes back to public relations 101 and the question of how you want to present your product. Sure it’s nice to be a newsroom rather than simply John Paul Jones, but on the other hand when purple hearts are given out for heroic service in war time, the deed that has earned the honor usually is the result of a John Paul Jones singlehandedly holding off a hundred howitzers. Let’s say John Paul Jones is a poet. His reputation isn’t going to be enhanced by being regarded as part of a group, since poetry writing is generally looked at as a solitary activity—in which a single individual’s limericks push up against the tide of other submissions to Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor of The New Yorker and finally emerge triumphantly in print. Before you unthinkingly add “group” to your on line identification, it’s important to consider how you want to be perceived. Are you an outfit manned by a staff or are you the Charles Atlas type who enjoys bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders?

Dawkins vs God

We all know the great rivalries in boxing Louis and Schmeling, LaMotta and Robinson,Ali and Frazier, Ali and Foreman (which culminated in the Rumble in the Jungle), Hagler and Hearns, Ward and Gatti. But the realm of art and ideas also’s had its great bouts. Christopher Marlowe was killed in a fight at the tender age of 29, though not by the rival Shakespeare. Popper vs. Wittgenstein gained notoriety for the poker.   Llosa and Marquez came to blows over women and McCarthy vs Hellman was famous for Mary McCarthy’s quip about her opponent, “every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the.'" William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow paired off in the Scopes Trial or Monkey Trial, as it was known. Shakespeare wasn’t around to defend himself when Tolstoy said to Chekhov that his plays were almost as bad as the bard’s. The recently deceased Carlos Fuentes got involved in a mud slinging contest with his old pal Octavio (Labyrinth of Solitude) Paz over politics that went right on to Paz’s death in l998. Gore Vidal and William Buckley similarly paired off over politics. Then of course there’s Jung and Freud whose contest over the metaphysical was recently dramatized in A Dangerous Method. Perhaps the greatest intellectual rivalry of all time is still drawing big crowds with Richard Dawkins coming close to knocking out God.