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.

A. O. Scott’s “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow"

Jose Ortega y Gasset

In a recent Times Arts and Leisure piece, “The Squeeze on the Middle Brow” (NYT, 8/1/14). A.O. Scott takes aim at both Virginia Woolf and Dwight Macdonald who decried middlebrow culture. Macdonald’s Partisan Review essay "Mass Cult and Midcult,” in particular, is a classic primer on the vagaries of a watered down culture. Ortega y Gasset took another view of the same issue in his essay “The Dehumanization of Art," in which he basically saw difficult modernist paintings as a bulwark against the juggernaut of mass culture. Anyone who has ever been in a gallery when a tell it like it is viewer claims that his infant could have pulled off the Jackson Pollock understands the crushing effect the demand for accessibility can have on artistic endeavor. But Scott’s piece sees the conflict between high and middlebrow in light of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the breakaway bestseller which describes the increasing economic disparity between the economic elite and the middle classes. And Scott’s view is almost a wistful one in which a once empowered middle class brought both the high and the low to the middle. Scott writes, “High culture became more accessible, popular culture became more ambitious, until the distinction between them vanished altogether. Some of the mixing looks silly or vulgar in retrospect: stiff Hollywood adaptations or comic book versions of great novels; earnest television broadcast about social problems; magazines that sandwiched serious fiction in between photographs of naked women. But much of it was glorious.” David Lean’s Great Expectations, PBS's Brideshead Revisited; CBS's acclaimed documentary about migrant farmworkers, “Harvest of Shame” and magazines like Playboy, The Evergreen Review and Eros  all are examples of the positive side of middlebrow culture that Scott alludes to. A side issue has always been the dichotomy between political and esthetic avant gardism which became particularly noticeable in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when Mayakovsky and other vanguard writers, artists and composers began to run afoul of the party line. However, Scott’s jeremiad makes sense in the rarified world of an increasingly powerful elite defined entirely by wealth. The aristocratic patrons like Peggy Guggenheim who once supported innovation have been replaced by a new class whose crushing materialism places little value on anything whose quiddity is not validated by the marketplace--and who fuel the demand for diamond studded skulls by Damien Hirst.

Slovenia Journal IX: Venice

Watercolor by Hallie Cohen

You take the train from Trieste Centrale to Venezia Santa Lucia. Two Russian girls, one a flaming red head with turquoise eyes, talk in their native tongue right up to the stop before the end of the line, Venezia Mestre. The train is filled with Japanese and an foursome of Indians. Santa Lucia is pandemonium in the sweltering heat of the afternoon and you wonder what has brought you to this mecca of tourism, though as the sun sets you are humbled. You achieve a rare feeling of commonality in the worship of undeniable beauty—the same beauty that attracted Ruskin, Turner, Thomas Mann and later Peggy Guggenheim whose art is now housed in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. There you see Picasso’s “On the Beach" (l937), one of Adolph Gottlieb’s “Floating” pictographs from l945 and Francis Bacon’s “Study for Chimpanzee” together with rooms full of paintings by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst. You walk along Zattere overlooking the Canale della Giudecca looking for gelato. You feel you’re on the set of some forthcoming Woody Allen movie, the third of the trilogy beginning with Midnight in Paris. Is this real? Goethe also inhabited Venice, along with a couple from Miami who ask if you know any decent restaurants as you climb on the Vaporetto direction Lido, departing Salute.