Page 14 - Studio International - January 1965

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

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2 Giuseppe Marchiori assesses the heroic selection now at the Tate Gallery

It is since 1948, the year when the exhibition of her
collection, in the Greek pavilion at the Biennale of
Venice, was so tremendously successful, that Peggy
Guggenheim has established her fame in the intel­
lectual Venetian and Italian milieu. She is one of the
most striking characters and most essential figures in
the artistic life of our town, because of her exceptional
personality and the world-wide network of her friend­
ships and connections.
In her house on the Grand Canal. the unfinished
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, in the course of these sixteen
years, she has gathered the most important champions
of the artistic civilization of our time, coming from every
part of the world, on the occasion of the Biennale, or the
various Venetian festivals or on private tours, promoting
thus new links and new relations in the sphere of a
generally too restricted society.
Her house has become a centre of outstanding
importance for meetings on a high international level,
made possible by her active social experience. At
Palazzo Venier, beside the paintings and sculptures,
there is a large and precious modern library, amply
documented, with some works that often cannot be
found elsewhere, particularly on surrealism, which,
following the suggestions of Max Ernst and Andre
Breton added to Duchamp's and Herbert Read's,
constitutes the dominant motif of her collection.
This is a period in the history of modern art, fixed in
virtue of a selection congenial to Peggy's spirit, in its
most typical expressions, specially by the objects which
were almost completely lacking at the Surrealism Show,
organized last year at the Charpentier Gallery in Paris.
It is the period between 1 930 and 1 941, from the year
when Peggy Guggenheim's gallery was opened in
London to the year of the inauguration of the 'Art of
this century' gallery in New York.
Already before 1939 she had thought of founding in
London a museum of modern art, entrusted to Herbert
Read's direction, but this idea could not be realized
because of the outbreak of World War 11. But this idea of
hers did not die: it grew into the collection illustrated
in 1942 by an important catalogue, entitled 'Art of this
century' like the gallery, and becoming thus Peggy
Guggenheim's ideal museum, a true mirror of her
likings and her beliefs after her wonderful meeting
with modern art.
In fact we must remember that before her exceptional
adventure as an avant-garde art collector, Peggy
studied the ancient, the Florentine and Venetian artists
of the Renaissance. under the guide of Berenson's
works. (Her first meeting with Berenson happened just
at the Biennale, in 1948, in a rather embarrassing way,
as the famous historian, the humanistic lord of
I Tatti* did not care at all for modern art.)
Peggy's conversion was total, rash and violent owing
to the vehemence of her enthusiasm and the logical
seriousness of her mind (two aspects of her tempera­
ment). Thus Peggy became a sort of symbolic character
of the surrealistic period, than ks also to Ernst and Tanguy,
in France and in the United States, where she took
refuge to escape the persecutions of the Germans.
It is but fair to remember that Peggy bought the
Bird in space by Brancusi, while the Germans were in
sight of Paris and that she succeeded in carrying this
famous work safely away, together with many more
courageously bought during that chaotic period.
In New York she had the merit of revealing, in a show
* His famous villa
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