Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern by Francine Prose - Yale University Press (2015)
I absorb history like a parched sponge absorbs water. I spend roughly twenty hours per-week reading non-fiction accounts of historical events, jumping from Ancient Rome to Imperial Russia with minimal motion sickness. In my free time I watch sensationalized reenactments of past dynasties and social movements on tv. Even the most *liberal* interpretations (i.e. my personal favorite,The Borgias, starring Jeremy Irons) usually manage to toss some factual information in with all the bodice-ripping and bubonic plague. The truth of the matter is that even the most ‘boring’ and uneventful period in human history—take the Great Depression for example—can be rendered fascinating by a skilled and artful historian. When you read as much as I do, you tend to arrive at new texts with a fair amount of accumulated knowledge. Thus, most of the biographies I’ve read have embellished what I already know. This is endlessly rewarding for me, but I sometimes wonder whether the opinion of a less knowledgable critic would be more beneficial for my readers. Several of my favorite biographies would overwhelm and repel a reader who lacks a substantial foundation. It can sometimes be hard for me to distinguish the information contained within the pages of a single book, from all the scraps I’ve collected throughout my many years of scavenging.
This week I decided to read about a subject I know very little about: modern art. I know even less about Peggy Guggenheim and her incredible collection of paintings and sculptures housed in Venice’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Francine Prose’s concise, intimate peek into the life of a passionate, erratic collector, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, was really my first foray into the world behind the canvas. Best known for her novels, The Glorious Ones, Household Saints, and Blue Angel, Prose writes with the tender sincerity of a fiction writer conceiving of a new character. Perhaps it is her humanity and compassion that led Prose to serve as the 2007 president of the PEN American Center—an organization dedicated to literary expression and the defense of free speech.
If there is one thing to be said about modern art in general, it’s that it relies much more on context and an awareness of contemporary events than allegorical or religious depictions do. It is, of course, very easy to dismiss a canvas by Jackson Pollock as so many droplets and drizzles. But once you take the time to read about Pollock himself, the social climate that fertilized his particular brand of genius, and the challenges he faced as an artist and an individual, you begin to develop a soft spot for the gloopy chaos that defines his aesthetic. Understanding modern art is hard work and it takes much more than a trip to the museum and an extended staring contest with a canvas to appreciate its worth. Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow upon Prose’s charming portrait is that it makes me want to do the hard work. I want to walk into the MOMA or the Tate Modern armed with the knowledge I need to really read the stories condensed and simplified within the cryptic forms of the modern. It seems to me that modern art is, in many ways, a hieroglyphic mode of expression. Once you figure out a way to interpret the various symbols and motifs, a new world of emotions and revelations is available to you—much like what the Rosetta Stone did for our understanding of ancient Egypt. I don’t want to be just another complacent observer who would rather dismiss than discover. I want to learn the language.
Peggy Guggenheim deserves to be remembered for her uncanny foresight. Writes Prose,
Among the artists represented in the collection that she began to assemble long before the significance and value of their work was widely or fully recognized are Picasso, Pollock, Brancusi, Arp, Braque, Calder, de Kooning, Rothko, Duchamp, Ernst, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Magritte, Miró, Mondrian, Man Ray, Henry Moore, and Francis Bacon.
Even to one with as little knowledge as I possess, this strikes me as a veritable pantheon of modern artists. If one person—let alone a woman—managed to amass a comparable collection of Renaissance works, she would be lauded as something of a deity. Instead, because of the controversial subject matter she was drawn to, Guggenheim was ridiculed and scorned her entire life. Prose suggests that she,
…seems to have been born with, or developed early, the urge to unnerve, and this impulse or compulsion would serve her well as she devoted her life to showing art that was truly new and sometimes disturbing. Her idiosyncratic combination of outspokenness and reserve, of shyness and a craving for attention helped her broker the match between the world of twentieth-century art and the world of glamour, gossip, and media publicity. For better or worse, for better and worse, her tendency to mythologize herself and the artists she represented helped shape the contemporary art world, to turn artists into celebrities and socialites into art collectors.
Perhaps people resented her privileged upbringing in one of the wealthiest Manhattan clans. Perhaps her very public and very messy relationships made it difficult for people to take her seriously as an art critic. Perhaps her indifferent attitude towards her two children cost her society’s respect. Whatever the underlying reason, Prose is anxious to emphasize that Peggy Guggenheim was always a controversial woman and rarely made excuses for herself. She was flippant, she was flighty, she changed her mind too often, and she hurt the people she should have cherished. But there is no denying the impact she had on the world of modern art and the broader cult of artistic snobbery and eccentricity she and her fashionable friends turned into an international obsession. For those granted admission to Guggenheim’s exclusive social circle, the ability to shock was its own form of cultural currency. As Prose describes the 1938 International Exposition of Surrealism in Paris to which Guggenheim was invited,
In the courtyard of the Galerie was Salvador Dalí’s Rainy Taxi, a black hansom cab in which a female mannequin, covered with live snails, sprawled amid the junglelike vegetation that clogged the rain-soaked windows. Lining the entrance to the exposition were fifteen mannequins decorated by the artist to represent the objects of their desire; the head of André Masson’s mannequin was encased in a birdcage housing a school of celluloid goldfish. The ceiling of the main room was lined by Duchamp with twelve hundred coal sacks, while the floor was covered with dead leaves, banked toward the center, where a brazier glowed. The smell of roasting coffee filled the air, as did the sound of maniacal laughter, which had been recorded at a mental asylum.
It is hard to read about this kind of senseless psychedelic melting-pot and remember that many of the artists involved—Duchamp, Giacometti, Ernst, Dalí—went on to become some of the most recognizable and critically esteemed figures of modern art. It is in extended descriptions like this that Prose really highlights Guggenheim’s admirable gift for spying the transcendent kernel at the heart of the ephemeral spectacle. Had I been present at the 1938 International Exposition of Surrealism, I might have dismissed the participating artists as a bunch of nutters. Although Prose is at times harshly critical of her subject’s impulsive personality, she recognizes Guggenheim’s contribution to the history of art and the art of history. Writes Prose,
Peggy was neither the first nor the only person to introduce Surrealism to the United States; there had already been shows at the Museum of Modern Art and at private galleries. But she was very good at making sure that it was talked about by critics and seen by younger artists. She encouraged and showed the work of a new generation of Americans, and it is partly thanks to Peggy that American artists shook off the influence of Europe. One can only speculate about how different the history of modern art would have been had Peggy not commissioned Jackson Pollock to paint a mural for the hallway of her East Side apartment—a work that helped change the ways in which Pollock and his peers thought about painting.
Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern is by no means a testament to the rewards of all-consuming research, as many of the other biographies I’ve reported on have been. It is sometimes painfully clear that Francine Prose hasn’t quite mastered the mechanics of non-fiction writing. I take issue, for example, with her decision to refer to Peggy Guggenheim by her first name throughout the manuscript while her male associates are all given surnames. This condescending habit doesn’t do much to combat the assumption that Peggy was a vain and brainless socialite who could only be seen in the reflected light of her lovers. Conventionally, it’s evident to me that Prose is still miles behind the likes of Stacey Schiff and David McCullough. But the passion is there, as well as the unquenchable desire to educate and convert. With a little polishing (and a little more time spent reading past Pulitzer-winners) I have no doubt that Francine Prose could evolve into an esteemed biographer of modern artists—a kind of vicarious collector herself.
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