From Publishers Weekly
Dearborn celebrates Guggenheim, the iconoclastic doyenne of abstract expressionism, in this appreciative, thorough biography. Born in 1898 to a "poor" branch of the family, Guggenheim moved to Europe in 1920, where she befriended such modernist notables as Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp. After two failed marriages (to alcoholic, volatile writers), Guggenheim began to collect surrealist and other modern art seriously, opening the Guggenheim Jeune in London in 1938. During WWII, she preserved numerous artworks—and artists—by getting them to the U.S.; she also began a long, turbulent relationship with Max Ernst. In wartime New York, Guggenheim opened Art of This Century; the explosively popular gallery brought fame to Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell and others. Dearborn, who has authored biographies of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, underscores Guggenheim's professional achievements, but salacious details and physical descriptions—of her infamous nose, her delicate ankles—sometimes win out over character analysis and art history. Although Dearborn seems to rely a good deal on Guggenheim's sensational 1946 autobiography, Out of This Century, which publicized her artists and myriad lovers alike, her research and interviews with family and friends add rich, gossipy detail about the heiress's life. With its fluid prose and provocative subject, this book will appeal to art lovers interested in more than the paint. B&w photos not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
How few of America's major museums would exist without the passion and zeal of art collectors and the dealers who advised them, and yet, how rarely their fascinating stories are told. Bohemian art impresario and collector Peggy Guggenheim has often been trivialized. Anton Gill's Art Lover (2002) offers a more balanced view, and now Dearborn presents a freshly judicious, multidimensional, and sympathetic portrait laced with new and revelatory documentation. With drive and clarity, Dearborn charts Guggenheim's peripatetic life in France and England during the heady 1920s and 1930s; her traumatic relationships with unstable, even violent men; and the crystallization of her mission to support avant-garde art. After helping artists escape the Nazis at great personal risk, Guggenheim opened her innovative New York gallery, where she was the first to exhibit such seminal modern artists as de Chirico, Giacometti, Pollock, and Rothko. Dearborn thoroughly analyzes Guggenheim's flaws--her low self-esteem, abysmal failure as a mother, and lack of intellectual rigor (although Dearborn herself is shaky on aesthetics)--yet vehemently defends Guggenheim against the vociferous, clearly misogynistic criticism of her free-spirited ways. Ultimately, Guggenheim comes into focus as a beleaguered champion not only for avant-garde artists but also for sexual equality and freedom of expression in all aspects of life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking "happening" at the center of its time. Dearborn's unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight to Peggy's traumatic childhood in German-Jewish "Our Crowd" New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy's last years as l'ultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1Prologuesunday dinner, summer 1941:sojourn on the coast of portugalHaving recently fled German-occupied France, PeggyGuggenheim found herself on a Sunday afternoon in late June 1941holding court at a large table in the dining room of a Portuguese resorthotel, surrounded by a motley band of friends and family, including apainter, a writer, an ex-husband, children, and others who were dependingon her to get them out of wartime Europe. They were cooling theirheels in Estoril, a resort town on what was once known as the PortugueseRiviera and home to exiled European royalty, including Juan deBorbón of Spain, Karl von Habsburg of the former Austro-HungarianEmpire, and King Carol of Romania, which lent a certain frisson tothe Guggenheim party"s experience. The town lay between the smallcoastal fishing village of Cascais and Lisbon, the latter near enough sothat members of Peggy"s party could make forays there to try to determinewhen their enforced exile would end—for Estoril was just a waystation on the journey to America. For the past three weeks they hadbeen waiting for passenger lists that would tell them when they could,all eleven of them, get passage on a Pan American Clipper flight boundfor America.Lisbon at that time was the single most important point of embarkationfor refugees from Europe who wanted to go to the United States.Portugal was a neutral country, and more than 70,000 refugees passedthrough the port during the war. In the 1942 Hollywood classic Casablanca,Lisbon is the destination for the refugees stranded in Morocco.Because of its transatlantic connections, and because it was a citycrowded with foreigners of all nationalities, it became a rendezvous spotfor spies and a hotbed of intrigue.It is difficult to overstate the anxieties of those wishing to flee theNazis—not to mention the fears of the Jews among them. One observertook measure of the atmosphere on a train heading for Lisbonafter the war commenced: "Outside the sun beats down in muggywaves, but inside . . . fear—like a blanket of dark cobwebs—lies overthe lives of the passengers. Fear that visas may expire before a destinationcan be reached. Fear that each new border check might bring agruff order to get off the train and turn back. Fear that scanty fundsmay not last until a safe place is reached in the New World. Fear that anoutbreak of war in a new theater will slam the gates to freedom at thelast moment. Fears by the hundreds—by the thousands." The Guggenheimparty was not immune to such fears; just keeping their papers togetherwas an anxiety-ridden chore.Most refugees got out of Lisbon when they could, and many ofthem went to America. The war saw a torrent of them making their wayto the United States, through Lisbon or through Marseilles, anotherjumping-off point. In the French city, the American intellectual VarianFry ran the Emergency Rescue Committee, which conspired to helprefugees from a list of two hundred mysteriously given to him in theStates. Fry risked everything as he maneuvered around and away fromthe Gestapo and the Vichy police to secure passage to the UnitedStates—usually through Lisbon—for the writer Hannah Arendt, thepainters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska,and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, among many others.Peggy Guggenheim—herself, as a Jew, in a very vulnerable position—had aided Fry materially, giving the committee 500,000 francs in December1940: she also arranged and paid for the flight to the UnitedStates of André Breton and his family. The surrealist potentate, whomPeggy would support for a good part of his stay in America, would reassemblehis court around Art of This Century, Peggy"s wartime galleryin New York City. Among the other artists seeking haven in New Yorkwere Chagall, the Chilean-born Roberto Matta Echaurren, Yves Tanguy,André Masson, and Kurt Seligmann. In fact, Peggy"s gallery wouldbecome a place where the European refugees could meet with emergingAmerican artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwellin a heady mix of cross-pollination and creative collaboration,out of which came abstract expressionism, and which saw the center ofthe art world move from Paris to New York City.The year before Peggy and her party arrived in Lisbon, as a Germaninvasion threatened, she had tried desperately to find ways to preserveher remarkable trove of surrealist and abstract art, which would serveas the anchor of her New York gallery and which by then included, shewrote, "a Kandinsky, several Klees and Picabias, a Cubist Braque, a Gris,a Léger, a Gleizes, a Marcoussis, a Delaunay, two Futurists, a Severini, aBalla, a Van Doesburg, and a "De Stijl" Mondrian. Among the surrealistpaintings were those of Miró, Max Ernst, Chirico, Tanguy, Dalí, Magritteand Brauner. The sculpture [included] works by Brancusi, Lipchitz,Laurens, Pevsner, Giacometti, Moore, and Arp." When the Louvredeclined to store the collection, a museum director in Grenoble hadagreed to show it and to store it afterward, but he kept putting off theexhibit. Finally, a shipping agent and family friend suggested that shewrap up all her artworks with the rest of her possessions—dishes, furniture,and her car—and send them to America as "household goods."The woman who assembled this remarkable collection was not aconventional collector or patron. Peggy had found her vocation withinthe larger frame of a life in quest of a personality separate from theconfining world of her prominent and wealthy family. Instead of a respectablemarriage and a stable home, she had opted for an itinerant lifewith a succession of male companions, friends, and hangers-on in theliterary and artistic circles of France and the United Kingdom. The entourageshe took with her on her constant travels across Europe—andnow to America—was an inextricable part of her life, for better or forworse. Out of these circumstances Peggy became one of the most colorfulfigures in the expatriate community of the 1920s and 1930s, and herNew York endeavor would prove the most distinctive and individualin America in the 1940s. The collection she assembled represented hericonoclasm: decidedly modern art, heavily surrealistic, a genre that wassexually and ideologically confrontational. She had been brought up onold masters. True, her uncle Solomon Guggenheim was collecting theworks that would form the backbone of his Museum of Non-ObjectivePainting—later the Guggenheim Museum in the Frank Lloyd Wrightbuilding on Fifth Avenue in New York—but he was thought to be eccentrichimself, and at any rate he thoroughly disapproved of his niecehaving a career in the first place, not to mention dealing in modern art.The party in the hotel dining room on a summer Sunday made a de-cidedly unconventional family picture. Peggy, at the center, was thenforty-two and had maintained her attractive, slim figure; her build wasdelicate in the wrists and ankles, and she waved her hands when shetalked, giving her an air of fragility and vulnerability. She could be astrikingly handsome woman, with raven black hair and bright blueeyes, but her crudely applied makeup—a crimson gash for her mouth—and her famously ugly nose marred her looks. She spoke in vaguelyEnglish-sounding, plummy tones, her voice often dryly amused, radiatingan ironic air that masked an underlying insecurity about how othersregarded her.With Peggy in Portugal was her ex-husband Laurence Vail, a harddrinkingliterary and artistic dabbler, equipped with a volatile temperbut a wonderful sense of fun. Once known for his yellow mane, Laurencewore his light, receding hair long on top but clipped underneath,giving him a boyish air even in his late forties. He too had striking blueeyes, and his large, aquiline nose, rather than detracting from his appearance,made him look distinguished. He was a naturally gracefulman. In group conversation, he was witty and ebullient, and in one-ononediscussion he was capable of creating a rare intimacy. He was alsovery much the proud papa, affectionate toward his large brood.With Vail was his second wife, the writer Kay Boyle, a beautiful andpatrician American who had managed to curb her husband"s scenes bythrowing impressive ones of her own. Kay was at the hotel with theothers reluctantly. She spent the rest of the week in a Lisbon clinic, supposedlybecause of a sinus infection but really to escape family turmoil.Kay intended to divorce Laurence as soon as she got to the States and tomarry her new lover, an Austrian baron named Joseph Franckenstein.Between Peggy and Kay there was no love lost. Kay had urged Laurenceto obtain custody of their two children by any means possible, includingdredging up some nasty gossip about Peggy"s family in an attemptto prove that all Guggenheim women were crazy, unfit mothers.Laurence eventually won custody of their son, Sindbad, and inevitablyKay and Peggy fought a tug of war over him and later, over Laurenceand Peggy"s daughter, Pegeen.In Estoril, the assorted children, however appreciative of the dramaof their situation, were themselves going through difficult passages, especiallyPeggy"s children, Sindbad and Pegeen, eighteen and sixteen respectively.Pegeen, a beautiful blond girl who projected a lost, otherworldlyvulnerability, inherited her mother"s mannerisms, including ahabit of drawing her mouth inward and downward when she laughed.She had bonded deeply with Kay and defended her stepmother"s actions—which was hard on Peggy. And Sindbad told Kay, "You haven"t onlyruined one man"s life. You"ve ruined two!" With Kay"s departure, hefelt that he was losing the only real mother he knew. Sindbad, with soulful,large eyes, was darkly handsome, having inherited the paternal, notthe maternal, nose. This summer, he was obsessed with losing his virginity,a burden he did not want to bring to America. The adults madethis a topic of much amused conversation—Peggy urged her son toforswear the local girls, from whom he might acquire a venereal disease.One member of the group, Pegeen"s close friend Jacqueline Ventadour,fifteen, had fallen in love with Sindbad, creating another subjectfor gossip among the adults. But Sindbad was still in love with YvonneKuhn (the sister of Pegeen"s first lover) from the previous summer atLake Annecy in the French Alps, and paid no notice to Jacqueline"s attentions.The fourth adult in the ménage was the surrealist artist Max Ernst,Peggy"s latest lover. She had met the German painter just two monthsbefore in Marseilles, when they were all arranging for their departuresfor the United States. Peggy had fallen in love with the strikingly handsomeMax, who, with his long whitish blond locks, piercing blue eyes,and beaky nose, closely resembled a younger Laurence. Max had allowedPeggy to take him in tow, grateful to her for making it possiblefor him to get an emergency exit visa, despite a stay in a French internmentcamp, as well as for paying his way—for which Peggy, driving ahard bargain, got her pick of his artworks. Yet Max was inscrutable.Sometimes boisterous, he could also be frigid and taciturn, emittingwaves of European displeasure. With his aloof manner, he kept Peggyguessing. A believer in personal anarchy, he introduced a wild, unpredictablenote into a household that already contained enough conflict tokeep it at the brink of chaos. On this Sunday, his hair was dyed blue—he had soaked it in mouthwash—to the children"s delight and thegrownups" titillation; yet he made no reference to the hue of his hair.Max could be a little frightening, especially to the children; just thatmorning, Kay and Laurence"s daughter, the twelve-year-old Apple, hadseen him naked in front of the mirror in his room, solemnly applyingthe blue to his hair.Peggy was dismayed by what she felt was Max"s lingering affectionfor the English painter Leonora Carrington, who had turned up in Lis-bon independently. Yet, as she wrote in her memoir, "I soon had a definitefeeling that my life with [Max] was not yet over." One eveningPeggy and Max went over to nearby Cascais, and Peggy took a nudemidnight swim: Max implored her to come out of the water, as the seaat night looked threatening and the sight of the naked Peggy bobbing inthe black waves frightened him. Afterward, Peggy dried herself withher chemise and they made love on the rocks. Repairing to a nearbychichi hotel bar, Peggy hung her chemise on the bar railing to dry asthey sipped their brandy. "Max loved my unconventionalities," Peggylater recorded.That evening in late June, Peggy sat, as was her custom, at the headof the great table, with Max on one side and Laurence on the other. Kay,sitting next to the various children, tended to them and generally ignoredthe other adults, though at one point she piped up to tell Peggyshe had heard a rumor that the ship carrying Peggy"s art collection tothe United States had sunk, a malicious remark she repeated severaltimes during the group"s long wait in Portugal. Peggy had been greatlyrelieved when she saw her collection off for America, but now her reliefgave way to worry about its safe passage. Her father had gone downwith the Titanic, and Peggy had a deep mistrust of boats."Our life in the hotel was rather strange," Peggy later wrote fondly.She hugely enjoyed the confusion their seating arrangement caused thehotel staff. "No one knew whose wife I was or what connection Kay . . .had with us," Peggy wrote. Once, the hotel"s head porter—nicknamed,by Laurence, Edward the Seventh, because of his resemblance to theEnglish king—took a telephone call from Peggy with informationabout when her train would arrive in Estoril. "[H]e guessed mydilemma and, not knowing to whom I wanted the message delivered,went to the dining room and facing both Laurence and Max, said impersonally,"Madam arrives on the nine o"clock train.""It was no accident that Peggy took the presiding post at the table. Itwas she who was paying the $550 Clipper fare (roughly more than$6,000 in today"s currency) for everyone in her party, with the exceptionof Jacqueline Ventadour. In Marseilles, the wartime hub of visa activityand travel arrangements for those seeking to leave Europe, shehad arranged for her party"s travel documents and for money from theBanque de France to be transferred to her account, and she made surethat everyone"s passports registered the sums.What this footloose, unconventional, gypsyish collection of expatri-ates had in common was Peggy. She was the glue that held them together.The entire band would be going to America because they had to, notbecause they wanted to. Peggy, Kay, and Laurence—Laurence especially,having grown up in Europe—had adapted themselves to expatriatelife. They viewed the United States (from a distance) as commercialisticand tawdry, devoted exclusively to business. Max was essentiallystateless and had been for some time; there was no place for him in Germanyor in any other European country for that matter. He would gowhere the winds of change carried him. Peggy, however much she mayhave dreaded revisiting the city of her childhood, had been frustratedby the shutdown of her artistic efforts by the war and saw only possibilityin a new life in America. She and her collection, she hoped, wouldfind a worthy home, and Peggy could continue a life among artists andother creative people.It was in Europe that Peggy Guggenheim had asserted her independenceand begun to sketch out a role for herself as a patron, collector,and occasional savior to a generation of modernists.With her marriageto Laurence at twenty-four in 1922, Peggy had put behind herwhat she considered a ridiculously conventional and confining destinyas the daughter of a prominent family in New York"s old guard German-Jewish elite, exchanging it for a life among artists and writers inEurope. Marriage to Laurence was a round of adventures, but many ofthem were sordid.Too often, Peggy felt she was living the life of the idlerich, and she wanted more—to be engagée, actively on the scene ofartistic or literary production. Divorcing Laurence, she had moved on tothe man she considered the love of her life, John Holms, a would-bewriter and literary critic, and they surrounded themselves with writers,most notably Djuna Barnes and British critics such as Edwin Muir.Peggy was trying out possible destinies for a woman of independentmeans in the twentieth century. Not until she turned forty, in 1938,four and a half years after Holms"s sudden death, had she begun to seeher way. She opened a London art gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, whichbecame, despite her inexperience, an overnight success. For two yearsPeggy exhibited the best in modern art, giving shows to Tanguy andKandinsky and displaying sculpture by Brancusi, Moore, Arp, Calder,and Pevsner, among others, developing the habit of buying at least onepiece from every show.When the gallery failed to realize a profit, sheclosed its doors and attempted to open a museum of modern art in Lon-don, setting a higher goal for herself. She came to collecting motivatedin part by economics, reasoning that in Europe"s threatening climateartwork could be had for rock-bottom prices. With an eye towardamassing a personal collection that could be the basis for her museum,she took advice from Marcel Duchamp, who had assisted her at GuggenheimJeune, and later from Howard Putzel, an astute American artdealer, and set out to buy, as she put it, "a picture a day."In France, with invasion threatening after the outbreak of war,Peggy gave up the idea of a museum—for the time being—and puther collection in storage. She roamed around the country, toying withthe idea of opening an artists" colony but really marking time until herdeparture became inevitable. When she had turned forty, coincidentalwith the start of her career as an art patron, Peggy had begun to takelovers. She chose them from the literary and artistic milieux she knew;they included, among others, Samuel Beckett (perhaps the closest shecame to a true match), Tanguy, Brancusi, the British surrealist JulianTrevelyan, and James Joyce"s son, Giorgio. Some of these affairs weremore difficult than others, but sexual freedom energized Peggy andgave her a new vitality. All the while she supported—financially—hergrowing and colorful caravan of family and protégés, including DjunaBarnes, Laurence Vail, the anarchofeminist Emma Goldman, and now,in Portugal, Max Ernst. Sometimes the world whispered, and she heardthe whispers. But she chose to disregard conventional morality and thegossip of those who seemed to her excessively narrow-minded andprudish.Peggy had come to Europe twenty-one years before and, except forvery occasional family visits, she had never looked back. In June 1941,from her temporary perch outside Lisbon, America loomed disconcertinglyahead again. In a sense, she was following her art collection, forincreasingly that was what defined her. It gave her confidence, a gift toone whose life thus far had been riddled with personal insecurity.Though she had little inkling of what awaited her in New York, and noidea of the full role she had yet to play in twentieth-century art, sheknew she would have to rely on that confidence.Copyright © 2004 by Mary V. Dearborn. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-making "happening" at the center of its time. Dearborn's unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight into Peggy's traumatic childhood in German-Jewish "Our Crowd" New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy's last years as l'ultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Dearborn celebrates Guggenheim, the iconoclastic doyenne of abstract expressionism, in this appreciative, thorough biography. Born in 1898 to a "poor" branch of the family, Guggenheim moved to Europe in 1920, where she befriended such modernist notables as Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp. After two failed marriages (to alcoholic, volatile writers), Guggenheim began to collect surrealist and other modern art seriously, opening the Guggenheim Jeune in London in 1938. During WWII, she preserved numerous artworks and artists by getting them to the U.S.; she also began a long, turbulent relationship with Max Ernst. In wartime New York, Guggenheim opened Art of This Century; the explosively popular gallery brought fame to Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell and others. Dearborn, who has authored biographies of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, underscores Guggenheim's professional achievements, but salacious details and physical descriptions of her infamous nose, her delicate ankles sometimes win out over character analysis and art history. Although Dearborn seems to rely a good deal on Guggenheim's sensational 1946 autobiography, Out of This Century, which publicized her artists and myriad lovers alike, her research and interviews with family and friends add rich, gossipy detail about the heiress's life. With its fluid prose and provocative subject, this book will appeal to art lovers interested in more than the paint. B&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

After Mailer and Miller, why not take on cultural doyenne Guggenheim? Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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