Review by Choice Review
Peggy Guggenheim played a key role in the world of 20th-century art. She was a patron blessed with a keen eye, plenty of money and nerve, and more than a flair for the dramatic. Her artists constitute a Who's Who of Modernity: Duchamp, Arp, Breton, Ernst, Pollock. In this comprehensive and enjoyable book, Weld offers a unique social history of the art of our times. Carefully researched, adequately illustrated, Peggy is most welcome relief for readers who have been led to believe modern art is just movements and bone-dry facts. It is the personal side of art that shines forth on these pages. All libraries.-A.C. Birnholz, SUNY at Buffalo
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
This vivid portrait of the bohemian art collector reveals a whole genealogy of unconventional behavior. (F 15 86)
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After years of playing dutiful wife or confidante to a string of men, Peggy Guggenheim found herself alone and bored with domestic life. She turned to collecting modern art, partly because it was a sure attention-getter, partly to vex her bourgeois mother and partly out of genuine interest. Besides introducing the European avant-garde to America, she helped discover American artists like Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell. This study, written with Guggenheim's cooperation until her death in 1979, is the first biogrpahy of a remarkable woman. Weld evenhandedly catalogues Guggenheim's lovers, husbands, scandals. She shows the flaws of a woman disliked by some for her abrasive tongue and bitchiness, but whose energy, conviction and farsightedness helped transform modern art. Weld tells many intriguing stories: how Guggenheim walked out on her first husband, leaving behind a note (``Life too hellish''); how she helped underwrite Emma Goldman's autobiography; her husband-to-be Max Ernst's close brush with the Nazis. This candid, engrossing biography is also a dynamic cultural history, for Guggenheim's life intersected with many creative personalitiesBeckett, Joyce, Arp, Cocteau, Duchamp, Ray, Breton, Picabia, Cage. Photos. February 17 (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Based on lengthy interviews with Peggy Guggenheim, her relatives, friends, and associates, this portrait reveals a woman of contradictions: scandalous yet shy, witty and intelligent but considered stupid and not taken seriously by acquaintances. Weld also creates a vivid picture of the bohemian life of the artistic and literary intelligentsia that surrounded Peggy, although the recitation of everyone's sexual escapades becomes a bit tedious. From a troubled life emerges a major proponent and collector of modern art. Because countless artists and writers played a part in Peggy's life, readers should have some prior familiarity with them. Though truth and legend seem blurred at times, this book nonetheless makes an interesting companion to Peggy's own memoirs, Confessions of an Art Addict and Out of This Century . Lynell A. Morr, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art Lib., Sarasota, Fla. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Long, steady, sober biography of America's ever-more-ravaged art-lover, painter-collector, and eccentric millionairess Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy was born into ""Our Crowd,"" the wealthiest Jews in New York at the turn of the century. Her mother and father were ever at war over his philandering--until he went down, dressed to the hilt, on The Titanic. He'd had business losses and Peggy found herself a poor rich girl with only $450,000 in her personal trust fund. Never going to school, she and her two sisters were lonely children and were raised in horror of the poor immigrant Jews flooding the US. Among her friends, a really good marriage was to a truly wealthy gentile, and so Peggy never had a Jewish lover until--at 51--she fell for Raoul, a Jewish Tarzan in Venice. He joined a long list of her promiscuous conquests, mainly artists, the most famous of whom probably was Max Ernst, who, fearful of poverty, married her. Shy, reclusive, with big begging cerulean eyes (and a nose that grew very large and bulbous as the years passed), Peggy sailed for Europe at 21 and didn't come back for over 20 flamboyant years, during which she'd become a famed art addict, party-giver and seductress. Returning, she brought her collection of Dada and Surrealist works, and with it opened what became the most influential American gallery in the 20th century. Her interests expanded to the unknown young American painters--whom she discovered and supported--including Motherwell, Rothko, Still, Hofmann and especially Jackson Pollock--and who became the Abstract Expressionists, a group reviled by established dealers. Her support of Pollock was double-edged. She collected his entire output each year (but for one canvas), in return for her rather minimal financial support, and some think she took Pollock for a ride. Her later and twilight years were spent in Venice, where she opened a famous gallery in her home, gave parties and put together a traveling collection. She had no center, only things. Earlier, when she'd visited Picasso's studio to buy a painting, he'd told her contemptuously, ""Lingerie is on the next floor."" Bizarre, absorbing, but uninspired bio. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
