Art: Temptations of Peggy

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Temptation of Peggu

When tense, ink-haired Heiress Peggy Guggenheim opened a modern art gallery in Manhattan (TIME, Nov. 2, 1942), few realized how well qualified she was. In an all-too-frank autobiography published this week (Out of This Century; Dial Press; $3.75), Peggy makes her qualifications clear.

Stylistically her book is as flat and wit less as a harmonica rendition of the Liebestod, but it does furnish a few peeks —between boudoir blackouts — at some of the men who make art a mystery.

Collecting Art & Artists. Peggy did not become seriously interested in modern art until 1937, when she was 39. To learn what it was all about she went to see Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp. "Every woman in Paris wanted to sleep with him," she confides. "His particular vice was ugly mistresses." Duchamp passed her on to Sculptor Hans Arp, "an excellent poet and a most amusing man. . . . The first thing I bought for my collection was an Arp bronze. . . .

The instant I felt it I wanted to own it." With her new-found knowledge Peggy opened a gallery in London, cutely called "Guggenheim Jeune." Among her first exhibitors were Arp ("He served me break fast every morning"), Kandinsky ("So jolly and charming, with a horrid wife"), and Yves Tanguy ("He had . . . beautiful little feet of which he was very proud"). Tanguy, who painted deserts strewn with elaborate bones, made her happy sometimes. "There was one drawing that looked so much like me I made him give it to me," she says. "It had a little feather in place of a tail, and eyes that looked like the china eyes of a doll when its head is broken. . . . Tanguy also designed a little phallic drawing for my cigaret lighter which he had Dunhill engrave. It is the smallest Tanguy in the world."

Gradually Peggy built up an outstanding collection of modern art. Some of it was hard to get. "It is very difficult to talk prices to [the abstract sculptor] Brancusi. ... I was aware of this and hoped my excessive friendship with him would make things easier. But . . .we ended up in a terrible row, when he asked four thousand dollars for the Bird in Space. . . . Brancusi polished all his sculptures by hand. I think that is the main reason why they are so beautiful."

Alien Sin. The war brought Peggy and Surrealist Max Ernst together in Marseilles. Says she: "He had white hair and big blue eyes and a handsome, beaklike nose resembling a bird's. He was exquisitely made. . . . When I began my affair with Max Ernst it was not serious but soon I discovered that I was in love with him." They fled to the U.S. together, and while Ernst painted feathered nudes, Peggy got her Manhattan gallery under way.

They were married after Pearl Harbor, because Ernst was German and Peggy "did not like the idea of living in sin with an enemy alien. . . . Max could not understand English and when he was asked to wed me, he understood wet, which he repeated."