Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

Daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, Peggy Guggenheim loses her father in the shipwreck of the Titanic at the age of 16. Her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, is instead the founder of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

At the age of 20 she starts working in a New York library and attending important cultural gatherings, where she also meets Laurence Vail, painter of the Dadaist movement thanks to whom she makes her way into the art world and that she will marry in Paris in 1922.

In January 1938 she opens in London, along with Jean Cocteau, the Guggenheim Jeune: it’s the first of a long series of collections that will make her the most important supporter of the European avant-garde in the world.

With the advance of the German army towards Paris, the American collector decides to leave the city (she’s Jewish) and go back to New York, where in 1942 she will open the Art of This Century gallery. Among the unknown artists of the collection there’s Jackson Pollock. Thanks to her activity of art dealer, Pollock and other American artists will get in contact with the European avant-garde, in particular with the Surrealism.

In 1948 she buys the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Canal Grande in Venice, where she moves her collection permanently, calling it, since 1949, Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

The talented director Lisa Immordino Vreeland - Diana Vreeland’s granddaughter - decided to realize a documentary which tracks all the most important moments of her life, entirely dedicated to her visceral passion for art: Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015).

It wasn’t easy to bring such a complex personality on the big screen: “When I started working on the film I knew all the truth about Peggy’s life but I had never put all the pieces together. We wondered what the passionate people would have wanted to see, how to show art through her eyes” the director confesses.

In her 81 years of life Peggy demonstrated an immense altruism: bringing art among people through her public collections, and putting her confidence in emerging artists who later became – thanks to her contribution – myths of contemporary art.