Confessions of an Art Addict (17 page)

The workmen had been very nice all the time they worked in the garden, in spite of the fact that they had completely upset our life. We were in perpetual danger of falling into pits, being covered in dust, or being deafened by the noise of machines. A fifteenth-century well came to light during the excavations, as did also part of a house of the last century. Wanting to show my appreciation of the workmen, I asked the builder what I should do for them, and he said that at the termination of the building operations I should give them what is called a
granzega
, meaning a dinner party. It was a great success, held in June in the garden of my favourite restaurant near the Accademia. We were eighteen to twenty people, and the architect's wife and I were the only women present. We drank a lot and got very gay. I moved from one guest to another in order to talk to them all. They sang songs and one played a mandolin. Suddenly I remembered my guest-book, and sent home for it. When it came, they all signed their names, and the partner of the builder turned out to be a poet and wrote a lovely poem for me, in which he called me the Lioness, in honour of the name of my palazzo. The architect, Passero, made a lovely drawing of the
barchessa.
The next morning, when I woke and looked in my guest-book, I found my addition to all my
guests' signatures. The following words were written in a very wobbly handwriting: ‘The nicest night of my life in Venice, 1948–58, Peggy G.'

I gave a second
granzega
in the fall, at the termination of the second building. It was held in the same restaurant but because of the season was not in the garden. Maybe for this reason it was not so pleasant. In fact, it was a complete let-down. I presume one cannot repeat such a marvellous soirée. But if the second party was not such a success, the second building definitely was. The
barchessa
was now large enough to permit me to place all my Surrealist paintings and sculptures in it. I removed them from a very overcrowded corridor in my palazzo, and also took this occasion to rehang everything in my home, as well as finally deciding not to admit the public to my library and sitting-room any more. I painted both rooms white, instead of the dirty dark blue I had suffered for ten years, and felt that a new life was commencing.

I had many times put off returning to America, where I had not been for twelve years. Instead I had been to Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, India, Ceylon, Lebanon, Syria,
Greece, Corfu, Turkey, Ireland, England, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Austria, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and Tangiers. I had always said I would return to New York for the opening of my Uncle Solomon's museum, When my uncle died, several years ago, his nephew, Harry Guggenheim, took over the museum and the Baroness Rebay, the former curator, was replaced by my great friend James Johnson Sweeney. This was a great blessing for the museum. I had been expecting it to open sometime in the winter of 1959, and was prepared to go to New York at any moment. However, at Christmas my friends, the Cardiffs, invited me to visit them in Mexico, where Maurice Cardiff was stationed as cultural attaché to the British Embassy. I had met them in Italy, in 1948, when he was posted in Milan, and once followed them to Cyprus. I now was delighted to go to see them in Mexico, which was much more exciting than New York, though I intended to go there on my way home.

It was a most marvellous trip. Maurice and I went to Yucatan, where we saw the most fantastic ruins at Palenque, which is set deep in the jungle and really seems to be out of this world. It was so inaccessible we could only go there by helicopter, which took us forty minutes. Then we had to make an enormous climb up many steep steps. Of everything that I saw in this one month, Palenque was by far the most exciting. The setting was wild and beautiful and the sculpture and the architecture
thrilling. In fact, the ruins were more beautiful than any I have seen anywhere. After this, I went to Oaxaca, Pueblo, Acapulco, Tasco, Guernavaca and many other places. However, this is not the place to write about my trip, as I must confine myself to modern art.

Let me first of all say how much I hate the enormous frescoes of Diego Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros that one sees in all official buildings in Mexico—and how much I like Tamayo, but even better, two remarkable women painters, Frida Kalo, Diego Rivera's wife, and Leonora Carrington, who now lives in Mexico City. She is still very beautiful, and is married to a Hungarian photographer and has two lovely little sons. She is now quite a well-established painter and her work has greatly developed. She still paints animals and birds rather resembling Bosch's, but nevertheless her work is very personal. There were no other painters of interest, though all the galleries in Mexico seemed to be flourishing.

Frida Kalo is dead and her home has been turned into a museum. I was familiar with her work, having included her in my women's shows, realizing how gifted she was in the true Surrealist tradition. Her museum was very touching and very sad. One felt how much she must have suffered in this home, where she was to die from a spinal injury caused in a motor accident in her youth, which had practically invalided her for life. Many of her pictures dealt with physical sufferings and her various operations to cure her spinal condition, none of which were
successful. We felt an atmosphere of tragedy on another plane. We saw her invalid's chair, in which she painted to the end. There could have been no love between Diego Rivera and Frida at the end of her life.

Diego Rivera, at his death, left no money to his children, who nevertheless adore him. Instead, he left a fortune to be used to build a monument to himself designed by himself. It is in the suburbs of Mexico City, in a forlorn spot surrounded by houses of poor squatters. In this pyramid, which is a bad imitation of a Mayan ruin, will be placed not only Rivera's bones, but also many of his paintings and his collection of pre-Columbian art.

When I got to New York, it was still too soon for the opening of the Guggenheim Museum. Sweeney had warned me of this, but I decided to go anyway, on my way back to Venice. Sweeney asked my cousin Harry Guggenheim to show me over the museum. I had not seen him for thirty-five years and was delighted to have this occasion to do so. I was also delighted, when I got back from Venice, to receive a letter in which he said:

‘Before your arrival, and before we had a chance to become reacquainted after all these years, I had the general feeling that perhaps some day you might want to leave your collection to the Foundation to be housed in the new Frank Lloyd Wright Museum. However, after thinking the matter through, I most sincerely believe that your Foundation and your palace, which has, thanks to your initiative, become world-renowned, should, after
your death, be bequeathed, as you have planned, to Italy. I think that is the appropriate place for it, and I think from the family point of view—which I confess is always uppermost in my mind, this plan would be the most beneficial. I do hope while you were over here you were able to make progress with your plans.

‘May you continue, in great success, in your life dedicated to the progress of art, and also get lots of pleasure and fun from it.'

Harry seemed to take his responsibilities very seriously and obviously had had great difficulties as a buffer between what he referred to as ‘two egotistical geniuses', Sweeney and Wright, the latter then a very old man. I did not envy Harry his position, but I completely sided with Sweeney against Wright who, I am certain, like Kiesler, was not interested in the pictures, but only in his architecture.

Two people could not have been more at loggerheads than Sweeney and Wright. Poor Sweeney, who inherited this millstone along with his job as director of the museum, is an absolute purist about display—in fact, he is a fanatic. The interior of his home resembles a Mondrian painting. Luckily Wright died while I was in New York, and I presume this cleared the air and left Sweeney with less difficulties.

The museum resembles a huge garage. It is built on a site that is inadequate for its size and looks very cramped, suffering from its nearness to adjacent buildings. It should
have been placed on a hill in the Park; instead it is on the wrong side of Fifth Avenue. Around an enormous space intended for sculpture displays, the rising ramp, Wright's famous invention, coils like an evil serpent. The walls bend backward, and a cement platform keeps one at a respectful distance from the pictures. Nothing could be more difficult than viewing them at this angle. Eventually they will be placed on brackets extending from the walls. It is amazing how Kiesler's ideas have been copied. The colours were very ugly, beige in some places, white in others. But I felt, somehow, that Sweeney with his genius would eventually overcome all the difficulties and the museum would be all right. Nevertheless, I much preferred my modest
barchessa
in Venice, and for the first time I did not regret the enormous fortune I had lost when my father left his brothers to go into his own business, a few years before he was drowned on the
Titanic.

My best day in America was spent visiting the Barnes collection and the Philadelphia Museum, ending up for cocktails in the modern apartment of Ben Heller, the art collector. Rather a heavy programme for one day, which also included a midnight party.

I was escorted to the Barnes Foundation by my friend Robert Brady, who had once been a pupil there. He obtained a special invitation for me, as I was leaving in a few days. He was not admitted with me, as his invitation was for a fortnight later. It was the first time that I had
asked to visit the collection. The house, situated in a lovely park, is not very large or modern, but this marvellous collection is unbelievable. The place is not in any way considered as a museum. The pictures are intended to be shown only to art students and are taken down from the walls when being studied. Miss Violette de Mazia presides as hostess and teacher. She was very kind and hospitable, but when I asked her for a catalogue she seemed very shocked. It took half an hour to get used to the arrangement of the pictures. I have never seen so many masterpieces assembled in such confusion, at times five rows deep. There were about twenty small rooms, apart from the large hall. Here, in a gallery above, there was a large series of paintings by Matisse, done specially for the space. One had to concentrate with all one's will-power to look at each picture in turn, as the surrounding ones were so close. There were about two hundred and forty Renoirs, one hundred and twenty Cézannes, forty-three Matisses, thirty Picassos, twenty Douanier Rousseaus, twelve Seurats, twenty-five Soutines, as well as paintings by Modigliani, Manet, Monet, Daumier, Van Gogh, Courbet, Klee, Vlaminck, Degas, Jean Hugo, Laurens, Utrillo, Braque, and Derain. There were also some old masters, like Titian, Tintoretto, Cranach, van de Velde and Franz Hals. Another room contained old American furniture, and another was filled with pre-Columbian sculpture and jewellery. The walls were dotted everywhere with early-American wrought-iron
arabesques. I was permitted to remain two hours, though I could have stayed a month. I went around two or three times, and at the end Robert Brady slipped in unnoticed.

Completely exhausted and overwhelmed by what I had seen, I nevertheless proceeded to the Philadelphia Museum to see the Arensberg and Gallatin collections in their new setting. I was enormously impressed by Henry Clifford's installation. Apart from this, the museum had innumerable other treasures and I wandered around through a part of the Indian temple of Madura, a Chinese palace hall, a Japanese tea-house, a Japanese scholar's study, the cloister of St Michel de Cuxa, from Toulouse, the fountain of St Genis des Fontaines, as well as Italian, French and English interiors, all brought to America like the Scottish castle in the Robert Donat movie,
The Ghost Goes West.

After such a day, it seemed a fitting climax to take cocktails surrounded by Pollocks, Philip Gustons, Stamos, Rothkos, in the home of Mr and Mrs Ben Heller and in the company of Mr and Mrs Bernard Reis, outstanding collectors themselves, and with Lee Pollock. The Hellers' apartment is dedicated to their collection. They have taken down walls in order to make space for Pollock's fabulous painting called ‘Blue Poles'. In fact, they moved from a lovelier place, because here, on Central Park West, they have more room. The flat is so bare that it looks half-way between a sanctuary and a hospital. This is the prescribed way of life for those who dedicate themselves
to modern art, and the Hellers are not the only victims.

In the twelve years I had been away from New York everything had changed. I was thunderstruck, the entire art movement had become an enormous business venture. Only a few persons really care for paintings. The rest buy them from snobbishness or to avoid taxation, presenting pictures to museums and being allowed to keep them until their death, a way of having your cake and eating it. Some painters cannot afford to sell more than a few paintings a year, as now they are the people to be taxed. Prices are unheard of. People only buy what is the most expensive, having no faith in anything else. Some buy merely for investment, placing pictures in storage without even seeing them, phoning their gallery every day for the latest quotation, as though they were waiting to sell stock at the most advantageous moment. Painters whose work I had sold with difficulty for six hundred dollars now received twelve thousand. Someone even tried to sell me a Brancusi head for forty-five thousand dollars. Lee Pollock kept all Pollock's paintings in storage and did not even want to sell to museums.

I could not afford to buy anything that I wanted, so I turned to another field, that is, after a few artists were very kind to me and made me special prices. I began buying pre-Columbian art. In the next few weeks I found myself the proud possessor of twelve fantastic artefacts, consisting of totem poles, masks and sculptures from New Guinea, the Belgian Congo, the French Sudan, Peru,
Brazil, Mexico, and New Ireland. It reminded me, in reverse, of the days after Max had left our home, when he came back in the afternoons, while I was in the gallery, and removed his treasures one by one from the walls. Now they all seemed to be returning. I even succumbed to the dangerous little Mr Carlebach, who had formerly sold so many things to Max in New York, and who now had a magnificent gallery on Madison Avenue. His prices had doubled, but at least they were still possible.