Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is a fascinating documentary that lifts the lid on a woman with a famous name who didn’t play by the rules. It reveals she loved art and sex, not necessarily in that order.
Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim, who lived from August 26th, 1898 to December 23th, 1979 was not only ahead of her time, but helped to define modern art. She not only collected art but artists, whom she helped forge their respective paths in life. She was the first to recognise Jackson Pollock, among others. She was the first to stage an all-women’s exhibition.
This is Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s follow up her acclaimed debut Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel. Vreeland was an art history major and, as such, always interested in Peggy Guggenheim. She’d read her autobiography, Out of This Century, when she was at school and found her to be a courageous woman who wanted to do something with her life at the relatively late age of 40. As a younger person Guggenheim wasn’t happy within the confines of her own traditional family and wanted to step out from that. It was the transformation that followed that Vreeland found interesting. She threw herself into an avant-garde circle of artists.
The movie is framed around a lost interview with Guggenheim that Guggenheim conducted late in her life. Vreeland optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorised biography of Guggenheim, which was published after she died. The author had spent two summers interviewing Guggenheim but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Not only did Weld have a great deal of access to her subject, but also to other people who had known her – she interviewed more than 200 people for her tome. Weld gave Vreeland access to all her original research except for the lost tapes. Then one day while Vreeland was looking through boxes in Weld’s basement, “bingo”, the tapes showed up in a shoebox. It was the longest interview Guggenheim had ever done.
We hear Peggy talking, frail though she may be. And Weld was good at asking provocative questions. Around that are featured interviews with artists and critics and people who knew Peggy Guggenheim, along with beautiful footage and still photographs of the time when she lived.
Vreeland has crafted a compelling picture, broken sequentially into the different time frames in her life, when she moved from place to place and established a succession of much talked about galleries. It is a story of enlightenment, about an emancipated woman who most certainly had her eccentricities, but someone who was way ahead of her time. I loved the richness of character and the insights that Vreeland has revealed. I was left thirsting for more and more knowledge and understanding of this remarkable person about whom I knew nothing before entering the cinema.
Surely that is a tell tale sign that Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is a captivating piece of work for an adult audience that appreciates art. Rated M, it scores a 7½ out of 10.
Director: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Release Date: 26 December 2015 (limited)
Rating: M
Alex First
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television