Peggy Guggenheim lounging on her bed with Calder headboard behind.
Photo: Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
Lisa Immordino-Vreeland’s 90-minute documentary about the legendary art collector, which debuted earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival, is screening the next two weeks at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center.
The director is well-versed in profiling strong-willed women; her last feature concerned her husband’s grandmother, Diana Vreeland, who was a legendary magazine editor as well as a consultant at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Her latest film, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is based in large part on an audio-recording of the last interview Guggenheim ever gave, which was captured by biographer Jacqueline B. Weld in the late seventies. “I am not an art collector. I am a museum,” Guggenheim reportedly said.
Peggy Guggenheim for Look (1966).
Photo: Tony Vaccaro, courtesy of www.dolice.com.
Although Guggenheim’s name may be synonymous with art, the film also shines a spotlight on her other passion. “I think I was sort of a nymphomaniac,” Guggenheim admitted in the film, referring to her many sexual exploits.
Guggenheim opened her first gallery in Paris, later branching out to London and New York. There, she ran the Art of This Century gallery, championing Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Robert De Niro Sr., among others. Ultimately, she settled in Venice, where her palazzo has housed her extensive collection of works by major abstract artists, and a selection of early 20th-century Italian art.
“I soon knew where every painting in Europe could be found and I managed to get there, even if I had to spend hours going to a little country town to see only one,” Guggenheim wrote in her autobiography.
Peggy Guggenheim with her children Sindbad and Pegeen in 1934.
Photo: via Pinterest.
Guggenheim has been in the news of late thanks to an ongoing dispute between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (named for her uncle) and her heirs over the management of her collection.
Last month, her 23-year-old grandson, Santiago Rumney Guggenheim, attempted to follow in her footsteps by opening a gallery of his own in Brooklyn.
The film will be screening four times a day through Thursday, November 12, with one daily 4:45 p.m. showing November 13–19.