Page 499 - The Secret Museum

VENICE IS THE DREAMIEST CITY on earth. Everything there is floating, suspended.

During the day, tourists crowd the city but, by night, it is eerily quiet. On the night I
arrived, I walked the streets, seeing barely a soul. I felt as though I were in an
enchanted city.

It’s the same at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal in Venice.

By day, art lovers cram into Peggy Guggenheim’s former home, drawn as much by
the mystique of the lady herself as by her stunning collection of modern art. By night,
only the paintings remain, and they settle down, into the quiet of the night time city,
wearing their pyjamas.

Yes, most drawings and paintings in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and some
of the sculptures, have their own pair of pyjamas. Each pair is beige and adorned
with a sketch of the painting it clothes each night. They protect the works of art from

the dazzling light that glitters off the canal each morning when the members of staff
first arrive at the museum and pull open the blinds. Then the pyjamas are taken off,
the doors unlocked and the crowds arrive.

Just outside the Pollock Room is a staircase that leads down to the basement. It is
cordoned off with a metal gate and a sign that reads ‘Private/Privato’. I met Grazina
Subelyte, curatorial assistant at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection there. She opened
the gate and we went down the stone stairs and unlocked the door to the room the
staff at the museum nickname ‘the bunker’.

Waiting for us inside was Siro De Boni, from Chioggia, a coastal town in the

Veneto region, who has worked at the museum for decades and knows the paintings
as if they were his family. Inside the bunker lives almost half of Peggy Guggenheim’s
collection: all the things there is no room to display, or which are too fragile to be
kept in the light.

One of the most fragile pieces in the entire collection is Marcel Duchamp’s Box in
a Valise, a suitcase containing a box filled with 69 replicas and reproductions of the
artist’s works in miniature. The suitcase itself lives inside a grey box on a shelf. Siro
pulled the box down and laid it on a table. He lifted the lid and revealed a Louis

Vuitton case, about the size of a briefcase. Then, he opened it.
It was such fun to see what was inside. Reproductions of 69 of Marcel Duchamp’s
favourite works are in there, but they are all tiny. It’s as if they ate the mushroom in

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and then were packed away out of sight.

I laughed when I saw a teeny version of his most famous work: the white urinal he
called Fountain, put inside a gallery and called art. With this strange and bold move,
he created conceptual art. No longer could an artist get away with just painting and
drawing what they saw; after Duchamp, they needed a concept, an idea.

The urinal was one of a series of conceptual pieces he called Readymades. Other
mini versions of those works are glued on to the lid as well, so that they hang in a
vertical gallery. There is a tiny glass chemist’s bottle filled with air from Paris and a