Page 501 - The Secret Museum

advice.

Peggy decided to open a gallery at 30 Cork Street in London called Guggenheim

Jeune. The first show consisted of works by Jean Cocteau. The only way she could
speak to the artist was to talk to him while he lay in bed smoking opium. ‘The odour
was extremely pleasant, though this seemed an odd way of doing our business,’ she
said. Duchamp hung the show and made it look beautiful.

London hadn’t seen anything like Cocteau’s abstract, Surrealist art before, and
sales were slow. Peggy bought his art under a fake name to cheer the artist up:
‘That’s how the collection began.’

She continued to develop her eye for modern art thanks to a brief affair with the
writer Samuel Beckett: ‘He told me one had to accept the art of our day as it was a
living thing’.

The second exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune was the first one-man show in

England of Kandinsky’s work – again, Duchamp introduced her to the artist. Next up
was a sculpture exhibition including sculptors Duchamp knew – Brancusi, Henry
Moore, Jean Arp and Alexander Calder.

The gallery became a hip place to be. Peggy Guggenheim showed all the top
contemporary artists and found talent in its embryonic stage. She even had an eye for
artists who were still children. During a show of children’s art, she included the
paintings of her own daughter, Pegeen, and showed works by Lucian Freud. In her
autobiography she says ‘At the last minute Freud’s daughter-in-law brought in some

paintings done by Freud’s grandchild Lucian,’ she recalled. ‘One was of three naked
men running upstairs. I think it was a portrait of Freud.’ Peggy also showed Birds in
a Tree, which Lucian Freud drew in crayon when he was seven. His mother Lucie
kept the drawing, which was exhibited once again in London in 2012.

As the Second World War began, Peggy Guggenheim was in Paris. As the Nazis
advanced and people began to flee the city, she bought a painting a day. Some of the
masterpieces of her collection – by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí
and Piet Mondrian – were bought in those days. She astonished Fernand Léger by

buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired
Brancusi’s Bird in Space as the Germans neared Paris.
Two days before the invasion of Paris, Peggy took her whole collection to a

friend’s house in the south of France and stored her paintings in a barn. Eventually,
she shipped them to New York, and she followed them, with her family, lovers – past
and present – and some friends.

In 1942, in New York, she opened her first museum-gallery in the States, called
Art of This Century. The Box in a Valise I saw in Venice was shown in the New
York gallery. She said of the valise, ‘I often thought how amusing it would have been
to have gone off on a weekend and brought this along, instead of the usual bag one
thought one needed.’