Page 502 - The Secret Museum
P. 502
It was in New York that Peggy met Jackson Pollock. He was working as a
carpenter in her uncle’s museum – now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She
financed him, encouraged him, commissioned his biggest piece of work ever – a
mural for her home – and said that helping him become a professional artist was ‘by
far the most honourable achievement’ of her life.
After five years of parties, meeting artists and running her gallery in New York,
Peggy moved to Venice and bought the white stone Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the
Grand Canal, which is now the museum. Three afternoons a week, she let visitors
roam around to look at her paintings, just as they do today.
Down in the storage room are works by all the top modern artists. I asked Siro,
almost jokingly, whether he had any Pollocks there. ‘Actually, yes, there are some
here,’ he replied. He slid one out of its slot – ‘Here is the first one, it’s called Two’ –
and, moving to the other side of the room, he pulled out another. ‘This one is called
Bird Effort.’
The collection’s chief conservator and Siro take care of all the works in the
gallery, making sure they’re in a good state of conservation, packing them on to boats
to go to exhibitions as loans, or to be framed if need be. Siro knows where each
painting is without having to think about it for a moment.
Once he had shown me around his domain, he left, calling, ‘Ciao, bella!’ and
winking. Grazina left for London, to pick up a Mondrian they had loaned to the
Courtauld Gallery and escort it back to Venice.
I left the beautiful paintings and went out of the gallery, into the garden. There was
a Wish Tree, put there by Yoko Ono. People were writing down wishes on paper and
hanging them from the branches of the tree. Yoko Ono and Peggy Guggenheim spent
time in Japan together, with the musician John Cage, who, Peggy complained, didn’t
let her go sightseeing enough. One of the wishes on the tree reads: ‘That people will
never cease to be astounded by the beauty and goodness of people in the world’. That
felt like a great wish to make in the gardens of the beautiful palazzo in Venice, filled
with the spirit of its creator, Peggy Guggenheim.
Her palazzo reminded me a little of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston; after all, both Peggy Guggenheim and Isabella Stewart Gardner were female
collectors who loved Venice. I wrote to Hans Guggenheim, whom I met in Boston the
night before visiting the Gardner.
I asked him whether he knew Peggy. He replied, saying that he did, he had gone to
some of her wonderful parties and visited her in Venice, but doesn’t like to visit her
palazzo any more as she is nowhere to be found. He ended his email to me with a
drawing of a unicorn with the tail of a fish, leaping out of the canal and the question,
‘I know you know she loved her dogs, but did you know she kept a unicorn in the
garden?’