Known for her extensive art collection, as well as her romantic liaisons among the elite of modern art, Peggy Guggenheim did not live her life in half measures, says Elyse Zorn Karlin, co-director of the Association for the Study of Jewelry and Related Arts (ASJRA). That’s the subject of her lecture, “Peggy Guggenheim: Her Art, Her Lovers, and Her Jewelry,” which she’s giving as part of the Jewelry History Series this month ahead of The Original Miami Beach Antique Show.
Guggenheim amassed her jewelry collection with as much enthusiasm as she did her art, and her association with modernist artists fed and informed both of those passions.
‘A picture a day’Guggenheim was born in 1898 into a life of privilege, Karlin relates. “Her father, who died on board the Titanic, was one of seven brothers who made their fortune mostly in smelting metals, including silver, copper and lead. Her mother came from a wealthy banking family.”
Living in Paris in her 20s, Guggenheim was introduced to the Bohemian circle that included people like Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi and other top artists of the times by her first husband, Laurence Vail — a painter and writer, and the father of her two children, Sindbad and Pegeen. Although the marriage broke up, the pair remained friends.
Guggenheim went on to enjoy a series of lovers — some married, some not — who helped refine her artistic tastes. In 1939, she drew up a shopping list for her collection, vowing to purchase “a picture a day,” even though the Nazi army was closing in. She returned to New York in 1941 and opened the Art of the Century gallery the following year, concentrating on surrealist and abstract expressionist art.
A lifetime of earringsGuggenheim’s love affair with jewelry began when she was a little girl, notes Karlin. “Her father would give her and her sister gifts of jewelry, and he would buy her mother very expensive pearls and diamonds.”
During a trip to Egypt with Vail, “Guggenheim bought lots of pairs of fabulous dangling earrings, which was not the kind of thing people were wearing back in America,” explains Karlin. “That began her lifelong collection of earrings.”
Later in life, after the death of her last lover, who was 23 years her junior, “Guggenheim traveled to India and Tibet, where she bought a lot of earrings to make herself feel better,” says Karlin.
One of Guggenheim’s artist lovers contributed to her jewelry collection in a significant way: Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy painted two different miniature landscapes for her and mounted them as earrings. Her friend Alexander Calder, meanwhile, gifted her a pair of enormous mobile earrings. At the opening night of her gallery in New York City, Guggenheim wore one from each pair to show that she had equal commitment to surrealism and abstract expressionism.
In 1948, when her art collection went on display at the Venice Biennale, Guggenheim’s opening-day outfit included a pair of Venetian glass earrings in the shape of large daisies, says Karlin. “When she was a little girl, her father called her Marguerite, which means daisy in French, and he gave her a bracelet that looked like a daisy chain made with pearls and diamonds, which might be why she had the earrings made.”
Dressing the partGuggenheim was as distinctive in her choice of clothes as she was in choosing her art and jewelry.
“With the earrings she bought in Egypt, she wanted to be seen as exotic and different. She had cropped hair like a flapper, so you couldn’t miss seeing the earrings. She would pose with a long cigarette holder,” says Karlin, noting that it showed up “in photographs by Man Ray and Berenice Abbot and other famous people of the times. And she’s wearing big, elaborate earrings in all of those paintings and photographs. So she really wore her earrings. There also are a lot of pictures of her wearing pearls. Her mother had very expensive pearls.”
In 1947, Guggenheim moved to Venice, where she lived until her death on December 23, 1979.
“She spent little money on her clothes,” states Karlin; it was “mostly on her art.”
When she was living in Venice, she’d buy big pieces of costume jewelry in “variety” stores, Karlin continues. “Everything she wore was to be noticed. In addition to her earrings, she wore glasses that looked like huge butterflies created by designer Edward Melcarth. She had many pairs of them that he designed for her.”
Guggenheim not only wore her earrings in dramatic ways, she displayed them as part of her home’s décor. “There are great pictures of Peggy in more than one home, where she has all her earrings displayed on a wall, hung as miniature art.” She left her earring collection to her granddaughters, her son Sindbad’s children. Ultimately, Karlin says, quoting Guggenheim, “it was all about art and love.”
Image: Solomon R. Guggenheim FoundationArticle from the Rapaport Magazine - February 2018. To subscribe click here.