Rating: A
I’ll be up front - I loathed the character that is the subject of this documentary. However, it must be said that the film itself is very, very well made. If, like me you had never heard of Peggy Guggenheim, the short version is that she was the real-deal rock’n’roll playgirl of the 1920s Parisian modern art scene. She inherited a lot of money from her family and set out on a mission of collecting avant-garde artwork that at the time was viewed as not worth preserving. She saved a bunch of it from the Second World War by shipping it to America; fast forward to the present and her collection is held to be the greatest collection of modern art in existence.
The film gives you all the saucy details about various love affairs and insane rich uncles that you want, while also maintaining a pace that helps you take the journey to Paris, London, New York, and Venice with her. Along the way you meet all the capital-B Big names in modern art that she befriended over the years, the only two with which I was familiar were Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. I gather she was married to many of them at various times too, while giving up her son? Oh, and there’s a section on those four days she spent in bed with Samuel Beckett, and something or other about finding James Joyce to be a dullard (despite the fact that he wrote some pretty great postmodernist fiction).
Suffice it to say she was a stupefyingly rich Manhattan socialite, with a bourgeois Gatsby accent and a lot of opportunity to hob-nob. She’s the very embodiment of the capitalistic mantra that accumulating wealth leads to artistic patronage and the betterment of all humanity. The interview tapes dug up and featured in this doco reveal that she openly admits to loving her art collection more than anything else, and that she’s pleased it will help her become immortalised. Super materialistic, not very Zen.
If you are into art I think you will probably get a lot out of this film, for one thing because you might know which artists are Big Deals, in the Ron Burgundy sense. Without that info, I just found her quite gross, and sad.