According to this new biography by an earnest, academically inclined American, Peggy Guggenheim deserves to be given a respected place in the history of modern art and not dismissed as a poor little rich girl with more money than sense. In fact, Peggy Guggenheim’s reputation was well earned, not to say established early on by her own memoir, Out of This Century, published in 1949, which proudly proclaimed the haphazard nature of her activities, both artistic and sexual.
By the time she was in her early twenties Peggy, born in 1898, had abandoned New York, where she was surrounded by stuffy rich Jewish relations, for Paris and the bohemian life, where she was soon surrounded by drunken spongers. Dearborn makes much of the fact that her father, who drowned on the Titanic when Peggy was 13, was openly unfaithful and hence Peggy and her sisters led a ‘strangely sexualised’ childhood; this, she suggests, along with a chilly mother who handed her over to a ‘primary caregiver’ (or nanny), a bulbous nose and two prettier sisters, explains why Peggy was repeatedly drawn to faithless men who treated her badly.
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