Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  While in Paris, Peggy met and married Laurence Vail, a handsome, charming, volatile idler who carried an American passport but, having been born and educated on the Continent, “was more French than expatriate.” Peggy called him “the King of Bohemia.” Six years and two children later, she walked out of the marriage, fed up with Vail’s spectacular public rages—he once attacked a chandelier in a restaurant—and his incestuous relationship with his sister, Clotilde. Within a year she had found a new lover, a Byronic, alcoholic Englishman named John Holms, whose accent “thrilled her.” A talented writer and an even more talented conversationalist—“He talked like Socrates,” Peggy bragged—Holms spent the next five years, the happiest of Peggy’s life, alternately educating her and infuriating her with his drinking. When Holms died during a routine operation as a result of the interaction of anesthesia and alcohol, Peggy blamed herself: she had neglected to inform the doctors that he had been drinking the night before. “Everyone I love dies,” she wailed.

  After several more failed relationships, Peggy gave up on men—temporarily at least—and turned to art. Although she personally preferred the old masters, collecting them would have been unthinkably conventional. Avant-garde art, on the other hand, “carried with it the power to scandalize.” With the help of Marcel Duchamp, she assembled a collection of abstract and Surrealist works and, on January 24, 1938, opened her first gallery in London, Guggenheim Jeune.

  Peggy Guggenheim with Herbert Read in front of a painting by Yves Tanguy, 1939

  A lover of eccentricity, Peggy was inexorably drawn to the high style and hedonistic excesses of the Surrealists, especially to a young, married painter named Yves Tanguy, who soon became her passion, both in art and in bed. (Peggy had notorious difficulty distinguishing between artists and their art.) “Tanguy really loved me,” she insisted in her memoirs, “and if he had been less of a baby I would have married him … but I needed a father, not another son.” She also reported affairs with Roland Penrose, the wealthy English writer and artist (who, according to Peggy, would only sleep with a woman if he could bind her wrists—“It was extremely uncomfortable to spend the night this way, but if you spent it with Penrose it was the only way”) and Samuel Beckett, a green-eyed Irishman whose poetry Peggy considered “childish.”

  After several years of financial losses, Peggy decided to close Guggenheim Jeune and open a museum instead. “I felt that if I was losing that money I might as well lose a lot more and do something worthwhile,” she said. Incapable of halfway enthusiasms and never shy about seeking advice, she enlisted the help of the leading British art critic, Herbert Read, as well as Nellie van Doesberg, widow of the de Stijl painter Theo, and Howard Putzel, a young American dealer, and began acquiring paintings for the planned museum at a rate approaching one a day. Never as wealthy as her family name promised, she set a limit of $10,000 for any single painting, and often bought works directly from her artist friends for less than $1,000. Like her father, she could be both generous and inexplicably parsimonious in her personal life. Other than sex, art was her only indulgence. “She allowed herself one dress a year and she paid no more than $125,” recalls her friend and, briefly, paramour David Porter. “She wore the same pair of dirty tan boots and one dress at openings for a whole year. She spent her money by giving it to artists and buying pictures, and I admired her enormously for that.”

  The approaching war put an end to Peggy’s plans for a museum (she worried that the Germans would bomb her paintings) and eventually drove her from Paris, along with her Surrealist friends. Before leaving, she tried to place her paintings in the safekeeping of officials at the Louvre, but “they decided that my collection wasn’t worth the trouble of saving,” she recalled. For Peggy, as for Europe, the threat of war had made it impossible to ignore the United States any longer. She had not been home since the death of her favorite sister, Benita, in 1927, and had vowed she would never return. But the necessities of war overrode old wounds. In early 1941, she packed up her collection and shipped it to New York marked as “household goods.”

  But she still wasn’t ready to return. Anyplace in Europe, she seemed to feel, was better than America. With her entourage, she repaired to Marseilles in Vichy France, where much of the Surrealist community (Breton, Masson, Brauner, Dominguez, Lam) had gathered in a dilapidated villa for a last stand against exile. There, on the eve of America’s entry into the war, she fell in love with yet another European artist, the German Surrealist Max Ernst—a suave, “exquisitely-made” man ten years her senior. “He had white hair and big blue eyes,” she later wrote of Ernst, who often painted threatening birds, “and a handsome beak-like nose resembling a bird’s.”

  Finally, on July 13, 1941, Peggy flew from Lisbon to New York aboard the Pan-American Clipper. She brought with her the flesh-and-blood souvenirs of her European happiness: her ex-husband, Vail; their two children, Sindbad and Pegeen; her mentor Breton (separately by ship, via Martinique); and her lover, Ernst. (As a German national in America on the eve of war, Ernst proved to be an embarrassment—although Peggy didn’t embarrass easily. After Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Germany, she married him. “I did not like the idea of living in sin with an enemy alien,” she quipped.)

  From the moment she arrived, Peggy treated New York more like a hotel than a home. Surrounded by Surrealists, she set out to recreate on the new continent the life-style she had been forced to abandon on the old.

  In a city awash with refugees, it was a relatively easy task. On an East Side cul-de-sac, she found a huge town house overlooking the East River. Distorted through the old panes of a big bay window in the baronial two-story living room, Fifty-first Street could have been London’s Cork Street or the Boulevard Montparnasse. There, amid round-the-clock revelers, surrounded once again by her beloved art collection, she picked up where she had left off. In shoeblack hair, blood-red lipstick, lizard-green eye shadow, and huge unmatched earrings (her clothes artfully torn to show she had nothing on underneath), she moved among her guests offering cheap whiskey, potato chips, and outrageous commentary. Around her, knots of guests complained in overheated French about American food and longed for the day when they could return to France; Breton choreographed his vicious games; and Ernst sat in his ornately carved ten-foot Victorian throne in front of the bay window, looking, according to one guest, “Mephistophelean.” The local press, thoroughly beguiled, referred to the house as “Surrealism’s headquarters” in America and dubbed Peggy its “financial angel.” “She practically supports the group by collecting its pictures,” wrote a reporter for Time magazine, “[and] plans next fall to open a Manhattan museum where they can be shown.”

  The projected gallery was, in fact, a revival of the earlier plans for a London museum, which had been so rudely interrupted by the war. And Peggy saw no reason to change anything just because she was in America. It was, from beginning to end, a European project. Ernst and Breton would serve as advisers; Ernst’s son, Jimmy, would be her secretary; and Frederick Kiesler, the Romanian-born “impresario without portfolio,” who had been in the United States since 1926, would design the gallery. Within this inner circle, Howard Putzel was the sole American.

  For the double loft that Peggy found over a grocery store on West Fifty-seventh Street, Kiesler designed a space as insular and self-contained as Peggy’s apartment. All views of New York were banished. Skylights and windows were blacked out. Materials were chosen without regard to wartime shortages (or, to Peggy’s chagrin, expense): linen, gumwood, fluorescent lights. Kiesler’s goal was to “break down the physical and mental barriers which separate people from the art they live with.” Paintings were stripped of their frames, suspended away from the walls, thrust toward the viewer on sawed-off baseball bats, and propped up on movable stands. The walls themselves, made of movable canvas panels, curved and bulged indeterminately in the background to avoid defining the space or providing a static reference point. All this would allow the paintings to “interact” with t
heir environment while the gallery itself remained oblivious both to place and time, to America and to the war.

  Peggy’s goal was to open the gallery with “as thorough a sample of modern masters as possible.” Using the list prepared by Read and van Doesburg in Paris, and accompanied by Ernst, Breton, and Putzel, she descended on the New York galleries. In weeks of shopping, she added to her already impressive collection of works by Duchamp, de Chirico, Miró, Malevich, Archipenko, Giacometti, Klee, Lipchitz, Ozenfant, and Tanguy. For breadth, she threw in an early Cubist Picasso and a Mondrian gouache. As for American artists, she bought only one piece by her longtime friend and jeweler, Alexander Calder (whom she had met in Paris and didn’t consider American at all), and one work by the abstract painter John Ferren, whose wife, Inez, was publishing the catalogue for the opening.

  Like the show it documented, the catalogue was a tour de force of European chauvinism. Breton wrote a lengthy introductory essay on the “great physico-mental stream of Surrealism”—in French, of course—which Vail translated into faithfully overheated English. Breton also contributed the idea of including pictures of the eyes of each of the artists represented in the show (to underscore his theory that reality is not as important as how the artist views reality) and wrote a brief biographical sketch to accompany each grainy photograph of bushy eyebrows. The catalogue also included a short preface by Jean Arp, articles by Ernst and the English sculptor Ben Nicholson, and, again for balance, a short piece by Mondrian, a Futurist manifesto, and a Realistic manifesto. Ernst designed the cover and Vail contributed the title: “Art of This Century.” Peggy liked it so much that she adopted it for the gallery itself. As a last, poignant touch, Peggy dedicated the catalogue to her English lover John Holms, who had been dead for almost nine years.

  The opening of the Art of This Century gallery on October 20, 1942, was an unalloyed triumph. Except for the pulsating lights that made it hard to see the paintings and “drove people crazy,” Kiesler had accomplished the seemingly impossible: he had outdone the Surrealists’ First Papers exhibit at the Whitelaw Reid mansion the week before. The wall-to-wall opening-night crowd milled through his creation, dodging paintings, toasting Peggy, and exclaiming their admiration, usually in French. They stared at Kiesler’s “seven-way” chairs, upholstered in bright shades of linoleum, which could be used as seats or tables or lecterns or easels; at the turquoise floors and sail-like walls; and at the “kinetic gallery,” a kind of penny arcade of contraptions, including a conveyor belt of paintings by Paul Klee—push a button, see a Klee—a giant pinwheel of Duchamp’s works, and a shadow box containing a portrait of Breton. Someone dubbed it “Coney Island.”

  The press, invited to a special preview, responded with ambivalent delirium. “Surrealist Circus!” cried the Mercury. “Isms Rampant,” headlined Newsweek. One writer described it as “a sort of blend between an alchemist’s dream, a nightmare, and a first-class hangover.” Even when the reviewers were skeptical, they were never, never bored. “My eyes have never bulged further from their sockets than at this show,” wrote the New York Sun reviewer. It was exactly the kind of breakthrough Peggy had hoped for. In a wartime world starved for extravagance, she and her European entourage had startled the art community to attention. “She made a big impression,” Julien Levy conceded enviously. “[She] got here at a time when everything was ready to burst.”

  The gallery may have been a triumph for Peggy, but for most American artists, it was yet another defeat. They, too, were electrified by Kiesler’s audacious design. (After surviving for a decade on the hardtack proletarian galleries of the Depression, they welcomed the indulgence.) “When you walked into Art of This Century,” recalls Reuben Kadish, “you knew there wasn’t any other place in New York that supplied as much energy and as much vigor.” But their exhilaration was edged with despair: not a single member of their ranks was represented in Peggy’s “thorough sampling of modern art.” (John Ferren, the lone American on view, had spent most of the 1930s in Paris.) Even the First Papers show had included a few token American artists. Peggy had promised that her gallery would be a “research laboratory for new ideas,” that it would “serve the future instead of recording the past.” Did that mean that American art had no place in the future? Breton and Ernst apparently thought so, and Peggy, with all the authority of her new position, seemed to agree. As thrilled as American artists were with the triumph of Art of This Century, they had to wonder if they would ever get to share in the glory.

  The Surrealist Gallery at Art of This Century, designed by Frederick Kiesler, who is seated at left in one of his seven-way chairs.

  In fact, even as she moved among the delighted patrons on opening night in her white dress and unmatched earrings (one by Calder, one by Tanguy), Peggy was already growing disenchanted with her European mentors. Her restless eye was already scanning for something new—an art, an artist, a lover. Perhaps all three. She never bothered with fine distinctions.

  It’s difficult to know when the estrangement began. Having been raised by a philandering father, a “dizzy” mother, and a series of sadistic nannies, Peggy had always been susceptible to resentment, distrust, infidelity, and fear of infidelity. Sooner or later, they poisoned all her relationships—with movements as well as with men. She was always either deliriously happy or deeply disenchanted with the present. The first overt sign of souring in her decade-long infatuation with the European Surrealists was a dispute over an advertisement for her gallery in Breton’s journal, VVV. In anticipation of the opening, Ernst had promised her free space in exchange for her generous patronage, but Breton, whom she was supporting at the time, reneged, explaining that he “had sacrificed to truth, beauty and art” so why shouldn’t she? Peggy was livid at the ingratitude. Her daughter Pegeen, equally incensed, called the Surrealists “mesquin” (cheap), an accusation that Breton considered a serious breach of decorum coming from a seventeen-year-old girl. The skirmish resulted in the cancellation of a show of VVV covers scheduled at Art of This Century in March 1943. In the show that she hastily assembled to fill the gap, Peggy pointedly included three works by Breton’s nemesis, Salvador Dali.

  But the rift ran far deeper than money. The tiff with Breton may have disappointed and embittered her, but Max Ernst’s infidelity broke her heart. She had steadfastly refused to see it coming, although their marriage had never been the mad flight of passion that Peggy longed for. “She was in love with him,” recalls Ethel Baziotes, “whereas he respected her and found her interesting. Their temperaments were too violently opposed.” In the summer of 1942, unknown to Peggy, Ernst had rented a house in Amagansett, Long Island, where he met secretly with a beautiful young American Surrealist painter named Dorothea Tanning. By the time the gallery opened in October, Peggy could read her fate in Ernst’s lethargy—he seldom arose before she left in the morning. In retaliation, she set about seducing Marcel Duchamp, whose priestly detachment alternately aroused and infuriated her. By all accounts, except Peggy’s, the attempt failed, giving her yet another reason to divorce the Surrealists. In December, Ernst took personal charge of selecting the paintings to be included in a show entitled “31 Women” scheduled for January. Peggy was later able to joke that the exhibition should have been limited to thirty. One of the thirty-one was Dorothea Tanning.

  By March of 1943, Ernst had moved out. Between Ernst’s departure and Breton’s enmity, most of the Surrealist circle deserted Peggy’s big town house on the river. Only five months after their triumphant show, she and her favored coterie of European artists had separated in recrimination and disillusionment. Her situation was much like that of American artists who had embraced the Europeans on arrival, only to reject them on closer inspection. Thus, when the critic Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann) launched a blistering assault on the Surrealists in the February 1943 issue of American Mercury, calling them “parlor anarchists” and claiming that the entire movement was a sham, it was no surprise that Peggy failed to leap to their defense. “I am not t
he supporter of surrealism,” she wrote in a letter to Art Digest, “neither am I its defender.”

  With the departure of Ernst and Breton, Peggy was forced to turn elsewhere for guidance. James Johnson Sweeney, who would soon become chairman of the painting and sculpture department at the Museum of Modern Art, was promoted to the unofficial position of chief spiritual adviser, but remained aloof from gallery affairs. Howard Putzel, an extraordinarily knowledgeable and peripatetic impresario of young American artists, replaced Jimmy Ernst as Peggy’s secretary, factotum, and “whipping boy.” Matta, whose close association with American artists saved him from being tarred with Breton’s brush, became the sole “European” Surrealist in Peggy’s inner circle. (It was during this period that Peggy expressed interest in Matta’s plan for a show of “American automatists.”) Together, Sweeney, Putzel, and Matta pushed Peggy and Art of This Century in a radically new direction. For the first time, she sought out young American artists whose works she considered Surrealist in spirit. She also began to reevaluate, in light of her changing tastes, the works of American painters whom she had dismissed only a few months before. Among these was Jackson Pollock.