Waiting for us inside was Siro De Boni, from Chioggia, a coastal town in the Veneto region, who has worked at the museum for decades and knows the paintings as if they were his family. Inside the bunker lives almost half of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection: all the things there is no room to display, or which are too fragile to be kept in the light.
One of the most fragile pieces in the entire collection is Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Valise, a suitcase containing a box filled with 69 replicas and reproductions of the artist’s works in miniature. The suitcase itself lives inside a grey box on a shelf. Siro pulled the box down and laid it on a table. He lifted the lid and revealed a Louis Vuitton case, about the size of a briefcase. Then, he opened it.
It was such fun to see what was inside. Reproductions of 69 of Marcel Duchamp’s favourite works are in there, but they are all tiny. It’s as if they ate the mushroom in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and then were packed away out of sight.
I laughed when I saw a teeny version of his most famous work: the white urinal he called Fountain, put inside a gallery and called art. With this strange and bold move, he created conceptual art. No longer could an artist get away with just painting and drawing what they saw; after Duchamp, they needed a concept, an idea.
The urinal was one of a series of conceptual pieces he called Readymades. Other mini versions of those works are glued on to the lid as well, so that they hang in a vertical gallery. There is a tiny glass chemist’s bottle filled with air from Paris and a small L.H.O.O.Q., an artwork he created in 1919 by taking a cheap postcard copy of the Mona Lisa, drawing a moustache and beard on her face and then writing the letters of the title on it. These letters, when pronounced in French, make the phrase ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, which was translated by Duchamp as ‘There is fire down below.’
Once I’d looked at those works, Siro began unpacking the box. It’s like a travelling salesman’s bag: it contains a bit of everything. He pulled out a miniature Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1, a work which now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We looked at Nude (study), Sad Young Man on the Train, a painting that hangs, full size, in the gallery upstairs.
Showing me the lot was quite a fiddly job for Siro, but we enjoyed checking out each of Duchamp’s pieces and seeing what was what in his box of miniature creations, his tiny, travelling museum.
This particular Box in a Valise was made public in 1941. There are many more like it, but this is the most precious in the world, because is the first and because it was given to Peggy Guggenheim. She financed the entire project, and he wrote a dedication to her inside the box.
This box was one of 20 originals of the de luxe edition Duchamp made; they’re now in museums around the world, including the MOMA in New York City. These first 20 took six years to make. Each of the boxes has one unique piece of art inside it.
Peggy was born Marguerite Guggenheim in Manhattan in 1898. She had two sisters, Hazel and Benita; she was very close to Benita. Her father died on the Titanic and her childhood was, as she put it, excessively unhappy’. When she turned 21 she inherited a small fortune, had a nose job – which didn’t go well and which she regretted – and changed her name to Peggy.
She met her first husband, Laurence Vail, while working for free in a bookshop, and they had two children together. He introduced her to Duchamp, whom she would describe as ‘the great influence of my life’. She left Vail in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holmes, who died tragically young in 1934.
For many years she lived in the Sussex countryside with Douglas Garman, who, I found out in her memoirs, was a friend of a poet named Edgell Rickword, my great-grandfather Cecil Rickword’s cousin. I have a book of poems by Edgell, with a dedication inside written by my great-grandfather.
It wasn’t until Peggy Guggenheim left Garman and turned 39 that she decided to begin the life for which she would be remembered: she started collecting modern art. She learned as she went along, with the help of Marcel Duchamp.
In her autobiography, she writes: ‘At that time I couldn’t distinguish one thing in art from another. Marcel tried to educate me. I don’t know what I would have done without him.’ He introduced her to artists, planned her shows and gave her lots of advice.
Peggy decided to open a gallery at 30 Cork Street in London called Guggenheim Jeune. The first show consisted of works by Jean Cocteau. The only way she could speak to the artist was to talk to him while he lay in bed smoking opium. ‘The odour was extremely pleasant, though this seemed an odd way of doing our business,’ she said. Duchamp hung the show and made it look beautiful.
London hadn’t seen anything like Cocteau’s abstract, Surrealist art before, and sales were slow. Peggy bought his art under a fake name to cheer the artist up: ‘That’s how the collection began.’
She continued to develop her eye for modern art thanks to a brief affair with the writer Samuel Beckett: ‘He told me one had to accept the art of our day as it was a living thing’.
The second exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune was the first one-man show in England of Kandinsky’s work – again, Duchamp introduced her to the artist. Next up was a sculpture exhibition including sculptors Duchamp knew – Brancusi, Henry Moore, Jean Arp and Alexander Calder.
The gallery became a hip place to be. Peggy Guggenheim showed all the top contemporary artists and found talent in its embryonic stage. She even had an eye for artists who were still children. During a show of children’s art, she included the paintings of her own daughter, Pegeen, and showed works by Lucian Freud. In her autobiography she says ‘At the last minute Freud’s daughter-in-law brought in some paintings done by Freud’s grandchild Lucian,’ she recalled. ‘One was of three naked men running upstairs. I think it was a portrait of Freud.’ Peggy also showed Birds in a Tree, which Lucian Freud drew in crayon when he was seven. His mother Lucie kept the drawing, which was exhibited once again in London in 2012.
As the Second World War began, Peggy Guggenheim was in Paris. As the Nazis advanced and people began to flee the city, she bought a painting a day. Some of the masterpieces of her collection – by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian – were bought in those days. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusi’s Bird in Space as the Germans neared Paris.
Two days before the invasion of Paris, Peggy took her whole collection to a friend’s house in the south of France and stored her paintings in a barn. Eventually, she shipped them to New York, and she followed them, with her family, lovers – past and present – and some friends.
In 1942, in New York, she opened her first museum-gallery in the States, called Art of This Century. The Box in a Valise I saw in Venice was shown in the New York gallery. She said of the valise, ‘I often thought how amusing it would have been to have gone off on a weekend and brought this along, instead of the usual bag one thought one needed.’
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?’
[Box in a Valise (Boîte en-valise), 1941]
This is No. 1 of a de luxe edition of a travelling case, by Louis Vuitton, assembling 69 reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s own work. This edition has one original’ and a dedication to Peggy Guggenheim, who assisted Duchamp financially in its production. Can you see the tiny white urinal?
[Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979)]
Peggy moved into the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, which is now the museum. Here she is popping out by gondola.
[Birds in a Tree by Lucian Freud]
Peggy showed this crayon drawing by Lucian Freud Caged seven) in her gallery in Cork Street, London.
[Hans’s unicorn]
Hans ended his email to me with a drawing and the question, ‘I know you know she loved her dogs, but did you know she kept a unicorn in the garden?’
‘I’M DEALING WITH MEMORIES,’ SAID Judith Dore, conservator of the Royal Opera House’s precious historical costumes as we walked through the greatest dressing-up box in the world. ‘People know what they think a production looks like. If a little girl comes to the Royal Opera House and sees something magical, that is a memory she carries with her for life.’
To preserve the magic and the memories, the Royal Opera House keeps over 6,000 items – headdresses, Cinderella dresses, delicate fairy tutus, swathes of huge opera robes – hanging on rails, or packed away in tissue paper in a storage site in the Kent countryside. The humidity is controlled to keep the costumes in perfect condition; the levels are sent through to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden every day for monitoring.
Among them is this beautiful blue hand-painted tutu worn by Dame Margot Fonteyn in 1946 when she danced the role of Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, the show that kissed the Sadler’s Wells ballet company into stardom at its new home.
During the Second World War, the Royal Opera House was taken over by Mecca – of bingo hall fame – and became a dance hall. The American troops loved it. While they swung the nights away in Covent Garden, the ballerinas of Sadler’s Wells danced, under the direction of Ninette de Valois, all over the country, to lift the spirits of their audiences with their leaps and pirouettes. Margot Fonteyn was one of the ballerinas in the company.
I spent an afternoon in the collection’s office in Covent Garden listening to rehearsals, which are piped up from the main stage, and reading letters Fonteyn wrote during the war years to a boyfriend – ‘My Dearest Patrick’ – telling of how ‘sad and terrified’ she felt, how London was being destroyed and of her sore feet, boils in her mouth and feeling ‘confused about myself and everything …’ She also felt uncomfortable writing – ‘I feel like a mermaid walking on land when I have to express myself in words’ – just as most of us would if up on the stage at the Royal Opera House.
When the war ended, the American troops went home. The Royal Opera House floor was cleared of chewing gum, and seats were put back into the auditorium. It was decided that resident ballet and opera companies were needed. Ballet had become much more popular as an art form during the war years, and so the Sadler’s Wells ballet moved to Covent Garden and has been the resident dance company at the Royal Opera House ever since (it became The Royal Ballet in 1956). The Covent Garden Opera Company, now the Royal Opera, was created at the same time in 1946; auditions were held the length of the country. The first performance after the war was The Sleeping Beauty with Margot Fonteyn in the lead role.
The opening night was a Royal Gala performance. The royal family were there in their finery, and the dress code was changed so that service men and women could come in their uniform if they didn’t have evening dress. Just imagine the sighs of relief as the curtain lifted, the ballet began and an audience exhausted from years of war settled down in their seats to celebrate beauty and fantasy.
This tutu worn by Margot Fonteyn shimmers with beauty. It is the dress that inspires the prince’s kiss. Margot Fonteyn danced in it during Act II, ‘The Vision Scene’, when the Lilac Fairy – Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother – shows a handsome prince a vision of the most beautiful girl in the world, Princess Aurora. The princess has been sleeping for a hundred years and can only be awakened by true love’s kiss. When the prince sees the princess dancing in this lovely dress, he is smitten. He decides to find her, to kiss her and so break the spell. The prince and princess get married, and they live happily ever after. The production was a massive hit, and 150,000 people came to see it in that first season in 1946.
The Royal Ballet took the show to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1949 for its debut performance there, and it was such a success that Time magazine put Margot Fonteyn on its front cover. The dress, and the production designed by Oliver Messel, made Fonteyn an international star.
Margot Fonteyn danced ‘The Vision Scene’ hundreds of times in this tutu. It is made from a pale blue Lurex with a bouncy silk net. The bodice is wonderfully decorated with hand-drawn shapes and stitched on cord that twirls down the front of the bodice and around the waist. It must have danced in the light as she moved.
When it was worn out, it was replaced in the 1960s with a copy, also now in storage in Kent. It’s interesting to see the two dresses together. Both are made from blue Lurex – probably the exact same material kept in stock by the wardrobe team – and have crinoline straps, but, while the 1946 dress has a net skirt made from silk, the sixties’ net is nylon. The earlier dress is more worn, as silk degrades over time. It is also more delicate and fine and the decorations more subtle – a lot of it done by hand, perhaps because there were fewer decorative materials around just after the war, than in the sixties. The later dress is bluer and has lovely leaf shapes called paillettes – sewn on to the skirt and 3D sequins on the bodice.
On both, you can see grey marks around the waist where the prince lifted Princess Aurora up over and over as they danced. Part of the later tutu has been repaired because of the wear from lifts.
Judith checked the crotch of the dress to see whether it had ever been displayed – it hadn’t; the crotch was still intact. ‘It’s the strongest piece of sewing the wardrobe does.’ The 1946 dress must have been on show at some point, as the crotch has been undone to hang over a mannequin and then stitched back up again.
Neither of these two dresses will be worn again, but they are k
ept as memories. The last production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House, in 2006, was based on the first production in 1946, so the costumes were brought out of storage to inspire the new generation of designers. Otherwise, they are sleeping beauties themselves, lying in storage in Kent.
Brand new costumes, for new productions, are made on site in London. I visited the costume department on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Royal Opera House. It was lunchtime, and everyone was at their desk having lunch, knitting and sewing their own things.
Judith Dore, back in Kent, tells me, ‘I think the wardrobe team are shocked to see the different way in which I treat their costumes. To them, they are basically a working tool.’ The costumes have to withstand enormous wear and tear while feeling like a second skin to the dancer, and still somehow look ethereal. I think it must be nice for the dancers to know their costumes are preserved so reverently once they are too worn to dance in.
Theatre is about tradition, and people like to see the show that they remember seeing, performed in the same way. Opera singers and ballerinas get superstitious about dresses, considering famous ones to be ‘lucky’. The dress worn in Act II of Tosca by Maria Callas is one of those dresses: singers feel the fabric contains the essence of Callas in the iconic role. Margot Fonteyn was an exception: she didn’t like to wear other dancers’ clothes and was the only one who wore her costumes.
Only when a production is no longer in the rep will the most iconic costumes be taken into storage here in Kent. A costume becomes important when it is a significant design, or from a brilliant production (like The Sleeping Beauty), or when it has been danced in by a famous principal dancer. From then on very few people see the costumes other than the collections exhibition team who bring items to London for display at the Royal Opera House, or curators from other collections who ask to borrow things.
The Secret Museum Page 29