Regular Bacon contributor Lawrence Blank-Cook hopes to get a trip to Venice out of this post. Good luck, Lawrence! You were an awfully good sport about risking your life on that enormous old sled with your entire nuclear family on it. I bet your husband will be a good sport about getting that trip to Venice on the calendar after reading your post!
From Lawrence:
Over the past year, my husband and I have felt an ever-so-slight relaxing of the demand for our time since becoming parents. This has resulted in finding more time to read. Oh glory day! I’m no longer frantically trying to finish a book for a book club that is tomorrow or skimming the last few pages before walking out the door for a book discussion. It was with pure pleasure that I selected the new biography on Peggy Guggenheim by Francine Prose. While driving to work one day, I heard Prose on NPR, and the interviewer played a snippet of Guggenheim herself. She had a low, slow sardonic voice, and as she talked about her famous uncle’s “car garage” in New York (the Guggenheim Museum), I was intrigued and wanted to learn more. While Uncle Solomon corners the market for the most impressive Guggenheim art legacy in the United States, Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice clearly dominates Europe.
Jeune Guggenheim was her first art gallery in London, and Art of This Century in New York was her second. She wanted not just a gallery, but an innovative exhibition space and salon for artists to gather. And they just did that from 1941 to 1947. After her divorce from Ernst, she left the United States for Venice and established herself and her collection. You can take a virtual tour and see “The Angel of the City” that welcomed her guests when she was living and still does today. It was one of Guggenheim’s favorites. “Peggy Guggenheim: An Art Attic,” a film directed and produced by Lisa Vreeland, debuted at the Jewish Film Festival in 2015, and it was nominated for Best Documentary at the Stockholm Film Festival.
Upon further research, I have learned of other biographers who focus on Guggenheim’s “voracious sexual appetite.” Prose clearly separates the personal from the professional (as much as possible!) to focus on Guggenheim’s true “work” at hand. While other women were working in factories and doing whatever they could for the war effort, Guggenheim did her part by focusing on saving the period’s best art. While this new biography is not for everyone, I’m glad that I read it to learn more about this fascinating woman and her role in the art world.
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Lawrence is currently reading Awakening the Spine by Vanda Scaravelli, The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson, and Old Filth by Jane Gardam. She made herself finish Gold Citrus Fame by Claire Vaye Watkins because novelist Adam Ross recommended it. She recently read and enjoyed his novel, Mr. Peanut. She won’t commit on the best book she’s read in the last six months. “There are too many good ones out there!” For Lawrence’s prior post on Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, please click here.
Great post, Lawrence! Going to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice (in 1985!) is in my Top 10 Visual Art experiences of all time.
Always enjoyable to read whatever Lawrence posts on Bacon.
YES! xo