In 1960 Peggy Guggenheim published an autobiography called Confessions of an Art Addict, a curious work which rehashes much of what had appeared in an earlier memoir but without some of the more entertaining anecdotes. As the author herself confessed: "I seem to have written the first book as an uninhibited woman and the second as a lady who was trying to establish her place in the history of modern art."
Trying to reconcile these two facets of the same person is always going to be a substantial challenge and one which Anton Gill has not really managed to overcome. Peggy Guggenheim was a strange person who used her wealth to collect both people and art, but the reasons why she should have done so remain unclear. At least in relation to her cultural pursuits, she could draw on what had, by the time she reached adulthood, become something of a tradition among newly-enriched Americans: the acquisition of respectability through artistic patronage. It was her uncle Solomon who - advised by his distinctly creepy mistress, the German-born Baroness Hilla von Rebay - assembled a modern art collection which formed the foundation of New York's Guggenheim Museum.
An earlier generation of American entrepreneurs - such as Henry Frick - had concentrated on old master paintings but by the 1930s these had become too expensive and rare, even for the very wealthy. Contemporary art, on the other hand, offered new opportunities for the philanthropically-minded collector, which is presumably why Peggy Guggenheim opted to concentrate her attention in this area. "Presumably" because Gill scarcely speculates on why, having shown no great interest in visual art until aged nearly 40, the subject of his biography should suddenly open a gallery in London and begin buying for herself as much work as was affordable. Guggenheim Jeune, as these premises were called, specialised in the avant-garde and, because sales were never very substantial, had to be heavily subsidised by its founder. It could be - and was - seen as a rich woman's folly, which makes Peggy Guggenheim's persistence all the more remarkable.
Prior to the gallery's creation in 1937, her interests had focused primarily on literature, or rather on male practitioners of the art with whom she had affairs. Most of these were very minor figures who wrote little, published less, but managed to talk impressively of their achievements. The exception was Samuel Beckett, with whom Guggenheim was briefly involved in Paris during the winter of 1937/38. Like so many other of her lovers, Beckett seems to have been initially attracted but soon repulsed by Guggenheim's neediness.
Although she had a fine figure, she was not good-looking, her features dominated by a nose "so large that one could not help looking at it", according to an acquaintance. As though to compensate for this disadvantage, Guggenheim was sexually voracious and inclined to make a play for almost every man she encountered; her memoirs give the impression that she was an irresistible siren but the reality appears less alluring. In particular, she was an indifferent mother to her two children, forever depositing them with other people whenever they interfered with her own plans.
Despite Gill's lack of specific information, cumulative evidence suggests that the same desire to be needed underlay Guggenheim's invention of herself as a cultural patron. Few artists could afford to resist her advances because she had enough money to buy their work, sometimes in large quantities. Picasso was among the handful who persisted in perceiving her as a dilettante; when Guggenheim came to visit him in his Paris studio in 1940, the Spanish painter studiously ignored her before eventually remarking: "Madame, you will find the lingerie department on the second floor."
In her early 1950s, Guggenheim and her collection finally settled in Venice, where the latter still remains on exhibition. This group of works is what makes her interesting, but Gill's book concentrates more on the woman and her personal life, aside from intermittent chunks of rather basic art history dropped into the text for the benefit of readers ill-informed in this area. Guggenheim is not an appealing subject: selfish, greedy and often distinctly silly. Somehow, the lady achieved her place in the history of modern art, but this long and plodding book fails to explain clearly how or why that came about.
Robert O'Byrne is an author and an Irish Times journalist