The American collector has rarely been the subject of paintings, instead there are numerous photographic images that portray her: a pivotal figure in the history of XNUMXth century art, among those who immortalized Peggy during her lifetime, and today on display at the Ikona Gallery, Rogi André, Berenice Abbott, Roloff Beny, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Gisèle Freund, Dino Jarach, Ida Kar, George Karger, André Kertész, Hermann Landshoff, Man Ray, Robert E. Mates, Nino Migliori and Stefan Moses.
“The idea of the exhibition”, explains the curator Živa Kraus, “is linked to the program of the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Ghetto of Venice, in 1516. The term 'ghetto' has its etymology in the Venetian vocabulary itself (from ghèto, foundry on a small island where Jews were confined in the 1847th century) and the word is, a priori, synonymous with diaspora and Judaism. In this sense, the very history of the Guggenheim family is a history of diaspora: Jews, originally from Switzerland, from Aargau-er Surbtal, emigrated to America in 21. Here was born Benjamin Guggenheim, brother of the famous Solomon, and father of Peggy. Peggy too lived a life marked by a perpetual displacement, by a continuous travel, between America and Europe, from Paris, to London, to New York, to Venice”. And so the XNUMX images on display retrace the salient stages of her unique and extraordinary life as a determined woman and forward-looking collector, always open to the world, a revolutionary woman who not only went against bourgeois social conventions, but undermined them, a woman who with his choices he left an indelible mark on the history of twentieth-century art.
The exhibition opens with the famous portrait of Man Ray (1890 - 1976) from 1925, in which Peggy poses wrapped in an elegant dress by Paul Poiret: she looks directly into the camera, with complicity, security and clarity. Epoch and time are perfectly defined here. Also from 1927 is the shot by Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991), which depicts the patron of the arts in the prime of her youth, letting the simplicity of her living and thinking character shine through. If Man Ray's photo, with a deco aftertaste, defines where Peggy comes from, Abbott's photo defines who Peggy is. And Gisèle Freund (1908 – 2000) who outlined Peggy Guggenheim with her own image, photographed her together with the critic, friend and adviser, Herbert Read, in her apartment in London, in 1939. Behind them, the sun in her jewelry box by Yves Tanguy, surrealist artist collected by Peggy. From London to Paris: here she is in a dress with a "futurist" flavor by Elsa Schiaparelli portrayed by Rogi André (1905 - 1970) in the Parisian apartment of the American painter and poet Kay Sage, in 1940. We are at the outbreak of the Second World War, Peggy is located in Marseille, where he financially supports the Clandestine Liberation Committee of Varian Fry, an American intellectual and journalist, who helps several artists, many of them of Jewish origin, to flee to America. Even the patron was forced to return to the United States in July 1941 with her ex-husband Laurence Vail and Max Ernst, who would soon become her second husband. An emblematic shot that testifies to the presence of these European artists in New York, many of whom were Peggy's friends, is that of Hermann Landshoff (1905 - 1986) from 1942 where we see the collector in her New York apartment together with Leonora Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, André Breton, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp. From this same period are the images, again by Abbott, of the spaces of Art of This Century, the gallery-museum that Peggy opened in 1942 in New York on 57th street, created by the architect of Austrian-Romanian origins Kiesler. Here he exhibits his Cubist, Abstract and Surrealist art collection, and also organizes temporary exhibitions of the most important European artists and various emerging American artists, who will soon become the representatives of Abstract Expressionism, such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert De Niro Sr., Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock to whom he dedicated his first solo exhibition in 1943. The famous shot by George Karger (1902-1973) with Peggy cannot be missed and Pollock in the patron's apartment in front of the monumental Mural commissioned from the artist in 1943 and now owned by the University of Iowa Museum of Art.
And then the return to Europe, the choice of Venice, his participation, in 1948, in the first post-war Venice Biennale. There are various images in which Peggy is intent on setting up her collection within the spaces of the Greek Pavilion. The following year, she buys Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal, where she has moved since 1949, and opens the his home to Venetians and tourists. Some of his portraits in the palace are memorable: radiant in Mariano Fortuny's dress in the photo Ida Kar (1908 - 1974) on the Marino Marini terrace, the famous images of two great Italian authors Nino Migliori (1926) and Gianni Berengo Gardin (1930), and again her friend Roloff Beny (1924 - 1984) who portrayed her together with Antoine Pevsner's Monument symbolisant la libération de l'esprit, at the French pavilion at the 1958 Biennale. During the thirty years she spent in Venice, Peggy continued to collect works of art, to share her extraordinary heritage with the public and to support artists such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, with whom we find her in a shot in her Venetian garden.
Talent, audacity, but also femininity. Characteristics that have outlined the figure of Peggy Guggenheim and that emerge clear and strong from the shots on display, "an exhibition" underlines the curator Živa Kraus, "which aims to be a memory and a tribute to that collector, whose every gesture was a gesture of art for the XNUMXth century”.
With over thirty years of activity behind it, the Ikona Photo Gallery was founded in 1979 in Venice, near the San Moisè bridge, by the artist and gallery owner Živa Kraus, who still manages it today. Since 1989, Ikona Venezia has also been an International School of Photography. He carried out projects in various other locations in the city, always prestigious, until arriving, in 2003, at the current one, in the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. In its halls it has seen, over time, the greatest representatives of world photography, from Berenice Abbott, to Gabriele Basilico, Antonio and Felice Beato, John Batho, Bruce Davidson, Adolphe de Meyer, Robert Doisneau, Giorgia Fiorio, Franco Fontana, Martine Franck, Chuck Freedman, Gisèle Freund, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Mario Giacomelli, Erich Hartmann, William Klein, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Paolo Monti, Barbara Morgan, Carlo Naya, Helmut Newton, Ferdinando Scianna, Rosalind Solomon.
