Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim Read Free Book Online

more Surrealist, but he managed to keep on both sides of the fence and exhibited with both groups. Sophie edited an interesting art review called Plastique. Arp was always trying to further Sophie’s career, and since her work was rather dull it often became painful to be so bored about nothing. They had done one sculpturetogether called ‘Sculpture Conjugal’. Sophie was a wonderful wife, she did everything possible for Arp, besides doing her own work and running the magazine. The very first sculpture I ever bought was an Arp bronze. He took me to the foundry where it had been cast, and I fell so in love with it that I asked to take it in my hands. The instant I felt it, I wanted to own it.
    Marcel also sent me to see Kandinsky. He was a wonderful old man of seventy, so jolly and charming, with a wife some thirty years younger, called Nina. I asked him if he wanted to have an exhibition in London and as he had never shown in England, though Sir Michael Sadler, who was a friend of his, owned a lot of his pictures, he was delighted. Kandinsky was very upset because my uncle Solomon Guggenheim had ceased to buy his paintings and instead bought paintings by an imitator of his, Rudolph Bauer. Kandinsky claimed that though he had encouraged my uncle to buy Bauer, Bauer never encouraged my uncle to buy Kandinsky. He now begged me to try to get him to buy one of his early works which my uncle wanted, and I promised to do so.
    Kandinsky asked for a plan of my gallery and when he received it, decided where the pictures should be placed. The show included paintings from 1910 to 1937. Kandinsky was very business-like and resembled a Wall Street broker. How I wish I had bought all the pictures in the show. I only bought one late one and none of the marvellous early ones. These I eventually had to findyears later in New York.
    What a joy those three weeks were! One day during the exhibition an art teacher from a public school in the north of England came to the gallery and begged me to allow him to show ten Kandinsky paintings to his pupils at his school. I was delighted with the idea and wrote to Kandinsky for his permission. He was equally pleased with the idea, but insisted that the pictures be insured. When my show was over, the schoolmaster came and strapped ten canvasses on to the top of his car and drove away with them. When he brought them back he told me how much they had meant to his school.
    As I had promised Kandinsky, I wrote to my uncle Solomon asking him if he still wished to buy the painting that he had previously wanted. I received a friendly letter from him in reply, saying that he had turned the letter over to the Baroness Rebay, the curator of his Museum, and that she would reply herself, which she did in due time, saying:
    Dear Mrs Guggenheim Jeune,
    Your request to sell us a Kandinsky picture was given to me to answer.
    First of all we do not ever buy from any dealer as long as great artists offer their work for sale themselves, and secondly will be your gallery the last one for our Foundation to use, if ever the need to get historically important pictures should force us to use a sales gallery.
    It is extremely distasteful at this moment, when the name of Guggenheim stands for an ideal in art, to see it used for commerce so as to give the wrong impression, as if this great philanthropic work was intended to be a useful boost to some small shop.
    Non-objective art, you will soon find out, does not come by the dozen, to make a shop of this art profitable. Commerce with real art cannot exist, for this reason. You will soon find out you are propagating mediocrity, if not trash. If you are interested in non-objective art you can well afford to buy it and start a collection. This way you can get into useful contact with artists, and you can leave a fine collection to your country if you know how to choose. If you don’t you will soon find yourself in trouble also in commerce.
    Due to the foresight of an