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

painting with the extraordinary title ‘ P S I’ in green letters. Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, admired it so much when he saw it years later that he wanted to buy it for the Museum, but I would not part with it, and he had to find another one instead.
    Another day Piet Mondrian, the famous Dutch abstract painter, walked into Guggenheim Jeune, and instead of talking about art, asked me if I could recommend a night club. As he was sixty-six years old, I was rather surprised, but when I danced with him I realized how he could still enjoy himself so much. He was a very fine dancer, with his military bearing, and was full of life and spirits, though it was impossible to talk to him in any language. Possibly his own, Dutch, would have been more satisfactory than his very odd French and English, but I somehow doubted that he even spoke his own native tongue.
    The second year of Guggenheim Jeune we gave a beautiful show of Yves Tanguy’s paintings. He was a simple man from Brittany, about thirty years old, and had been in the Marine Marchande for years. His father had once had a position in one of the Ministries, and Tanguy as a result was born in a building on the Place de la Concorde. This rather official commencement to his lifedid not make him at all pompous. On the contrary, he was completely unpretentious. In 1926, he went to André Breton, the poet, writer and leader of the Surrealists and started painting for the first time in his life. Of course, under Breton’s influence he painted what Breton considered Surrealist paintings, but I always considered them much more abstract. He adored Breton the way Beckett adored Joyce, and was always disappearing in order to do odd errands for him. Tanguy had been mad at one time and was therefore exempted from the French army. He had a lovely personality, was modest and shy and as adorable as a child. He had little hair (what he had stood straight up from his head when he was drunk, which unfortunately was very often), and beautiful little feet, of which he was extremely proud. He was very fond of me and once told me I could have had anything in the world I wanted from him; but I was still in love with Beckett at the time.
    His show had a great success and we sold a lot of paintings, as Surrealism was beginning to become known in England at this time. As a result, Tanguy suddenly found himself rich for the first time in his life and began to throw money around like mad. In cafés he used to make little balls of one pound notes and flicker them about to adjacent tables. Sometimes he even burnt them. He had a great friend in Paris, a painter called Victor Brauner, a Roumanian, who was looking after Tanguy’s Manx cat while Tanguy was in London. Every dayTanguy sent a pound note to the cat, but in reality it was meant for Brauner, who was very poor.
    Tanguy came to visit me in my country house in Sussex and did lovely drawings. One of them so much resembled me that I made him give it to me. It had a little feather in place of a tail, and eyes that looked like the china eyes of a doll when its head is broken and you can see inside. He also did a little phallic design for my Dunhill lighter, which we had engraved, and last but not least, he painted me two miniature paintings on earrings which were, according to Herbert Read, the most beautiful Tanguy paintings in the world. I also bought several of the paintings from his show for myself and gave some of his gouaches as presents. Tanguy’s gouaches were exquisite and he sold a great many of them, as well as some oils but soon he had no money left, as he had thrown it all away. He told me it was too bad that I had given it all to him at once and that I should have doled it out to him instead.
    My ex-husband, Laurence Vail, and my children, all wanted me to marry Tanguy, but I felt I needed a father, not a son.
    During one of my visits to Paris, which were still frequent (because of