This new biography of Peggy Guggenheim charts the life of the infamous, multi-talented art collector and personality. Great-granddaughter of Swiss immigrant Simon Guggenheim, and daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down on the Titanic, Peggy Guggenheim was an extremely controversial figure, censured for everything from stinginess to sexual voraciousness. She was known for taking lovers at the drop of a beret as much as for her choices in modern art, and was married. Known as the enfant terrible of the art world, Peggy Guggenheim was one of its most significant patrons and promoters as well as its impresario, with her personal and professional life intermingled.
A captivating story of Peggy Guggenheim; her charismatic personality and her talents, the culture that shaped her and that she went on to transform. Mary Dearborn's colourful personal and cultural biography locates Peggy Guggenheim in an array of shifting and colliding cultures, providing a story of this complicated and talented woman and the culture that shaped her and that she went on to transform.
Richly detailed, highly sympathetic portrait of the Guggenheim who rebelled against her family and then left to them her extraordinary collection of contemporary art. . .Peggy Guggenheim could not have wished for a more generous biographer than Dearborn. . .she credits [Guggenheim] for being a principal force in the public's acceptance of mid-20th-century artists. . .we get much family history along the way. . .Thoroughly, even lovingly researched. (KIRKUS REVIEWS)
Dearborn celebrates Guggenheim, the iconoclastic doyenne of abstract expressionism, in this appreciative, thorough biography...With its fluid prose and provocative subject, this book will appeal to art lovers interested in more than the paint. (PW)
Excellent...[Guggenheim's] achievements were routinely minimized and her promiscuity was snidely exaggerated, but in Mary Dearborn's biography she emerges as a woman of vision and integrity (BOSTON GLOBE)
Dearborn...approaches her subject with a fine balance of sympathy and objectivity, and an unobtrusive authorial presence befitting the genre... Dearborn will convince readers to take Guggenheim seriously as an independent woman and an appreciator of art. WAS ('[Dearborn’s book is] deeply, perhaps lovingly researched and gives a new authenticity to the long-type-cast doyenne of the "champagne years," the early 20th century... Dearborn follows Guggenheim’s life in strict chronological fashion and amasses rich hist)
