Pieces of Peggy
Four bits of bling to rule the avant-garde: the best bits of Peggy Guggenheim’s jewellery collection.
“I am not an art collector. I am a museum.”
Oh, to be Peggy Guggenheim.
A devotee to Surrealism and a crusader for the beau monde, she amassed one of the world’s most notable collections of modern-day art.
The self-proclaimed “art addict,” had an artistic mission – to buy a picture a day – a mission that the art world seemed to accept with a kind of boggled delight.
Guggenheim was haunted by a lonely and suppressive childhood and suffered great insecurities, often using her wealth and wardrobe as a shield. An extravagant flapper, she was famously photographed by Man Ray in an oriental Poiret dress, worn with a hairband given to her by Stravinsky's girlfriend. Other favourites included an Elsa Schaparelli cellophane zipper, a black and gold Ken Scott dress and a collection of tricorn hats and ethnic jewellery.
Guggenheim was an exhibitionist. Sexually, it is claimed she had close to one thousand liaisons, controversially including most artists that she supported. At the age of fifty-one, she took up naked sunbathing on the roof of her palazzo – directly across the water from the windows of police headquarters – and developed an attitude to sampling the local men which her friend Mary McCarthy compared to her attitude toward the local olives and crusty bread.
A botched nose job at 21 left her with what would be referred to as the "Guggenheim potato".
Guggenheim was calmer and quieter in her last years in Venice; she liked to say that floating in a gondola was the nicest thing in her life since she gave up sex. Nicer still, seen through the bottle-green-tinted lenses of her bonkers ‘bat’ glasses. Peggy commissioned the frames to be made by her friend, the artist Edward Melcarth, in 1948. Melcarth was primarily a painter; a romantic, who dared to live as an openly homosexual man and did not hide his support for communism. He painted hungrily - like he was inhaling the world - it’s grime, its grandeur, its boys with cigarettes dangling. His paintings represented what he called “’Social Romanticism’. The artist’s bespoke design became a staple in Guggenheim’s wardrobe during her later years, metamorphosising into butterfly frames, too, growing precious wings of gold and silver. Peggy flaunted the frames to gallery openings, as she traversed the Venice canals with her beloved dogs (Guggenheim was the last private owner of a Venice gondola and making for Venice’s most eccentric version of street (canal?) style.
Alexander Calder is most known for his beautifully suspended mobiles- but also made thousands of pieces of jewellery, each unique and produced by his own hand. From the 1930s, Calder’s wife and friends became walking mobiles when wearing the artist’s necklaces and bracelets, primitive executions in bent, curled, and twisted silver and brass. Calder’s creations: be it object or jewellery, come to life when they are lifted and hung in position. Each piece he made was designed to move, to be worn or to perform. As a result, the wearer of Calder’s jewellery becomes a part of the jewel and plays an integral role in the spectacle. Peggy epitomised ‘spectacle’ and was a great supporter of Calder’s art and jewellery. ‘Earrings for Peggy Guggenheim’ demonstrate the eccentricities of Calder’s hand, expressing his tactile qualities. One earring is long and sinuous, like a single spindly spider’s leg, the other is shorter and more angular, composed of intersecting shapes—flat brass discs and bent wire—that create a sense of rhythmic imbalance, as if frozen mid-spin. The pair hang freely, moving almost in the manner of helicopter seeds falling from a tree—their movement subtly echoing his mobiles.
The Earrings for Peggy Guggenheim were a gift, a surrealist love letter, from French artist Yves Tanguy. Best known for his dreamlike, biomorphic landscapes, Tanguy was a key figure in the Surrealist movement alongside Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst (Guggenheim’s husband at the time). His paintings depicted endless, desolate plains strewn with fluid, alien-like forms, often occupying psychological as much as physical space. Given to Peggy in 1938, these earrings, Tanguy’s smallest paintings, reflect his surreal visual language on a miniature scale. They are delicate yet strange: mismatched, abstract shapes composed of silver, gold, pearls and oil on shell. Each bears an organic, almost marine-like quality. One resembles a curling mollusc or a tendril; the other, a coiled, twisting pod. Peggy was later to wear one of these, together with an earring by Alexander Calder, on the opening night of her New York museum-gallery, Art of This Century, on October 20, 1942, to signal her impartiality towards abstraction and Surrealism.
Peggy’s flower earring! Worn to the 1948 Venice Biennale, an event which marked her return to Europe after World War II and the public debut of her newly formed collection. Guggenheim was newly single – following her divorce from Max Ernst in 1946, and so this singular earring, clipped onto her left ear and resembling such a fantastical bloom in full flourish, marked also her return to society as a single woman. Photos from the event show the earring blooming outwards in gilt metal, petals fanning dramatically from her face. Each one curls slightly as if in caught in the wind. The earring feels deliberately exaggerated, sitting on the side of Guggenheim’s head, interrupting the symmetry of her face and the formal balance of her otherwise (uncharacteristically) minimal ensemble. In her memoir, Out of This Century, Guggenheim refers to the asymmetry as a way of unsettling the viewer.
The piece has often been attributed to Yves Tanguy, and although unconfirmed, it certainly evokes the dreamlike distortion found in his paintings. Like much of Guggenheim’s collection, the earring sits somewhere between the real and the imaginary. Worn at a moment designed to showcase her newly established art collection, the flower blurs the line between collector and collected, showing Guggenheim’s commitment to living as art.