ARTS
A face-lift for Guggenheim
Bryan Robertson
Before she died in 1979, Peggy Guggenheim bequeathed her famous collection in Venice of 20th-century painting and sculpture to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation which, almong other activities, administers the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She also left to the Foundation the building and garden that had been her home and housed the collection for 35 years, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, well known on the Grand Canal as an uncompleted single-storeyed landmark between the Academia and S. Maria della Salute. The collection was to remain in Venice and to be maintained by the Guggenheim Foundation.
The life-sized bronze 'Horse and Rider' by Marino Marini on the terrace facing the Canal hasP been well known over three decades to passing boat loads of sightseers perhaps because the bronze male rider, upturned head scanning the heavens, rigid arms outstretched to infinity, also possessed an only too obviously outstretched and erect penis — so in fact does the horse — although what had seemed faintly comic in the Fifties hardly drew a glance from visitors weeding up and down the Grand Canal in the increasingly permissive Sixties and Seventies. As a sop to Catholic constraints back in the Fifties, Peggy Guggenheim had the bronze penis cast separately so that it could be unscrewed from the horseman's body during religious festivals on the Grand Canal: a gesture of odd propriety in a country where erect phalluses are hardly unknown in scores of Pompeiian and Etruscan works, but at that time Peggy Guggenheim was a fairly new expatriate in Venice from New York, Venice was, as it still is, a centre of bourgeois decorum and she had hopes of the Venetian authorities eventually taking over the collection as a public responsibility. The collection had seemed to deteriorate rather in the past 15 years or so of its owner's life in the way that possessions of all kinds tend to do in the hands of increasingly elderly parties: in this case, exceptionally beautiful and historically important large charcoal drawings by Mondrian were unglazed, exposed to the humid Venetian elements as well as to visitors brushing by, and many canvases by Braque or Picasso seemed grubby, or in need of varnishing. The Palazzo itself took on a dilapidated character: its owner pleaded poverty, which touched nobody's heart, and the collection was rumoured to have been offered to a number of museums in Europe With, as always, on and off, Peggy Guggenheim's stated hope that the public authorities in Venice would take over the Palazzo and its collection.
From her late fifties on she had become increasingly bored with the responsibility of maintaining the works of art. It had begun in a radical spirit of inquiry and adventure back in the Thirties under the stimulus of, first of all, Herbert Read, who had agreed to build up a representative modern collection for Peggy Guggenheim which would soon open as the first museum of modern art in London. Peggy Guggenheim helped Herbert Read financially with his directo rial position at Routledge's and continued to buy modern art on a large and serious scale before she was forced to spend the rest of the war in New York. Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst to whom she was married for a while, also helped in the formation of the collection. I think that, with time, the collection in Venice seemed to Peggy Guggenheim to belong to earlier phases of her life and she had lost interest in contemporary art, partly from a sense of surfeit. I remember her telling me, after a trip in her private launch to see an amazing church full of paintings made by Carpaccio when he was 14, that she would willingly exchange her entire collection for one small Bellini. She became very knowledgeable about Italian art and architecture. She still admired the classic phases of modern art but was divided between half enjoying the power that the collection gave ,her and being bored by its responsibility. Also, her style of living (she was a generous hostess) took all of her income and she had nothing left over for conservation or keeping the collection open to the public, which she did, for periods in the summer.
If there was general relief that the collection was to be safely maintained under the Guggenheim wing, there was also surprise because Peggy Guggenheim had always seemed keen to do her own thing away from the family and her uncle's Foundation; but the decision was sensible. The rooms of the Palazzo have been repainted and spruced up; the painting and sculptures seem in better nick, and everything has been rehung and relit to great advantage. The shaping hand of Tom Messer, the Director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is already felt. You still enter the garden through Claire Falkenstein's finely meshed wrought-iron gates with brilliant lumps of coloured glass trapped in the mesh, but the overgrown garden itself has been cleared and replanted with paths and spaces for sculptures by Giacometti, Ernst, Brancusi, Richier, Moore and Arp. It is a great treat to see Brancusi's tall gleaming 'Bird in Space' and `Maiastra' out of doors in a colonnade. But the best part of visiting the collection is still to walk into the main hall and see, cascading toward you, a vast soaring and plunging Calder mobile of black and silver metal; on the wall to the left is a big Picasso painting of comical young naked girls looking as if they'd been carved out of rubber bananas, sailing a boat on a big blue pond with a huge interrogatory head looming up on the horizon. Beyond, are big windows looking on to the Grand Canal and the Picasso and the Calder seem to contain all that's best and most cheerful in 20th-century art in this brilliant Venetian light, and not at all discountenanced by the noble buildings beyond.
The collection lives up to this optimistic first glimpse, with at least one other Picasso 1928 masterpiece of a studio interior, and fine works by Braque, Arp, Klee, Miro et al. The collection adds something lively and perfectly shaped to Venice and provides a useful antidote to a surfeit of Baroque art. When I last saw it, Philip Rylands, the curator of the collection, was taking a big party of schoolchildren round the surrealists and they were enjoying themselves. Do go and see the collection if you get to Venice; it's open from April to the end of October, there are crowds but it's worth it; even those strenuously unimpressed by modern art get some pleasure• from the collection; like Peggy G. it is never boring.
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