I bought it because before he had any association with the Guggenheims, Rumney was an important figure in Situationism, an anti-art art movement in the lineage of Dada. The Consul is a book of interviews with Rumney conducted by Gerard Berreby. Here is Marlene Strauss’ 2017 lecture on Peggy’s history and legacy which characterizes Pegeen’s suicide solely as a function of her “troubled second marriage.” It is a simplification that gives Peggy cover for her own role in Pegeen’s suicidal depression.
Already devastated by the loss of his wife, Ralph endured months of persecution before the action was dropped.”īut Peggy had successfully smeared him.
Her mother, Peggy Guggenheim, who had always hated Ralph (for reasons he describes, with wit and a surprising lack of bitterness, in The Consul), took out a civil action against him for murder and ‘non-assistance to a person in danger’. In 1967, Ralph’s wife Pegeen – whom he had saved from earlier suicide attempts – killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates in their Paris flat. “He was, unforgivably, accused of murder. When Rumney died in 2002, The Guardian’s obituary said: Art Addict documents that Peggy blamed Pegeen’s second husband – Ralph Rumney, whose name flashes across the screen as Peggy calls him terrible. Pegeen’s lifetime of depression was punctuated by more or less constant suicide attempts, one of which eventually succeeded in 1967. She also describes one of Pegeen’s suicide attempts which interrupted a dinner party with blood everywhere. Peggy admits onscreen to being a hapless and emotionally ill-equipped mother. Her collection itself has been described as a work of art.Īrt Addict devotes some time to Peggy’s daughter, Pegeen Guggenheim Vail, an accomplished surrealist painter in her own right. She blazed trails to preserve and display it. As art became less figurative and more experimental, not everyone could see the importance of what was occurring on canvasses worldwide. Not an artist herself, she had the foresight to grasp the importance of the avant-garde zeitgeist of the 20 th Century. Peggy’s outsized personality and excesses are well known, as are her multiple liaisons through the art world it’s scandalous and titillating.
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Then in the post-war years, her money and prestige powered the international art scene, as documented in the movie Art Addict. For one thing, she saved many artworks (and artists) from extinction as the Nazis swept through France, shipping her collection of priceless art to safety through sub-infested waters. Peggy Guggenheim was the art collector-financier whose vast contribution to modern art resists calculation. Rumney’s book The Consul provides a critical point of view on this fraught mother-daughter relationship cracking up at the cutting edge of the art world. The story of Peggy and Pegeen Guggenheim, as told by the Situationist painter Ralph Rumney, reads like Shakespeare: court intrigue, backstabbing, madness, and suicide.
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