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

cast, he appeared one morning on my terrace with what resembled a strange medieval animal. Together they looked exactly like the Carpaccio painting of St George leading in the captive dragon from whom he has delivered the princess, which is in the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, in Venice. Giacometti was extremely excited, which surprised me very much because I thought he had lost all interest in his earlier work, having long since renounced abstractions in order to carve little Greek heads, which he carried in his pocket. He had refused to exhibit in my sculpture show in London because I would not show one of these. He said all art was alike. I much preferred my bronze, which was called ‘Woman with a Cut Throat’. It was the first of Giacometti’s work ever to be cast, and when, years later, I returned to Europe after the war, to my great horror I seemed to see it everywhere, though I suppose the number of casts must have been limited to about six.
    The day Hitler walked into Norway, I walked into Léger’s studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars. He never got over the fact that I should be buying paintings on such a day. Léger was a terrifically vital man, who looked like a butcher. Duringhis stay in New York, where he finally got after the German occupation of France, he became a sort of guide and took us all to foreign restaurants in every quarter of the city. He seemed to know every inch of New York, which he had discovered on foot.
    The phony war continued all winter, and I personally was convinced that the Germans would never get to Paris. Therefore I tried to find a suitable place to house my fast-growing collection. I was living in a pent-house on the Ile de St Louis and could not hang any pictures there as it was all windows. I found a beautiful apartment on the Place Vendôme, where Chopin had died, as well as the shop of the famous tailor O’Rossin. I found it on the same day that I went to see Léger, but the owner of the apartment did everything in his power to discourage me from taking it. He thought I was mad. He said, ‘Think it over and come back tomorrow.’ I went back the next day and told him I had not changed my mind, so he let me have it. I then got the architect, van Togerloo, to draw up plans to remodel this spacious place, where I intended to live as well as make a museum. It was over-decorated in the jin de siècle style. I insisted on having all the angels removed from the ceiling and scraped off the wedding-cake stucci from the walls. At this point, it obviously became impossible to continue with the scheme, as the Germans were nearing Paris. I asked the landlord to give me the cellars instead, to make a museum, but they had to be kept for air-raid shelters.
    The only thing to do with the paintings was to pack them and get them out of Paris before it was too late or store them in an underground vault. Léger told me he thought the Louvre would give me one cubic metre of space somewhere in the country, where they were hiding their own treasures. So I had my pictures taken off their stretchers and packed into one cubic metre. To my dismay, the Louvre decided that my pictures were not worth saving and refused me the space. What they considered not worth saving were a Kandinsky, several Klees and Picabias, a Cubist Braque, a Gris, a Léger, a Gleizes, a Marcoussis, a Delaunay, two Futurists, a Severini, and a Balla, a Doesburg, and a ‘de Stijl’ Mondrian. Among the Surrealist paintings were those of Miró, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Tanguy, Dali, Magritte and Brauner. The sculpture they had not even considered, though it comprised works by Brancusi, Lipchitz, Laurens, Pevsner, Giacometti, Moore, and Arp. Finally my friend, Maria Jolas, who had rented a château near Vichy to evacuate her bilingual school of children, said she would keep my collection in her barn. So I sent them there.
    Nellie and I fled from