Confessions of an Art Addict (6 page)

In spite of the fact that I had opened this gallery, I still much preferred old masters to modern art. Beckett told me that one had to accept the art of one's day, as it was a living thing. He adored the paintings of Jack Yeats and of Geer van Velde, and he wanted me to give them both exhibitions. I could not refuse him anything, so it was agreed. Jack Yeats luckily realized that his painting was not at all in line with my gallery and let me off. But I agreed and gave the Van Velde show. In fact, I bought some of the pictures which were rather like Picasso's, secretly under various names in order to please Beckett, but even after this Van Velde, not knowing I had done so, asked me for five hundred dollars, which I could not refuse him.

Beckett lived in Paris, and because of the gallery I was supposed to live in London. But because of Beckett I was always leaving the gallery to Wyn Henderson and rushing off to Paris to be with him. He could not make up his mind either to have me or to let me go. Ever since his
birth, he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother's womb. He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating. He always said our life would be all right one day, but if I ever pressed him to make any decision it was fatal and he took back everything he had previously said. At this time his book
Murphy
came out, and he gave it to me, as well as his previous study on Proust, which was excellent.

Though I adored talking to him and being with him, conversing with him was very difficult. He was never very animated and it took hours and lots of drink to warm him up before he finally unravelled himself. He was a very fascinating lanky Irishman with green eyes and a thin face and a nose like an eagle and his clothes were very French and tight-fitting. He was extremely intellectual and abstract as a person and had an enormous passion for James Joyce, and had once been engaged to his daughter.

Beckett was not Joyce's secretary, as everyone has since claimed, though he was perpetually doing errands for him. Joyce had a Russian Jewish intellectual for secretary, called Paul Leon, who was later killed by the Germans.

In 1938, Joyce had his fifty-second birthday, for which occasion Maria Jolas, a great friend of the Joyces, gave him a dinner party. Beckett was in a state of great excitement about suitable gifts. He went with me and made me buy a blackthorn stick. As for his own present, he wished to give Joyce some Swiss wine, Joyce's
favourite beverage. I remembered years before that John Holms and I had dined with Joyce in a Swiss restaurant on the Rue Ste Anne, so I went back there and asked the proprietor if he would sell us some. Of course, he was delighted to do so.

The party was a great success, and Joyce wore a beautiful Irish waistcoat which had belonged to his grandfather. This was the
Finnegans Wake
period and Joyce offered a hundred francs to anyone who could guess under what name it would be published. I think Beckett was the winner. The table was decorated with a plaster model of Dublin, through which ran a green ribbon representing the River Liffey. Joyce was very happy, surrounded by all his adorers, and after quite a lot to drink, got up and did a little jig by himself in the middle of the floor.

In Paris Marcel presented me to Jean Arp, the sculptor who was an excellent poet and most amusing man. He took me to Meudon to see the modern house he had built for himself and Sophie, his wife. They had separate studios, each consisting of a whole floor, and there was a garden full of Arp's sculpture. Sophie, a Swiss ex-school mistress, was an abstract painter and sculptress. Arp's work was more Surrealist, but he managed to keep on both sides of the fence and exhibited with both groups. Sophie edited an interesting art review called
Plastique.
Arp was always trying to further Sophie's career, and since her work was rather dull it often became painful to be so bored about nothing. They had done one sculpture
together called ‘Sculpture Conjugal'. Sophie was a wonderful wife, she did everything possible for Arp, besides doing her own work and running the magazine. The very first sculpture I ever bought was an Arp bronze. He took me to the foundry where it had been cast, and I fell so in love with it that I asked to take it in my hands. The instant I felt it, I wanted to own it.

Marcel also sent me to see Kandinsky. He was a wonderful old man of seventy, so jolly and charming, with a wife some thirty years younger, called Nina. I asked him if he wanted to have an exhibition in London and as he had never shown in England, though Sir Michael Sadler, who was a friend of his, owned a lot of his pictures, he was delighted. Kandinsky was very upset because my uncle Solomon Guggenheim had ceased to buy his paintings and instead bought paintings by an imitator of his, Rudolph Bauer. Kandinsky claimed that though he had encouraged my uncle to buy Bauer, Bauer never encouraged my uncle to buy Kandinsky. He now begged me to try to get him to buy one of his early works which my uncle wanted, and I promised to do so.

Kandinsky asked for a plan of my gallery and when he received it, decided where the pictures should be placed. The show included paintings from 1910 to 1937. Kandinsky was very business-like and resembled a Wall Street broker. How I wish I had bought all the pictures in the show. I only bought one late one and none of the marvellous early ones. These I eventually had to find
years later in New York.

What a joy those three weeks were! One day during the exhibition an art teacher from a public school in the north of England came to the gallery and begged me to allow him to show ten Kandinsky paintings to his pupils at his school. I was delighted with the idea and wrote to Kandinsky for his permission. He was equally pleased with the idea, but insisted that the pictures be insured. When my show was over, the schoolmaster came and strapped ten canvasses on to the top of his car and drove away with them. When he brought them back he told me how much they had meant to his school.

As I had promised Kandinsky, I wrote to my uncle Solomon asking him if he still wished to buy the painting that he had previously wanted. I received a friendly letter from him in reply, saying that he had turned the letter over to the Baroness Rebay, the curator of his Museum, and that she would reply herself, which she did in due time, saying:

Dear Mrs Guggenheim Jeune,

Your request to sell us a Kandinsky picture was given to me to answer.

First of all we do not ever buy from any dealer as long as great artists offer their work for sale themselves, and secondly will be your gallery the last one for our Foundation to use, if ever the need to get historically important pictures should force us to use a sales gallery.

It is extremely distasteful at this moment, when the name of Guggenheim stands for an ideal in art, to see it used for commerce so as to give the wrong impression, as if this great philanthropic work was intended to be a useful boost to some small shop.

Non-objective art, you will soon find out, does not come by the dozen, to make a shop of this art profitable. Commerce with real art cannot exist, for this reason. You will soon find out you are propagating mediocrity, if not trash. If you are interested in non-objective art you can well afford to buy it and start a collection. This way you can get into useful contact with artists, and you can leave a fine collection to your country if you know how to choose. If you don't you will soon find yourself in trouble also in commerce.

Due to the foresight of an important man since many years collecting and protecting real art through my work and experience, the name of Guggenheim became known for great art and it is very poor taste indeed to make use of it, of our work and fame, to cheapen it to a profit.

Yours very truly            

H.R.                        

P.S.
Now our newest publication will not be sent to England for some time to come.

I soon got into trouble again with the British Customs. Marcel Duchamp had sent me from Paris a sculpture show, consisting of works by Brancusi, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Antoine Pevsner, Arp, his wife, Henri Laurens and Alexander Calder. Henry Moore was to
represent England. But the Customs would not admit the show into England as an art exhibition. It could only be allowed in if the exhibits were admitted as separate pieces of bronze, marble, wood, etc., which would have meant my having to pay heavy duty on them, which I would have done had it come to the worst. This was because of a stupid old law which existed to protect English stone-cutters from foreign competition. It rested with the Director of the Tate Gallery to decide in such cases what was art and what was not. Mr Manson, the Director, refused to pass my show, which he declared was not art. This was really so scandalous that Wyn Henderson got all the art critics to sign a protest against this verdict. As a result, my case was brought up in the House of Commons and we won it.

From then on, any sculpture, whether abstract or not, could be admitted into England without the approval of the Director of the Tate Gallery. I thus rendered a great service to foreign artists and to England. The press took up the story and the show had marvellous publicity and was a great success.

Wyn Henderson, who had organized all this, was a remarkable woman, a sort of fat Titian-beauty type. She made everything go like clockwork in the gallery, though she had no previous experience of anything of this kind, being a typographer by profession. She had run several modern presses, and therefore we had the most beautiful catalogues and invitations. She had a lot of common
sense, tact and social grace, remembering the faces of all the people who came to the gallery, whom I never recognized.

Henry Moore, a very direct simple Yorkshireman of forty years, who was then teaching art to earn his living, was having a great success in London at the time of the sculpture show. He lent us a very large wooden reclining figure, which looked beautiful in the centre of the gallery. I would have liked to have bought it, but it was much too large for my house. I said that had it been smaller it would have pleased me very much. One day, months later, he arrived in the gallery like a travelling salesman, carrying a little handbag. From this he brought out two elegant reclining figures, one in bronze and one in lead, and asked me to choose one. I infinitely preferred the bronze, which I acquired.

One day a marvellous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz-band leader; which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miró's. His colour was exquisite and his construction magnificent. His name was John Tunnard. He asked me very modestly if I thought I could give him a show, and then and there I fixed a date. (Later, he told me he couldn't believe his good luck, he was so used to being turned down.) During this exhibition, which was a great success from every point of view, a woman came into the
gallery and asked, ‘Who is this John Tunnard?' Turning three somersaults, Tunnard, who was in the gallery, landed at this lady's feet, saying, ‘I am John Tunnard.' At the end of the show I, amongst many others, bought an oil painting with the extraordinary title ‘
P S
I' in green letters. Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, admired it so much when he saw it years later that he wanted to buy it for the Museum, but I would not part with it, and he had to find another one instead.

Another day Piet Mondrian, the famous Dutch abstract painter, walked into Guggenheim Jeune, and instead of talking about art, asked me if I could recommend a night club. As he was sixty-six years old, I was rather surprised, but when I danced with him I realized how he could still enjoy himself so much. He was a very fine dancer, with his military bearing, and was full of life and spirits, though it was impossible to talk to him in any language. Possibly his own, Dutch, would have been more satisfactory than his very odd French and English, but I somehow doubted that he even spoke his own native tongue.

The second year of Guggenheim Jeune we gave a beautiful show of Yves Tanguy's paintings. He was a simple man from Brittany, about thirty years old, and had been in the
Marine Marchande
for years. His father had once had a position in one of the Ministries, and Tanguy as a result was born in a building on the Place de la Concorde. This rather official commencement to his life
did not make him at all pompous. On the contrary, he was completely unpretentious. In 1926, he went to André Breton, the poet, writer and leader of the Surrealists and started painting for the first time in his life. Of course, under Breton's influence he painted what Breton considered Surrealist paintings, but I always considered them much more abstract. He adored Breton the way Beckett adored Joyce, and was always disappearing in order to do odd errands for him. Tanguy had been mad at one time and was therefore exempted from the French army. He had a lovely personality, was modest and shy and as adorable as a child. He had little hair (what he had stood straight up from his head when he was drunk, which unfortunately was very often), and beautiful little feet, of which he was extremely proud. He was very fond of me and once told me I could have had anything in the world I wanted from him; but I was still in love with Beckett at the time.

His show had a great success and we sold a lot of paintings, as Surrealism was beginning to become known in England at this time. As a result, Tanguy suddenly found himself rich for the first time in his life and began to throw money around like mad. In cafés he used to make little balls of one pound notes and flicker them about to adjacent tables. Sometimes he even burnt them. He had a great friend in Paris, a painter called Victor Brauner, a Roumanian, who was looking after Tanguy's Manx cat while Tanguy was in London. Every day
Tanguy sent a pound note to the cat, but in reality it was meant for Brauner, who was very poor.

Tanguy came to visit me in my country house in Sussex and did lovely drawings. One of them so much resembled me that I made him give it to me. It had a little feather in place of a tail, and eyes that looked like the china eyes of a doll when its head is broken and you can see inside. He also did a little phallic design for my Dunhill lighter, which we had engraved, and last but not least, he painted me two miniature paintings on earrings which were, according to Herbert Read, the most beautiful Tanguy paintings in the world. I also bought several of the paintings from his show for myself and gave some of his gouaches as presents. Tanguy's gouaches were exquisite and he sold a great many of them, as well as some oils but soon he had no money left, as he had thrown it all away. He told me it was too bad that I had given it all to him at once and that I should have doled it out to him instead.