In the museum gift shop at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, you can buy cardboard facsimiles and miniature key-chain souvenirs of the namesake's distinctive batwing sunglasses. The expat art patron and American heiress (her father, Benjamin, went down with the Titanic) always capped off her outfits with one of the many gilded butterfly and bat styles she commissioned from painter Edward Melcarth, and they frequently appear in the photographs and film clips in Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, a new documentary about her (opening in Toronto and Montreal this week and soon in Vancouver).
By all accounts the collector wasn't particularly interested in clothes, yet her canny fashion taste is the reason she's remembered as vividly as the renegade modern art she championed. "Peggy did – literally and purposefully – vamp for the camera," director Lisa Immordino Vreeland says of the signature look documented in numerous portrait poses (many of them, incidentally, taken by Canadian photographer Roloff Beny, who was for decades among Guggenheim's inner circle). "She had a big collection of fur coats and would lean on a sculpture or pose at a Dalí or a Tanguy."
A talking head in the film posits Guggenheim's choice of abstract and surrealist art was "a mirror for her own strangeness." Arguably, so was her wardrobe. In one scene the chatty Guggenheim is surrounded by jewellery – earrings, mostly – pinned up the bedroom walls displayed like objects in an art gallery. "I am the only woman in the world who wears his enormous mobile earrings," the art collector once boasted about sculptor Alexander Calder.
Not anymore: This season, sculpted metal, wire and drop-orb earrings – mini mobiles that reference the art-jewellery Calder and Yves Tanguy made for their patron – are the holiday trend at designers like Marni. Of late, the art patron has been the go-to spirit animal of several designers. To craft its first fragrance with niche perfume brand Arquiste, J.Crew was inspired by Guggenheim's 1943 opening party for her all-female modern art show Exhibition by 31 Women. Giambattista Valli's fall haute couture nods to her accessory look with oversized earrings and sunglasses, as does Dolce & Gabbana, while Dries van Noten has said that the riotous, clashing prints in his upcoming spring collection looked to Venice-era Guggenheim, who favoured flowerprint dresses by designer Ken Scott (another of her protégés), a pioneer of bright, psychedelic gardens of peonies, anemones, daisies and dahlias.
"We draw from the past and these figures with such original thought and way of approaching life. It's such an important message to see examples of women who stand out and are courageous do things and live on their own terms," Immordino Vreeland says in reference to Guggenheim and the subject of her prior documentary The Eye Had to Travel, her late grandmother-in-law and legendary Vogue empress Diana Vreeland. "What it is is reinvention, the creation of these personas, that attracts me so much."
During our conversation, Vreeland likened both women to "characters." As the Pied Piper and eventual patron saint of Venice and its Biennale, it's especially fitting that Guggenheim is most remembered for her outlandish sunglasses, those outsized kissing swans, bats and butterflies. The inaugural exhibition at the Rapp Museum of Eyewear in Toronto explores this mask-like modern cat-eye style (first created in 1939 by a woman, natch) and has many historic Guggenheim-like examples. But it traces the eyewear style's roots and even its original patented name – the Harlequin – back to the Venetian mask tradition of commedia dell'arte, a masquerade of disguise and identity creation.
"You have to have something rebellious inside of you, that stands out already," Immordino Vreeland says. "In Diana's case, she always wanted to stand out – but I think with Peggy you have something ticking in there, hibernating, and it comes out in the right situation." That started to break out in the atmosphere of bohemian 1920s Paris but only cemented itself in Venice alongside her taste in art. "She had some Poiret and Fortuny," Immordino Vreeland says, but little of her modest fortune was spent on clothes. "It's not that she had a vast amount to throw left and right," the director underscores. "She was on a really strict financial diet to be able to buy art."
To the refrain that one can either wear art or be a work of art, Guggenheim did both, but to accomplish the latter, she was shrewd and shopped at the five-and-dime for unconventional items with the most memorable impact. An earlier lover had been very particular and preferred Guggenheim in plain cotton shirtwaists and bobby socks (a look Walter Winchell mocked in his gossip column); when the frugal patron later moved to Venice, she pragmatically continued to wear the sedate dresses but augmented them with fluffy furs and gobby tangles of necklaces. Of her veritable wardrobe of fur coats, most were purchased secondhand and, aside from the art-jewellery made by her protégés, she bought inexpensive outré costume jewellery or wore bib necklaces purchased during a long-ago winter spent in Egypt. The finishing touches of her costume were unusual, pointed opentoed sandals – another judicious expense: She had them custom-made based on a slipper style depicted in a 15th-century Carpaccio painting.
By design, Guggenheim also chose as her home the Venier dei Leoni, a prominent terraced palazzo on the Grand Canal that would put both the art collection and its singular collector on display. (As it had the villa's previous tenant, the indelible Marchesa Casati.) Nothing was by accident: Even when deciding what colour to paint her palazzo's palina, the front mooring poles denoting each canal property, Immordino Vreeland says, "she based her blue ones on the shade of a coat she had bought from Dior. You have to love that!"
Nathalie Atkinson