Peggy | Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison

I love books where history slides down easy, making me a big fan of historical fiction. Peggy is a great addition to that collection, telling the story of Peggy Guggenheim, a significant figure in the surrealist and modernist art movements. I like the idea of fictional biographies since they're typically based on years of research, but are so readable with dialogue and no footnotes. This book was widely reviewed, and though it didn't appear on a lot of "best of" lists, it did receive a lot of attention.

First thing to correct is that Peggy Guggenheim did not establish the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That was her stuffy uncle Solomon who was also a big patron/collector of modern art. Peggy's legacy is housed in Venice at her former home. Late in the book, her uncle's assistant (and mistress, we're led to believe) wrote Peggy to condemn her decision to open a gallery and "cheapen" the family name. We learn a bit about the family dynamics of the three Guggenheim brothers over the course of the book. Let's just say they're not particularly close knit.

This story starts when Peggy is a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. At 14, she learns that her father, Benjamin, went down with the Titanic while sailing back to NYC with his mistress. At this point, her family loses a lot of the family money (although they still live at a level that's mind-boggling). Peggy's mother also had a family fortune, so no one had to get a job at Macy's to pay the bills. Back to Peggy -- she was close to her dad, a man who took her to museums and schooled her on the history of a wide range of art works. Peggy's relationship with her mom was rather frosty. She was very tight with her older sister, Benita, who died during childbirth and tried to ignore her younger sister, Hazel, who developed serious mental illness and is believed to have caused the death of her two children, as much as possible. At 21, Peggy gets her legacy which is $750,000--a goodly amount in the 1920s.

Peggy obviously lived in the rarefied world of the ultrarich, but the book focuses on her inner growth and struggles--abusive husband, various love affairs, grief at losing her dear sister Benita--in short, discovering who she, Peggy, really was. As an heiress, she attracted people for lots of reasons, but made some key decisions in her life to give her purpose and demonstrate her inner vision for her contribution to the world. Peggy provided funding to many artists and, perhaps most famously, provided a villa in St. Tropez for Emma Goldman to write her autobiography.

The story ends with the opening of her gallery in London in the late 1930s and her drive to acquire modern and surreal art works through the rest of her life. The epilogue, set in 1958, is a reflection on what she's done. Peggy was running out of money at this point, and it's not quite clear from the text on how she managed to maintain her lifestyle. But that's a nit.

I liked the book, although I can't say that I would have like Peggy all that much. Her character is full of adventure, love, contradictions and loss -- all of which marked her and helped form her later life. Godfrey did 10 years of research to pull this together and died from cancer before it was complete. Her friend Leslie Jamison finished it and had I not known this, I wouldn't have suspected. I was left with the desire to learn more about Peggy.

If you're interested in art, there's also a great nonfiction book called Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came To America by Hugh Eakin that I read some years ago and really enjoyed.