Passengers on This Earth

Why is modern art so strange? One answer is that a generation of artists who experienced back-to-back world wars felt compelled to express their confusion and dismay through innovative visual experimentation. Another is that visionary patrons of the time, like Peggy Guggenheim, were often as bohemian as the artists they supported and used their personal drive and resources to influence the output of clients and artists that would shape the taste of generations to come.

In the early 20th century, many American artists seeking to challenge social and sexual norms and aesthetics moved to Paris, where a bohemian community of expatriates thrived. Paris was considered the capital of modern art until World War II, when most of these artists moved across the Atlantic to New York City. Today there is a healthy interest among both art academics and laypeople in understanding the artists behind this formative period for modern art, as evidenced by exhibits such as “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939,” on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., until Feb. 23. The exhibition will then travel to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., and onto the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Ga.

As contemporary minds look back, there is a temptation to apply 21st-century terms to the lives of 20th-century artists. But while much can be learned from viewing current trends and experiences through the lens of the past, one must proceed with caution when viewing the past through the lens of the present. The obvious risk comes when we assume that historic individuals must have made choices according to the same mores and motives that influence society today. This anachronistic approach can rob individuals of the very agency that made them unique and influential in their own time.

In the case of “Brilliant Exiles,” the lives of many great women shine forth from the rich collection of portraits very much in their own time and on their own terms. In particular, Alfred Courmes’ portrait of American socialite and art patron Peggy Guggenheim beckoned me to learn more about the choices and decisions made by this group. At the same time, the curators of the National Portrait Gallery resolved to spoon-feed to the viewer prepackaged interpretations of each image, forcing connections between the historic portraits and their presumed accord with today’s social trends. Although researched information and even educated opinions shared by curators can provide welcome context for approaching unfamiliar art, in this case, the pervasiveness of the presentism framing “Brilliant Exiles” not only stifles the stories of the historic American women in Paris but also discredits the discernment of the viewer.

Americans in Paris

“Brilliant Exiles” features 57 portraits of American women in Paris, many if not most painted by American women in Paris. Kim Sajet, the National Portrait Gallery’s first female director, notes that only 11% of the works acquired by U.S. museums today are by women and less than 15% of exhibitions are dedicated to their work. “Brilliant Exiles” is a valiant effort to increase those numbers, but more impressive than the quantity of female artists featured in the exhibit is the range of artistic styles and corresponding variety of lifestyles depicted. Unfortunately, the National Portrait Gallery’s rhetorical framing of this collection fails to reflect this richness in range of its visual component, doing a disservice to the exceptional lives of the women it represents.

What distinguishes these noteworthy subjects, according to descriptions throughout the gallery, is that they mostly followed a predictable arc: First, due to their race and/or gender, they felt repressed in the still bourgeois and chauvinistic United States; next, they fled to Paris where society was less constrained; finally, they self-actualized as the queer artists they were meant to be. Let’s set aside the anachronistic application of today’s trending social lexicon to life almost a century ago and grant that some of the featured women’s lives did follow this pattern. Even so, the repetition of this convenient trope throughout the exhibit dwarfs the amount of concrete information offered about the paintings and their subjects.

If paintings are the headliners at any museum, their verbal descriptions might be taken with a grain of salt. Hoping these tropes were a fluke of the explanatory blurbs next to the paintings, I investigated the catalogue of essays published in tandem with the exhibit. Expanded biographical details are provided, but so too are bromides riddled with buzzwords. Smithsonian curator Robyn Asleson writes:

The history of American women in Paris provides a counternarrative to the familiar legend of a “Lost Generation” of hard-drinking, fast-living, disillusioned, white heterosexual male writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the 1920s. That account was enshrined in literary biographies and nostalgic memoirs (largely “by men writing about men”) during the 1950s and 1960s. […] In contrast to the stereotype of the solitary male “genius,” American women galvanized modern innovation through connectivity, fostering productive synergies, creative collaboration, and mutual support. […] Women who were sexually attracted to other women discovered a sense of communal identity in the transnational subculture of “Paris-Lesbos.”

Asleson neglects to mention that the term “Lost Generation” originates with Gertrude Stein, the patron, critic and Paris-Lesbo par excellence. Ernest Hemingway memorialized Stein’s sobriquet for her contemporaries in the epigraph to “The Sun Also Rises” (whose protagonist is the bold and progressive Lady Brett Ashley), giving Stein explicit credit in “A Moveable Feast” not only for that phrase, but also for her influence on Hemingway’s own literary trajectory.

Dissatisfied with the background the gallery offered but intrigued by its paintings, I resolved to independently explore one portrait and one life of a brilliant exile. Alfred Courmes’ striking 1926 painting of Peggy Guggenheim, on loan from the Musée Franco-Américain du château de Blérancourt, inspired me to pursue the heiress, patron and pioneer of modern art collection on her own terms.

One Brilliant Exile

Peggy’s head is in the clouds. Her geometric jewelry juxtaposes with otherwise natural curves throughout the painting. A white mantle hugs her slumped shoulders. A pattern of cubes accents her persimmon blouse. Beneath billowing fabric, Peggy’s torso, elongated à l’Ingres, cuts a perpendicular through parallel planes of craggy earth, a hazy mountain range and the placid Mediterranean. Columns of cork trees frame Peggy’s pensive face, rising above stratus clouds that unspool across the horizon to rest against the smoldering cumulus above.

When Courmes painted Peggy in the south of France, he captured her in the calm before the storm. Ahead lay not just the pinnacle of Peggy’s career as an art collector but also the onslaught of World War II, with its flood of expatriate artists whose return stateside would, following Peggy’s lead, make New York City the heir to Paris as modern art capital of the world. But, in 1926, Peggy experienced an understudied yet formative period of fleeting domesticity.

“Our new home was called Pramousquier. My mother always pronounced it ‘Promiscuous’,” recounts Peggy in her autobiography, “Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict.” (Peggy initially proposed the title “Five Husbands and Some Other Men,” notes biographer Francine Prose.) Guggenheim and her first husband, the writer Laurence Vail—known as the “King of Bohemia” for the raucous fêtes he hosted and the legions of lovers he entertained—spent the early years of their marriage moving and feasting across Europe. Pramousquier, their fixer-upper on the Riviera, was Peggy’s first home as a married woman. A day in the life, “completely dictated by Laurence,” followed this idyllic pattern: Laurence rolls out of bed and into the sea. Peggy sleeps in. Lunch on cliffside terrace. Siesta induced by local Muscadet and sea breeze. Laurence awakens to romp through the hills with a band of female admirers. Second swim. Competitive lawn sports, then supper of garden tomatoes and black sausages.

The lifestyle and social pull of the Guggenheim-Vails attracted Parisian artists, making Pramousquier a center for creative retreat. “Pramousquier was a real home and it grew perpetually in every way,” recalls Peggy. “By degrees more and more people came to visit us.”

Among these visitors was Alfred Courmes. While the painter and early beneficiary of Peggy’s patronage is not mentioned by name in her autobiography, Courmes’ detailed 1926 portrait featured in “Brilliant Exiles,” reminiscent of Bellini’s landscapes for its minutia, corresponds vividly to Peggy’s descriptions of this era of her life.

A Renewed Devotion to Art

When Peggy’s favorite sister Benita died in childbirth in 1927 in New York, the idea that people are but passengers on the earth became Peggy’s main source of consolation. Benita’s death also marked a turning point in Peggy’s relationship with Laurence, who resented her grief. Their marriage ended as did several subsequent relationships, clearing space for a renewed devotion to art. Peggy recalls the thrill of shedding her uxorial skin:

I was rather at a loss for an occupation, since I had never been anything but a wife for the last fifteen years. The problem was solved by my friend Peggy Waldman, who suggested that I start a publishing house or open an art gallery in London. I immediately renounced the idea of a publishing house, because I decided it would be too expensive. Little did I dream of the thousands of dollars I was about to sink into art.

Peggy tapped vital connections from her immediate circle, many of whom would prove enduring influences on both Peggy’s taste and the trajectory of modern art in decades to come. Peggy admits:

At that time I couldn’t distinguish between Abstract and Surrealist art. Then [Marcel Duchamp] introduced me to all the artists. They adored him, and I was well-received wherever I went. He planned shows for me and gave me lots of advice. I have him to thank for my introduction to the modern art world.

As fighter planes were taking off, first in Spain and then all over Europe, so was Peggy’s art collection. Peggy debuted Guggenheim Jeune, her inaugural gallery, in 1938 with an exhibit of Jean Cocteau, and hosted another 20 shows before the war forced her to close up shop. The American Jew was reluctant to accept that the mounting conflict would have an impact on her.

We used to sit in cafés and drink champagne. It is really incomprehensible now to think of our idiotic life, when there was so much misery surrounding us. Trains kept pouring into Paris with refugees in the direst misery with bodies that had been machine-gunned en route. I just can’t imagine why I didn’t go to the aid of these unfortunate people. But I didn’t; instead I drank champagne…

It would be easy to attribute Peggy’s aloofness to her privilege. When I returned to the National Portrait Gallery to revisit Peggy’s likeness, I told an employee about my quest to get acquainted with Ms. Guggenheim’s story. “She was rich, but she was still interesting,” said the employee with the same intonation one might use to say, “He was a crook, but such a nice guy.” It should be noted that Peggy was hardly the only person to underestimate the severity of the authoritarian threat.

“The day Hitler walked into Norway, I walked into Léger’s art studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars,” Peggy recalls. “I tried to rent a suitable place to show my paintings, but the Germans were advancing so quickly that I finally had to rescue my collection and ship it out of Paris.” Léger, Peggy’s dealer, informed her that the Louvre kept vaults in the French countryside to protect precious works from bombings.

The Louvre deemed Peggy’s collection “too modern and not worth saving,” denying her access to this storage. Among those rejected were works by Ernst, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Dalí, Magritte, and myriad modern masters that would become the foundation of one of the world’s most coveted private collections. Ultimately, Peggy used her private wealth to protect these works and to sponsor safe passage for her family and dozens of artists seeking sanctuary in the United States. By 1942 in Manhattan, Peggy opened the iconic museum-gallery Art of This Century, where she featured works by her clients and friends, including Ernst, Pollock, Breton, Rothko and others.

After her sister Benita’s death, Peggy had vowed never to return to the United States, but circumstance led her to break this promise. However, once the war ended, she began once again to look abroad. Ever a passenger on this earth, in 1948 Peggy moved to Venice, where her home remains one of the world’s premier venues for viewing modern art.

The fact that Peggy returned to Europe of her own volition reminds us that the intercontinental movement of 20th-century American artists was due not only to the collision of geopolitical events that forced their migration, but perhaps also to a deeper pull: attraction to the foreign. While great works have been produced by local artisans and artists inspired by their immediate surroundings, the characteristic “strangeness” of the surreal and abstract currents that dominated the early modern style were likely the fruit of this xenophilic fascination with that which is other.

A common criticism of modern art is that its “beauty” is too subjective, a trope appropriated by Peggy’s uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, who originally named his own modern art collection “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting.” (Peggy referred to the Upper East Side establishment as “my uncle’s garage.”) But, to create a subjective experience of art, one must be familiar enough with the objective to differentiate the two aesthetic modes. I believe this interplay between objective and subjective, foreign and familiar, discomfort and ease, is at the heart of both Peggy’s lifestyle and her inextricable influence on modern art. Reflecting in her memoir on her “wretched” disposition in romantic relationships, Peggy concluded:

It is my fate to go through with the impossible. Whatever form I find it in, it fascinates me, while I flee from all the easy things in life.

When curators at the National Portrait Gallery insist that the brilliance of the women whose portraits they feature is universally due to their escape of American oppression and thanks to their sexual liberation, they succumb to the easy interpretation that brilliant individuals are motivated primarily by social currents rather than by their own choices. Perhaps this is because the curators themselves have succumbed to contemporary currents, as evidenced by their blanket characterizations of the remarkable female artists with today’s voguish vocabulary.

The uncommon collection of paintings in “Brilliant Exiles” makes the exhibit well worth a visit. But, if you want to get to know the subjects, take after Peggy Guggenheim: Flee from the easy or familiar interpretation and embrace the stranger, more complex approach of learning the unique stories of the artists on display.

Grace Phan Bellafiore writes on art, culture and politics from Washington, D.C.