A look into the jewellery archives with Kitty Lees, this month rummaging through one of the art world’s most coveted collections: Peggy Guggenheim’s jewellery box.
“I am not an art collector. I am a museum.” Oh, to be Peggy Guggenheim.
Both a devotee of Surrealism and a tireless crusader for the beau monde, she assembled one of the most prolific collections of modern art in the world. The self-proclaimed “art addict” collected her acquisitions hungrily, declaring an artistic mission to buy a picture a day – a proposition the art world seemed to accept with a kind of amused delight.
Guggenheim was, in every sense, an exhibitionist. Sexually, it is claimed she had close to one thousand liaisons, controversially including many of the artists she supported. She lived as she collected: unapologetically and instinctively. Art was never separate from the theatre of her life; it adorned her walls, her work, her lovers – and, often, her ears.
The Earrings for Peggy Guggenheim were a gift, a surrealist love letter, from French artist Yves Tanguy. Best known for his dreamlike, biomorphic landscapes, Tanguy was a key figure in the Surrealist movement alongside Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, the latter Guggenheim’s husband at the time. His paintings depicted endless, desolate plains strewn with fluid, alien-like forms, often occupying psychological as much as physical space. Given to Peggy in 1938, these earrings, Tanguy’s smallest paintings, reflect his surreal visual language on a miniature scale. They are delicate yet strange: mismatched, abstract shapes composed of silver, gold, pearls and oil on shell. Each bears an organic, almost marine-like quality. One resembles a curling mollusc or a tendril; the other, a coiled, twisting pod.
Peggy was later to wear one of these, together with an earring by Alexander Calder, on the opening night of her New York museum-gallery, Art of This Century, on October 20, 1942, to signal her impartiality towards abstraction and Surrealism.
To wear Tanguy was to inhabit the dream. For Peggy, it was a way of carrying the surreal into the everyday, showing society that she herself was as much a masterpiece as the works she adored.
