Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim Page A

forty or fifty. He said, ‘At fifty.’ It was all ridiculous and childish, but the funniest part of all was the seriousness with which Breton took all this. He was mortally offended if anyone spoke out of turn. Part of the game was to inflict punishment on those who did so. Then he made you pay a forfeit. He ruled us with an iron hand, screaming, ‘Gage’ at every moment. You were punished by being brought in blindfolded and forced on all fours, then you had to guess who had kissed you, or something equally foolish.
    After we had been in New York for a while, my sisterHazel invited us to California. Max was delighted to go, and we took his son Jimmy and my daughter Pegeen. I particularly wished to go to see the Arensberg collection, which was then in California, and it was well worth the trip. The Victorian house was filled with Duchamp’s paintings, Brancusi’s sculptures and much pre-Columbian art, besides a lot of very fine Cubist and other paintings. They all looked funny in this setting. Even the bathrooms contained works of art. Arensberg was a sad man, who seemed to be more interested in the Bacon-Shakespeare theory than in his collection. Today it looks magnificent in the Philadelphia Museum, beautifully installed by Henry Clifford, and poor Mr Arensberg is dead.
    We went to Arizona and New Mexico and New Orleans, perpetually in search of a house wherein to install my museum. Max fell in love with kachina dolls and Indian masks. He wanted to buy everything he saw.
    The place I came nearest to buying was a fifty-room unfinished castle built on a high hill at Malibu in Southern California. In its unfinished state it looked like a Surrealist dream. In Marseilles I had inadvertently invited Beton to live in my museum in America and hold his court there. This would have been the perfect place for such activities, but it was too far away from any city, so we gave it up.
    Then we tried New Orleans, a most fascinating town, but it seemed too remote from the world and too hot and provincial. San Francisco was a lovely city, but did notneed me or my museum, as Dr Grace McCann Morley was already doing a wonderful job there as director of the San Francisco Museum.
    When we got back to New York we continued looking for a house. We finally found a dream of a house on Beekman Place which we couldn’t resist. Unfortunately, we were not permitted to make a museum there. It was a remodelled brownstone mansion called Hale House, on the East River and 51st Street. It had a big living-room which looked like a chapel, with an old fireplace that might well have come out of some baronial hall in Hungary. The chapel was two stories high and the whole front of the room gave on to the River, where we had a terrace. There was a balcony above, with five little windows overlooking the chapel. Here five choir boys might well have sung chants. Above we had a bedroom, and Max had a studio with another terrace. There were other rooms for my daughter and for guests. When we were alone we ate in the kitchen, where Max and I both loved to cook.
    Soon after Pearl Harbor we were married, as I did not want to live in sin with an enemy alien.
    When we arrived in America we had expected a warm reception from Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, but he was in Vermont and we did not see him until the fall. His books had been my bibles for years and I was longing to meet him. When I did so, I was surprised how much he resembled Abraham Lincoln. Iliked him at once. He was shy but charming, and his conversation was serious and learned and stimulating. He was impressed by my passion for art. He wanted to buy a painting of Max’s for the Museum of Modern Art, but as my Aunt Olga, his guardian angel, only gave him money to buy the most expensive paintings, he could never raise the funds he needed. So in the end he gave me a Malevich (of which he had thirteen) which had been smuggled out of Russia in an umbrella, and I gave