Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim Page B

Max five hundred dollars and Barr got Max’s painting.
    When we moved into Beekman Place we gave a huge house-warming. Unfortunately there was a terrible fight between giant Nicco Callas, the art critic, and little Charles Henri Ford, the poet. Jimmy Ernst, who was my secretary, rushed to take down my Kandinsky, fearing it would be spattered with blood. Barr thought it was real devotion on Jimmy’s part to rescue my painting before Max’s.
    Max took me to many museums. He called the Modern Museum the Barr house, and the Guggenheim museum. (my uncle’s collection), the Bauer House, and the Gallatin collection, now in Philadelphia, the Bore house. He liked the Museum of Natural History, where he decided the mathematical objects were much better than Pevsner’s constructions, but what he really preferred was the Museum of the American Indian, the Hay Foundation, where Breton took us. It has undoubtedly the best collection in the world of British Columbian, Alaskan,pre-Columbian, Indian and Mayan art. Max was in constant communication with a little man called Carlebach, who produced wonderful things for him from all these places, so our house soon became full of them, and as we had practically no furniture, it looked very beautiful. Carlebach was perpetually scurrying round and finding things with which to tempt Max and phoning him.
    When Carlebach discovered that I collected ear-rings, he immediately got together a large quantity and began to work on me. But I did not succumb. Of course, Max did. He bought me a beautiful pair with Spanish baroque pearls. But I resisted any further efforts on the part of Carlebach, as I considered him sufficiently dangerous with his masks and totem poles. The last one Max bought was twenty feet high. He also bought an old Victorian chair with a ten-foot back. It was a stage piece and he would not let anyone else sit in it, except my daughter. He looked regal in it, or more like a matinée idol. At one period, he filled the house with American wooden horses. He was selling more and more pictures in New York, with my aid and Putzel’s, and could well afford luxuries of this sort, especially as he refused to contribute to our household expenses and never put a cent aside for his income tax.
    The paintings Max had done in France between periods of concentration camps, or while he was actually in them, started a completely new phase of his work. The backgrounds of these paintings resembled the desert landof Arizona and the swamps of Louisiana, which we were soon to visit together. It seems to have been his special gift to forepaint the future. As his painting was completely unconscious, and came from some deep hidden source, nothing he ever did surprised me. At one time when he was alone in France, after Leonora had left, he painted her portrait over and over again in all the landscapes that he was so soon to discover in America. I was jealous that he never painted me and it was a cause of great unhappiness.
    One day when I went into his studio I had a great shock. There on his easel was a little painting I had never seen before. In it was portrayed a strange figure with the head of a horse. It was Max’s own head with the body of a man dressed in shining armour. Facing this strange creature, with her hands between his legs, was a portrait of me, but not of me as Max had ever seen me. It was my face at the age of eight. I have photographs of myself at this age and the likeness is unquestionable. I burst into tears and told Max he had at last painted my portrait. He was rather surprised, as he had never seen the photos. Because my hand was placed where it was, and because it was between two spears, I named the painting ‘Mystic Marriage’. At my request Max gave me this painting. Later he painted an enormous canvas of this same subject, slightly changing it, and my lovely little innocent child’s head turned into that of a terrible monster. He called the big