STORIES: Peggy Guggenheim

A woman who embodies the Avant-garde. She dedicated her life to discovering, collecting and bringing to the public the newest and most avant-garde art forms of her time, forms that remain so today. Photographed by Man Ray, a friend of Duchamp, a leading figure in the most revolutionary cultural and artistic circles of the 20th century, she described herself as "a museum" rather than a collector. Open to new trends and free of any common, conservative morality, she spent her life collecting and promoting art and beauty.

Without being rhetorical or criticising contemporary consumerist tendencies, and without delving into the figure of woman in today's society, increasingly reduced to a wrapper and an object, Peggy is for me an inspiring role model.
First of all, she was not a woman who sits to one side watching what men achieve, but a woman of immense charisma, intelligence and deep culture, able to sense the artistic revolution of the years in which she lived and to become one of its protagonists, setting the new trends and bringing innovative artists to the public, whose works, collected in her museums, are still timeless, just as she is.

Surrealism, Dadaism, abstract expressionism, from Kandinsky to Pollock (it is worth noting that it was she who organised his first solo show), from Magritte to Ernst, she could perceive the true artistic value of what she saw, even when it was utterly misunderstood by most. And today the Peggy Guggenheim Collection has become one of the greatest museums of modern art in the world. And she, with her unique style, her dogs and the beauty she constantly championed, still represents the choice of a woman who makes her own life a work of art, a ray of culture that feels new even decades after her death. I don't want to spend too many words on her life; there are plenty of detailed biographies you can read.

Of course, she was a rich woman from a powerful family, but that did not make her a snobbish, conservative, bigoted aristocrat, the trophy of some man from a wealthy family like her own. Quite the opposite. She put herself at the service of something beyond the disposable object of consumerism, at the service of art, using her material wealth to create an immortal cultural wealth that enriches all of us still today.

Alice K.

STORIES is a column dedicated to great stories from the past that can inspire your present.