Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim Page B

what a fool I was.
    In my struggles for Pollock I also had to contend with such things as Dorothy Miller absolutely refusing to include him in an exhibition of twelve young American artists—artists who were obviously what she considered the best we had—which she did in 1946, as a travelling show for the Museum of Modern Art. I complained to Alfred Barr, but he said it was Dorothy Miller’s show and nothing could be done about it. I also had great money difficulties to keep both Pollock and the gallery going, and often found myself in the position of having to sell what I called an old master. Thus, I was once forced to part with a marvellous Delaunay of 1912, called ‘Disks’, which I had bought from him in Grenoble, when he was a refugee from occupied Paris. This picture later turned up in the Museum of Modern Art. Its loss is one of the seventragedies of my life as a collector.
    The second was my stupidity in not availing myself of the opportunity of buying ‘La Terre Labourée’, of Miró, in London in 1939 for fifteen hundred dollars. Now, if it were for sale, it would be worth well over fifty thousand.
    The third tragedy was selling a 1936 Kandinsky, called ‘Dominant Curve’ in New York during the war, because I listened to people saying it was a fascist picture. To my great sorrow I later found it in my uncle’s collection in an exhibition in Rome.
    The fourth was not buying Picasso’s ‘Pêche de Nuit à Antibes’, because I had no cash on hand, and did not have enough sense to sell some capital, which my friend and financial adviser, Bernard Reis, told me to do when the picture was offered to me in 1950; and now that, too, is in the Museum of Modern Art.
    The fifth is having to sell a Henri Laurens sculpture and a beautiful Klee water-colour in order to pay Nellie van Doesburg’s passage to New York; and the sixth, to have all but two of my last remaining Klees stolen from Art of This Century. But the worst mistake of all was giving away eighteen Pollocks. However, I comfort myself by thinking how terribly lucky I was to have been able to buy all my wonderful collection at a time when prices were still normal, before the whole picture world turned into an investment market.
    As the gallery was a centre where all the artists were welcome, they treated it as a sort of club. Mondrian was afrequent visitor, and always brought his paintings carefully wrapped up in white paper. I had bought two of his beautiful large charcoal Cubist drawings from a gallery in New York, and these I much preferred to his later works, of which I also had one. When I once asked him to clean one of his own paintings, which always had to be immaculate, he arrived with a little bag and cleaned not only his picture, but also an Arp and a Ben Nicholson relief. He admired Max’s and Dali’s paintings very much and said, ‘They are great artists. Dali stands a little apart from the others, he is great in the old tradition. I prefer the true Surrealists, especially Max Ernst. They do not belong to the old tradition, they are sometimes naturalists in their own way, but free from tradition. I feel nearer in spirit to the Surrealists, except for the literary part, than to any other kind of painting.’
    One night Mondrian invited me to his studio, which looked exactly like one of his paintings, and played boogie-woogie music for me on his gramophone. He kept moving strips of paper with which he was planning a new painting, and asked me which combination was best. I am sure he did not take my advice.
    In the winter of 1946, I asked Alexander Calder to make me a bed-head, which I thought would be a marvellously refreshing change from our grandmothers’ old brass ones. He said he would, but never got around to it. One day I met him at a party and said, ‘Sandy, why haven’t you made my bed?’ At this strange question, Louisa, his wife,a beautiful niece of Henry