Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim

Author:Peggy Guggenheim
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER SIX

ART OF THIS CENTURY

Finally I found a top story in West 57th Street for my museum. I didn’t know how to decorate it, and Putzel, as usual on hand said, ‘Why don’t you get Kiesler to give you a few little ideas?’ Frederik Kiesler was one of the most advanced architects of this century. So I accepted Putzel’s suggestion, never dreaming that the few little ideas would end up in my spending seven thousand dollars.

Kiesler was a little man about five feet tall, with a Napoleonic complex. He was an unrecognized genius, and I gave him a chance, after he had been in America for fifteen years, to do something really sensational. He told me that I would not be known to posterity for my collection, but for the way he presented it in his revolutionary setting.

Kiesler really created a wonderful gallery—very theatrical and extremely original. If the pictures suffered from the fact that their setting was too spectacular and took away people’s attention from them, it was at least a marvellous décor and created a terrific stir.

The only condition I had made was that the pictures should be unframed. Otherwise Kiesler had carte blanche. I had expected that he would insert the pictures into the walls. I was quite wrong: his ideas were much more original. In the Surrealist gallery he put curved walls made of South American gum wood. The unframed paintings, mounted on baseball bats, which could be tilted at any angle, protruded about a foot from the walls. Each one had its own spotlight. Because of Kiesler’s theatrical ideas, the lights, to everybody’s dismay, went off every three seconds. That is, they lit only half the pictures at a time. People complained, and said that if they were looking at a painting on one side of the room, the lights suddenly went off and they were forced to look at some other painting that was lit instead of the one they wanted to see. Putzel finally put an end to this and the lighting system became normal. In the abstract and Cubist gallery where I had my desk, near the entrance, I was perpetually flooded in a strong fluorescent light. Two walls, consisting of an ultramarine canvas curtain like a circus tent, attached to the ceiling and floor by strings, curved around the room in various sweeps. The floor was painted turquoise.

The paintings, which were also hung on strings from the ceiling, and at right angles to the walls, looked as though they were floating in space. Little triangular shelves of wood supported the sculptures, which also seemed to float in the air. Kiesler had designed a chair out of plywood and various coloured linoleums, which could be used for seven different purposes. It could serve as a rocking chair, or it could be turned over and used as a stand for paintings or sculpture, or as a bench, or table, and it could also be combined in different ways with planks of wood to increase the seating capacity.

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