For without Guggenheim’s sharp eye, personal pluck and frenzied determination – as the Germans marched into Paris she embarked on a mission to save a painting a day – it is quite possible that seminal works by Brâncuşi, Klee, Mondrian, Magritte and Kandinsky would have disappeared in one of the Nazis bonfires of “degenerate” art. What bothered the Tribune, the Times and a host of other newspapers was the way that the sleazy prattle of Out of This Century tarnished the reputation of the woman who had a legitimate claim to be one of the great heroines of 20th-century art. The Chicago Tribune, aghast at the “nymphomaniacal revelations”, suggested that a more accurate title would be “Out of My Head”. Stuffed with sexual scenes involving the smelting heiress’s reputed 400 lovers, including a hairdresser, a ski instructor, Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst and several gay men whom she took on as a challenge, Out of This Century appeared to be, in the words of a shuddering New York Times, “worthy of tabloid headlines and recounted in tabloid prose”. It is also thanks to anecdotes such as this that Guggenheim’s memoir, which she republished in different versions over a period of 30 years, received a critical drubbing when it first appeared in 1946. And Peggy Guggenheim, a highly sociable hostess with many calls on her time, is unlikely to have spent her days hovering by the palazzo windows on permanent nun-watch. In any case, they ask, how feasible is this, really? Marini, like all artists, took himself deadly seriously and was hardly in the business of knocking up strap-ons for his masterworks. This anecdote is the kind of thing from which Guggenheim’s biographers, of whom there have been many since her death in 1979, tend to avert their eyes, embarrassed at the way their subject always lets herself down at crucial moments by talking dirty. Guggenheim claimed in her memoir that she had instructed Marini to ensure that the figure’s phallus was detachable so that, should a huddle of sight-seeing nuns happen to pass by in a vaporetto, she could nip out, remove the offending organ, and spare everyone’s blushes. It depicts an ecstatic equestrian, body arched, erect phallus pointing urgently at the tourists as they putter up and down the Grand Canal. You can still see the bronze statue today.
W hen the art collector Peggy Guggenheim moved into her Venetian palazzo in 1949 she installed Marino Marini’s The Angel of the City on the landing stage.
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