Peggy Guggenheim Visits Picasso's Bathroom
Eggplant. Cur. Lump of Gouda. Doorknob. A large rosy oval with a coral fringe and then a reddish speckled border and a thin dusting of coralline, another selvage fading into lotioned whiteness. Nectarine pit. Blob.
The Guggenheim nose.
She wanted to look away, to leave the mirror, the bathroom, stroll past the artist and his two models (both naked, fat, messy-headed and glowing with insouciance) without eye contact and then call a taxi for the ride over to Boulogne-Billancourt, to a garage behind a country house, the residence of a man recommended by her American contacts, a draftsman who'd been loyal to a habit and run out of money and would sell anything at any price—at her price, which would be reasonable but clearly unfair. She would then visit three further arrondissements, two sculptors and collector with a genius for oversized still lifes. She would offer cash, show a wad of colorful bills; would be sure to drop the word Germany into any negotiations. She would close the deal, once again; she would stumble upon the finest Cubist Braque in Paris and get it for cheap and spend the rest of the evening sitting cross-legged on a Persian rug and sipping dry champagne while staring into the heart of the painting, clearly, clearly, clearly happy.
But she didn't look away.
Lips tight and symmetrical. Lipstick arterial red, as the nails. Hair starchy and brown, swooping back, a dense halo-cloud, tint of gloss. An expression of comfortable resignation, pupils shimmering, eyes slightly aglaze, the results of three breakfast mimosas and the artist standing one wall away.
The goddamn artist. This was her fourth inquiry, first visit. Her eyes fluttered shut as she leaned against the cold porcelain. She pressed her fingertips into her eyelids and watched the tracers weave and dodge in the glittering dark and she was outside this world, inside her world, drawn into its simple core, and she was startled by the ease of her acceptance, by the way she slid into darkness, its warm embrace.
She would break away from the mirror. She would open the door. He wouldn't glance up from the models. He would be asking their opinion of a large triangular canvas that leaned against the wall. (He hadn't asked hers.)
“I buy a painting a day,” she would say, loudly.
He would turn, squint at something above her head. “So I've heard. We've all heard.” A nod to a glass wall clock, its hands a feather and a silver spoon. “You had better get started.”
“I have an inheritance.”
“I don't want your inheritance.”
“I want to buy a painting,” she would say, tacking to the center.
“You bore me, Miss. Guggenheim. Tell me one thing interesting about yourself.”
She would blink, sensing an opportunity. “My father died on the Titanic.”
He would turn away. “Pick up a newspaper, Miss Guggenheim. Death is no longer interesting.”
She would look to the floor, grind and crinkle the toe of her shoe into the wood grain, and let silence fill the air.
She would say, “And the Nazis, when they are reading our newspapers . . .”
He would stop; turn slowly, lowering a brush he'd been biting the end of. It would be the first time she'd truly had his attention and she would pause for several minutes, listening to the faint buzzing of her inner ear. Finally, she would say, “What will they think of your paintings?”
He would smile, directly at her nose. “What will they think of you?”
Portobello. Wet sock. Fireball smoke cloud. Waxes and liners and moisturizers and creams and glosses and surgery in the 1920s manner—unpracticed, inexact, more scientific experimentation than cosmetic routine. Dirt clod.
She opened her eyes but didn't look away from the mirror. Her head swam and she tilted against the sink and rummaged a pint of scotch from her purse and took three long draws and squinted into her face and thought about throwing the bottle into her face. Instead she slumped to the floor, the tiles comforting against the leg's pale skin, the wall solid against her head. She listened to her hair crackle as she leaned back, so alone, within herself. She thought of childhood and necessary hidings and knees pulled up to chin. The dregs of the scotch she swallowed; then knelt forward on the broken tiles and wedged the bottle beneath the bidet, into the shadows.
A door slammed and someone entered the apartment, a male voice, talking loudly. More doors slamming, laughter, a cough, a sound like coins rolling across the floor. They hadn't even checked on her, she told herself; they're probably having a party. A plane buzzed overhead, and her mind went off to some sunny day in Central Park, clouds glinting off a dark green pond, one of her nurses shaking her, shaking her shoulders, for grasping the fluffy top off a cattail—one of her nurses, the tall one who threatened daily to cut out her tongue.
Fuck the Germans, she thought.
Gripping the edge of the sink and pulling herself up, she looked again to the mirror, straightened her hair, the edge of her blouse, turned to the doorknob, her hand missing once and then clamping hold.
Fuck the Germans and fuck Picasso.
She stepped into silence. The paintings gazed at her, tall, silent faces, curves and glow, orbs and angles, and she had an impulse to take one, the large blue and yellow one, right there and then. But she didn't. She let go the doorknob and stepped into the center of the room.
“Hello?” she called out.
Silence. Dust motes spun in the wide light of the studio.
“Hello?” she whispered. She frowned at the ceiling, a skylight of glass, the murmur of pigeons. Her feet ached in her tight shoes. She wrapped her purse tight against her hip, bandolier-style, the strap digging into her shoulder, her breasts. A dull thudding; dust from the ceiling. A distant siren. She listened to the pigeons, scraping, cooing, cooing...She went to look for the artist.
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Author's Note
MFA possibly the new Guggenheim.
I like this, Sean. It's baffling & beguiling.
Nice.
So elaborately brilliantly dazzlingly gloriously thrillingly Piccassoly hard on Peggy, in blue rose and cubist manner, in blood and oil manner, and I wonder why, a little, althugh I do not want fiction to be obliged to history, but I think here of Guy Davenport, the late great underrated master of short story, the only rival to Don Barthelme, and I think how his blade always came out clean. She is rich. She is vain enough to know extraordinary beauty and that she cannot own this beauty for herself, but buy it from others for others. I wonder.
Sean, I'm misunderstanding a few things here, such as your note "MFA possibly the new Guggenheim" and the story itself, which I read twice. I like the mystery of it and I like thinking of it in connection with the stories of Paul Bowles and Bilie Holliday. I'll read the Ingrid Bergman one next.
The rhythms and images in the Guggenheim/Picasso story silk the reader.
Peggy Guggenheim's practice of buying a painting a day will stay with me.
This reminds me that only Mina Loy, according to a story about them, would not accept money from her friend, Peggy Guggenheim.
*
She would blink, sensing an opportunity. “My father died on the Titanic.”
He would turn away. “Pick up a newspaper, Miss Guggenheim. Death is no longer interesting.”--
ok, that is wonderful,
then this, to close:
She went to look for the artist. ==
they always come looking for the artist. there is a certain kind of person who lives as parasite to host, and one must reognize and resist, as an artist, or it is over. let them buy, sure, but that is all. distanz. is all.
this captures that moment. that the writer KNEW to capture it, and to do it so well, makes this a fave, for me.
additional comment: that the writer knew to capture that moment and STILL managed a sympathetic glimpse of pg is wonderful.
the mfa comment in the author's note, to me, is a nod at the mass matriculation of late capitalism, where cache is bought (if not art)--the skepticism of such a transaction, from an aesthetic pov
Okay, not to start a thread dialogue here, GP, but Pablo never scorned a patron and PG doesn't seem like the sort of patron-pariah you mean.And you don't buy a Guggenheim,(one suspects the selection process is corrupt, but that's not part of our text) nor did Peggy use the threat of German National Socialism to strip artists of their works, nor is an MFA in painting a vile commodity, it's a lovely, quaint expensive and noble and meaningless gesture in the late capitalist paradigm.
Biting the hand --
I'm thinking here of the Hans Haacke show,which the Solomon Guggenheim in NYC censored, closed, would not allow to stay up. The ONE taboo subject,not religion sex or politics or even infantilism, assaults on bourgeois decency standards--all these were tolerated. But Haacke put up beautiful silver plaques on which were printed the financial investments of the Guggenheim's doges regents and biggest donors. Most were heavily invested in apartheid South Africa.
Pay my respects to grace and virtue.
Send my condolences to good.
Give my regards to soul and romance.
they always did the best they could.
And so long to devotion
you taught me everthing I know.
Wave goodby
Wish me well
You've gotta let me go.
B.Flowers
James, you assume too much.
I have an MFA. In fiction. Bama was my benefactor for 4 years. I went from working full time as an ER nurse to years of drinking beer and reading books for a living.
I simply meant the MFA can be a benefactor.
As for historical fact, my persona fiction often strays.
BUT
Is someone actually arguing that PG didn't buy important pieces of art right before the Germans took over France? She did. She bought them at great prices too. People were trying to get the hell out of there, and to make some money, any money, understandably.
As for Picasso, I wasn't with him every day of his life, so I have no idea if he scorned a patron. I simply wanted a conflict, a push-back from art here.
Thanks for reading!
S
"Only Picasso snubbed the shopper in his Paris studio. He ignored her, then turned to sneer, "Madame, you will find the lingerie department on the second floor."
"In the later 1930s, Peggy set up one of the first galleries of modern art in London, quickly acquiring a magnificent selection of works by Picasso (who snubbed her), Magritte, Miró, and Brancusi, and buying great numbers of paintings from artists fleeing to America after the Nazi invasion of France."
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=0060196971
http://www.arlindo-correia.com/060602.html
Unless you're writing "historical fiction", Sean, it seems to me that once Pablo and Peggy appear in your work, they become your characters and must dance to your tune. The tune is well-played, the behaviour plausible( all Gass says is required) the story well written and constructed.
Incredible portrait of Peggy. *
It is imperative that, when dealing with a real person, one use exactly the kind of justice you enacted in the Peggy/Venice story. That was as brilliantly conceptualized as it was written. But my god, to portray a Jew in WW2 buying works the public hated and Nazis would have found decadent, loathed and destroyed, as a profiteer, set right by Picasso, (who was a strange sort of communist, setting himself up as a multi-million dollar corporation before artists did such things,who did not support causes or other artists, as PG did, who fled Spain and Marco, Paris and Hitler,who always found refuge rather than engagement) seems off. I think of the kind of patrons with taste not as refined as hers--Huntington Hartford or Hirshhorn and I'm grateful that she shaped 20th Century art, or paid for it,or both, and brought about the kind of conditions that allow our stories to be, and was so generous in sharing her taste and purchases. Then too,she would not have to reminded of what the Germans would make of her. As early as the early 30s German Jews were fleeing their homeland--broken hearted. As for the MFA comment, I was responding to Gary's interpretation--but still puzzled how an MFA is the new Guggenheim. One pays dearly for an MFA, as you know, and one gets a lot of money for a Guggenheim. An MFA in painting and a job app will get you work in a paper hat. A Guggenheim opens doors and buys you at least a year off to work. Even I have benefited several times in my life from Solomon and especially Peggy's capacious spirit, just as I have learned everything about representational art from the colossus that is Picasso. Both deserve care, I think, in any fictional representation.
James, I respect what you're saying, but we'll just agree to disagree on many points here. No worries.
Thanks again for the read.
Hell fire...loved this story, Sean and, have to say, was pretty pulled in by the discussion that cropped up here in the comments thread. All in all, fine reading and lots to think about. Time well spent.
I buy a painting a day. Great line.