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Title: Peggy Guggenheim

Subtitle: The Shock of the Modern

Author: Francine Prose

Narrator: Carrington MacDuffie

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-14-16

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 24 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

A spirited portrait of the colorful, irrepressible, and iconoclastic American collector who fearlessly advanced the cause of modern art.

One of 20th-century America's most influential patrons of the arts, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) brought to wide public attention the work of such modern masters as Jackson Pollock and Man Ray. In her time there was no stronger advocate for the groundbreaking and the avant-garde. Her midtown gallery was the acknowledged center of the postwar New York art scene, and her museum on the Grand Canal in Venice remains one of the world's great collections of modern art. Yet as renowned as she was for the art and artists she so tirelessly championed, Guggenheim was equally famous for her unconventional personal life and for her ironic, playful desire to shock.

Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a listen of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of 21st-century art as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs. Prose delivers a colorful portrait of a defiantly uncompromising woman who maintained a powerful upper hand in a male-dominated world. She also explores the ways in which Guggenheim's image was filtered through the lens of insidious anti-Semitism.

Members Reviews:

A view into an important art patron.

I knew little to nothing about Peggy Guggenheim before reading this book. It is an interesting read, very readable and I now have a sense, I think, of this woman's fascination with art and artists but even more, her dedication to keeping art alive in times that, had it not been for her, we would be missing very important works. She acquired and protected them and made them available for us to appreciate today. While much of her life is depicted as chaotic and scandalous, I'm finding myself grateful to her for her purposeful acquisitions. Whether or not the book is factual regarding her personal life, we have bits and pieces of fact that we may be able to dig up to verify or not, while the art is fact that lives on without question. And rather than be repulsed by what may be deemed bad behavior on her part, it makes it all the more awe-inspiring that she did so much that is beneficial to us all. The book offered all of that and seems to have been quite thoroughly researched. We are even given a view into the fragility of her self-concept that, on the face of things, it is often easier to think of the wealthy as impervious to self-doubt. That the story of her life could have the broader implications of the human condition, the good, the bad and the ugly, is quite an art in itself.

Not an easy job to write a book about a very complex figure.

I would assume that the task of writing a biography requires an interest in and sympathy for the lead character. Prose does a fine job of allowing Peggy to come through and yet not be especially "attractive " with or without her botched nose job. It was a tumultuous time in the world and in the Art world with Peggy often at the center of the action.