New York, Venice… Petersfield? The art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim is famously associated with many of the world’s great cities, but an exhibition opening this month reveals the transformational five years she spent in the West Sussex and Hampshire countryside.
Here, between 1934 and 1939, Guggenheim found solace after several difficult years, in which her divorce from Laurence Vail, the father of her children Sindbad and Pegeen, was followed in 1934 by the sudden death of her partner John Holms. That autumn she bought Yew Tree Cottage near Petersfield, where she lived with Pegeen, joined before long by her new partner Douglas Garman and his daughter Debbie. These were, she said later, her most domestic years. “I get such thrills walking near the Downs,” she wrote to her friend Emily Coleman, the American writer, and though she also felt “bored and lonely”, she found the space to plan her future.
It gave her the opportunity to rethink what she was doing
“I think it gave her the opportunity to rethink what she was doing”, says Louise Weller, the head of collections and exhibitions at the Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery. “It was here that she decided to open Guggenheim Jeune in London, and from that she became the art collector that we know today.”
Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo marks the 25th anniversary of the Petersfield Museum, and with loans from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Tate, the National Trust and the Penrose Collection, among others, it will blend art with local history.
Weller has known of the Guggenheim connection for some time but says that newspaper archives and the museum’s own records have enabled her to build a picture of daily life. Pegeen and Debbie feature regularly in reports of local dance recitals, and Sindbad, at home during school holidays, is mentioned in cricket reports. “Marguerite Guggenheim” (Peggy) is reported as having been fined £1 for driving with an expired licence. She must have attracted considerable curiosity, driving into town several times a day to pick up shopping—“as I always forgot something”, she would later say—and feuding with the neighbour she nicknamed “the general”.
Guggenheim wrote that “local gentry did not call on us”, but her visitors were illustrious enough, among them the artists Yves Tanguy, Henry Moore and Jean Arp (all of whose works will feature in the show). Samuel Beckett, whom she credited with channelling her attention towards contemporary artists, was photographed in her garden there.
In August 1939, her relationship with Garman over and war looming, Guggenheim set off for Paris on her mission to “buy a picture a day”. She never returned to Yew Tree Cottage, but at home in Venice, late in life, she said: “If I didn’t live here I would live in the English countryside.”
• Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo, Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, 15 June-5 October