Interview with Karole Vail

January, 2018

Interview with Karole P. B. Vail, Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection

1)For the information of our readers, I would like to mention that you are the granddaughter of Peggy Guggenheim. Would you please tell us about the relationship with your grandmother. What is the inspiring side of her that touches you most?

Peggy was my paternal grandmother, and I am her older grand-daughter. Peggy wanted to do something special in her life and she set out to build an extraordinary collection of modern art, 20th century art. I think we can say that she was a visionary and this is all the more remarkable for a woman of her background and especially at a time when it was difficult for women to assert themselves and look at the world beyond family and home. I must however mention that there were several enterprising women who built collections and museums, certainly in the United States, beginning already in the 1920s. For example, Katherine Dreier, who worked especially closely with Marcel Duchamp, in forming and presenting a collection of modern art to the public; today that collection is dismantled, but many museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum benefitted from Dreier’s generosity. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC was founded by women, just as the Whitney Museum of American Art was. With respect to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, it is interesting to note that both collections were essentially built by women, Peggy and Hilla Rebay who was Solomon’s adviser. I am full of admiration for these women who formed museums and collections of modern art, often against all odds.

I remember spending time as a young girl at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni when Peggy was alive and having meals with her in the dining room adorned with early Cubist works by Picasso and Braque, that was quite an experience. And then, I remember extraordinary gondola rides through the canals of Venice in Peggy’s beautiful private gondola. She would drop me off in front of churches and insist I go and see the paintings and then report back what I had seen. This was quite an unusual but important informal education.

2) Inheriting a great collection such a family heirloom, how do you feel about this huge responsibility? Do you find it hard sometimes?

Of course, it is a great responsibility and even more so because of the family connection. It’s an important legacy and a privilege, but I have often downplayed the relationship, and certainly not

having the same surname has helped. I intend to continue to ensure that Peggy’s legacy be maintained and that the museum remain one of the most rewarding cultural experiences in Venice.

3) As a former archivist, how do you think the intergenerational transmission of the significant collections could be possible/achieved?

I did indeed work for an important archive and documentation centre in Florence, and I have also been a curator for the last 25 years, and therefore archives have always interested me. That is where you find first-hand information, and one should always go back to that source of information if at all possible. Even though the internet has facilitated so much and allows us to research and find information so much more easily, and not everyone can travel, there is nothing like seeing the art on site in museums and researching the archives in a library.

4) Being an art patron or dealer, what was Peggy Guggenheim’s contribution to the art market in her time?

Peggy was much more of an art patron and collector than a dealer. I don’t think she liked to be described as an art dealer, though she did do her best to help out artists by selling their work when she had her galleries in London and in New York. Peggy wrote in her autobiography “in fact, I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell, as a result of the financial attitude.”(Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century, 1979, p.363. London, Andre Deutsch). Of course, I understand the financial and investment value of art has always existed, and today more than ever, but that is not what art means to me.

5) European and American modern art are in debt of gratitude to Peggy Guggenheim since she saved the artists just as a friend did and supported them in all cases. How could you define her relationship with the artists?

Peggy was a champion of artists, life and art were intertwined for her, and one of her great talents was to listen to others. She sought out the best advisers such as Marcel Duchamp, the English art historian Herbert Read, Howard Putzel who was her assistant in New York, as well as the great Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. She also benefitted greatly from Laurence Vail, her first husband, who introduced her to the Bohemian art world in Paris in the early 1920s. And then, she was quick to act on that advice.

6) Peggy’s life seems to be a kind of 20th century modern art history. How do you interpret the personal meaning of such self-devotion to art ?

It is true that Peggy’s name and her collection belong to the history of modern art, she and her collection are now legendary. She greatly admired artists, writers and intellectuals and believed she should help them as she did not think she had any special creative talent of her own. But ultimately, she did create something spectacular, and for the benefit of all.

7) In what way does Peggy Guggenheim Collection provide a blueprint for the art collectors throughout the world?

Certainly the PGC is an outstanding model and an example for art collectors today with respect to the quality of the art. The collection is relatively small but it comprises stellar works by important artists, and of course the setting is magnificent and quite unique.

This text first appeared in the January 2018 issue of Artam Global Art.