PEGGY GUGGENHEIM & NELLY VAN DOESBURG ADVOCATES OF DE STIJL
nai010 publishers Rijksmuseum Museum De Lakenhal
4 Antoine Pevsner, Surface développable, c. 1938–1939 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
5 Rogi André (Rosza Klein), Peggy Guggenheim in Kay Sage’s apartment, Paris, c. 1940
pp. 6–7 Nelly van Doesburg in the studio in Meudon, c. 1931–1932
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PEGGY NELL Y PEGGY GUGGENHEIM AND NELLY VAN DOESBURG ADVOCATES OF DE STIJL DORIS WINTGENS
16 Nelly van Doesburg and Peggy Guggenheim at Art of This Century, New York, 1947
NAI010 PUBLISHERS RIJKSMUSEUM MUSEUM DE LAKENHAL
INTRODUCTION PEGGY AND NELLY ADVOCATES OF DE STIJL Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) and Nelly van Doesburg (1899–1975) were strong, determined and independent women who made a significant contribution to art history. Not by creating art themselves, but as patrons of modern art, by collecting, exhibiting and promoting it. With diligence, charm, know-how, enthusiasm and useful contacts they brought abstract art to the attention of important collectors, museums and the public. Their efforts helped turn a spotlight on De Stijl shortly after the Second World War and it gained international recognition as the most significant modern art movement ever produced by the Netherlands. The art movement of De Stijl, which was formed in 1917 around the periodical of the same name, counted Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, J.J.P. Oud, Bart van der Leck, Vilmos Huszár, Georges Vantongerloo and Gerrit Rietveld among its most prominent members. They strove to establish an autonomous, universal art, intended for a new human being in a new society. An entirely new visual idiom would have to appeal all people in the same way. Their radical reform of art also needed to be in line with developments in technology and science. The artists of De Stijl largely reduced the colour palette to the three primary colours – red, yellow and blue – and simplified the idiom of forms down to mainly lines and rectangular planes. They advocated a fusion of art and architecture. All the members of De Stijl were men. At the time, women scarcely had any direct access to the avant-garde. In this regard De Stijl did not differ in any way from other avant-garde movements. The artists published their ideas in the periodical De Stijl, which was issued between 1917 and 1928. From the beginning, De Stijl was an important conduit for the avant-garde in the Netherlands and abroad. Theo van Doesburg was not only the periodical’s founder; as a tireless, multi-talented and central figure in De Stijl, he was also its binding factor and the one who dedicated himself to disseminate the group’s ideas with passion and verve. In 1920 Theo van Doesburg met pianist Nelly van Moorsel, who was sixteen years his junior. Van Doesburg left for Weimar with her in 1921 to propagate the ideas of De Stijl among the international avant-garde. In 1924 Theo and Nelly moved to Paris. After Van Doesburg’s death in 1931 Nelly devoted herself, in his name, to publicize the philosophy and art of De Stijl. In the course of this mission, in 1938, Nelly van Doesburg met Peggy Guggenheim, who had recently founded her avant-garde gallery Guggenheim Jeune. The two women instantly became friends. Both women chose a life in, with and for modern art. They fought for their freedom and independence far beyond the margins the society of the interwar period allowed them. This required considerable pugnacity, for while equality between men and women was preached in avant-garde circles, even here practice failed to match theory. Women artists and designers who collaborated with a man, for instance, were not even given credit for the final work. These women – such as Lucia Moholy, Charlotte Perriand and Hannah Höch – often provided an impulse to artistic innovations but were not recognized for it. Peggy and Nelly were part of a new emancipatory movement in the interwar period. This New Women’s Movement was not politically oriented per se; instead it focused on the development of personal freedom, independence, self-realization and a modern lifestyle.
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They wanted to participate – just like men – in the life of the new era and manifest them selves: smoke, drink, drive, go out. Motherhood – at the time the ‘natural destiny’ of women – was absolutely not a high priority for them. What’s more, they demanded the right to sexual freedom. In many ways these women were both forerunners and trailblazers for today’s modern woman. The women of the New Women’s Movement wanted to define their lives for themselves. They rejected traditions and conventions. Breaking with one’s family was more or less part of this. In a period in which the art world was a male preserve, Peggy Guggenheim and Nelly van Doesburg succeeded in influencing the course of art history. Both women possessed courage, faith and stamina, a vision of art and a strong sense of its historical significance. They were both part of the immediate entourage of the avant-garde and had an extensive network of influential people in the modern art realm. In addition, Peggy had a lot of money at her disposal. Through their efforts, Peggy and Nelly generated interest in modern art from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. In many respects the two women were an ideal match. Their outlooks on life were as radical as the art they promoted. Until now, the scope of their joint efforts has received only modest attention. When Peggy Guggenheim’s collection is described, credit tends to go to her advisers on Surrealist art, Marcel Duchamp and (to a lesser extent) Howard Putzel. Marcel Duchamp is renowned as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, but also as an adviser for prominent private art collections.1 The association of his name with Peggy’s art acquisitions lends immediate importance to her collection. The fact that Nelly van Doesburg was also closely involved in assembling Peggy’s collection is only occasionally mentioned in passing. Art historian Wies van Moorsel is the only one to have devoted significant attention to it.2 Nelly’s influence on the composition of Peggy’s collection, however, was extensive. Without her recommendations, Guggenheim’s collection would very probably have remained confined to Surrealist art. Similarly unknown is the fact that, conversely, Peggy Guggenheim was instrumental in establishing the name of Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl. By including their works – at Nelly’s recommendation – in her collection and organizing a museum-level solo exhibition of Theo van Doesburg’s work at her New York gallery in 1947, subsequently sending this exhibition on tour to leading museums in the United States, she created an outstanding infrastructure to give exposure to his work. Nelly van Doesburg, who accom panied the exhibitions in the United States, used this opportunity to sell the work to prominent museums and private collectors. Together they managed to breathe new life into the movement of De Stijl, which had lapsed into obscurity after Van Doesburg’s death in 1931. Together they succeeded in launching a dynamic process of exhibitions and publications, acquisitions and sales of the works of Van Doesburg and De Stijl in the United States. This seldom receives any attention, and as result the significance of both Peggy and Nelly to the art world is undervalued. It is appropriate, in the year that the centenary of De Stijl is celebrated in the Netherlands, to devote particular attention to the women in and around the movement. De Stijl’s membership was exclusively male, but behind the scenes women also played a significant role. Truus Schröder-Schräder was not just one of Rietveld’s clients, but his design partner as well; Marlow Moss, an English artist influenced by Mondrian in Paris, in turn influenced Mondrian; the poet Til Brugman produced translations for De Stijl, published a poem in the periodical and wanted to transform her house into a De Stijl universe.3 Peggy Guggenheim and Nelly van Doesburg also belong in this list of women who were significant for De Stijl. These were women who were able to stretch the limits of the latitude afforded them by the zeitgeist and played a role in art history. In many ways these women were forerunners and trailblazers for today’s modern woman. Until now, however, they have enjoyed little recognition. 1
arcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was a French artist who opened M new paths for art with his groundbreaking work but also had an extensive career as a consultant. He was outstandingly up to date on the art of his time. Based on this knowledge he advised Walter and Louise Arensberg in the United States on acquisitions for their prominent art collection and introduced interesting artists for the exhibitions and acquisitions of the Société Anonyme in New York, which he had co-founded with Katherine S. Dreier. His friend Mary Reynolds was a good friend of Peggy Guggenheim.
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Van Moorsel 2000. Van Halem 2017.
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38 15. Nelly van Doesburg with Cornelis van Eesteren and E.L.T. Mesens in the studio on the Rue du Moulin Vert, Paris, 1923 16. Exhibition of work by Theo van Doesburg, Parc des Expositions, Paris, 1932 17. Nelly van Doesburg, Hans Arp, Antoine Pevsner and César Domela at the opening of an exhibition of Domela’s work at Galerie Pierre, Paris, 1934
39 18. Man Ray, Portrait of Nelly van Doesburg, 1923, bromide print, 27.3 × 19.9 cm Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
CHAPTER 3 NEW WOMEN: PEGGY AND NELLY
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These emancipated women admittedly seldom held official jobs, but they did occupy a position in the world at large. They were no longer willing to let their identity be defined by the role of mother and wife. What most made these ladies of the interbellum the ‘naughty sisters’ of the women’s emancipation movement that had preceded the First World War, however, was the right they claimed to sexual freedom. In general there was a great deal of interest in sexuality within the avant-garde. The Surrealists were obsessed with it – with their interest in the theories of Freud – and cutting-edge bookshops in Paris sold the works of James Joyce, laden with sex and taboo subjects, as well as the explicitly sexually oriented work of Elsa von Freytag. In the meantime, the licentious lives of the ‘new women’ were described by Anaïs Nin,3 F.S. Fitzgerald4 and Victor Margueritte,5 to the horror of the older generation, who wondered whether the young had now truly abandoned all values and standards. The ‘new women’ formed a small vanguard. The majority of women of the time remained true to the traditional role imposed on them by morality, religion and law. Peggy and Nelly, in their appearance and mindset, seamlessly fit the profile of the nouvelle femme outlined above. As independent, chain-smoking and heavily made-up ladies, they led a bold and colourful existence.
The photographs Lucia Moholy took of Nelly van Doesburg in 1924 show a modern woman with her hair in a garçonne style, short and straight like a boy’s, and with clearly visible make-up. An up-to-date look befitting a life outside social conventions. In a photograph taken by Man Ray – also in 1924 – of Peggy Guggenheim, we see a self-aware woman who cultivates her eccentricity (see fig. 3). [fig. 19]
The photo shows Peggy dressed in a gold lamé evening gown by Parisian couturier Paul Poiret, with a richly embroidered bodice, in a mysterious, Oriental style. Her silhouette casts an enormous shadow on the wall behind her. She wears a gold turban, pulled down to just above her eyes and designed by Vera Soudeikine, who would later marry Igor Stravinsky. Her hair is entirely concealed by it. ‘It was sensational’, Peggy Guggenheim would say of her own outfit.1 Here, in an elegant pose, one hand on her hip, in a dress that clearly shows off the curves of her body, with a long cigarette holder in her hand and without long hair, she represents the New Woman. It signals a new phase in her life. Once they had liberated themselves from their families, both women underwent an external and internal metamorphosis. They took on a new identity. With their stubbornness and independence, their desire to define their lives for themselves and not be ruled by prevailing norms and values, they were part of a wave of women’s emancipation that emerged in the 1920s, primarily in large cities like New York, Paris and Berlin. In France this type of modern woman was called la garçonne, in the United States the flapper. In more general terms she was referred to as the neue Frau, femme liberée – the ‘new woman’. In opposition to the traditional ideal of domesticity, self-sacrifice and strict and chaste standards of decency, they championed the ideal of self-realization, independence and the same standards for men and women, including in the sexual sphere. The mental emancipation of these ‘new women’ was reflected not only in their provocative behaviour, but also in their appearance, which defied every edict in this domain. They wore short skirts or, on the contrary, long trousers and showed off the shapes of their bodies – without corsets. The term ‘sex appeal’ in fact dates from the 1920s. These nouvelles femmes often wore their hair short and were heavily made up, with lots of lipstick. They had their eyebrows shaved off and then drawn back on in a perfect curve. All at a time when make-up was still associated with women of easy virtue. Florence Henry, an avant-garde photographer in Paris who had studied photography under Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, portrayed Nelly van Doesburg as an icon of this beauty ideal, which was paired with an emancipated mind.
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Peggy boasted of having gone to bed with at least 400 men.6 Even for a woman in the vanguard of the New Women’s Movement, this was an extraordinary number. Her autobiography, published in 1946, reveals that many of her friends would change partners with ease – outwardly, at least – but Peggy seemed obsessed with sex and would devote a major part of her life to passionate, sometimes self-destructive relationships. In her autobiography, she devoted so much attention to her amorous relationships that this aspect overshadowed the history of the origin of her collection and the strategy that underpinned it. In fact among the public at large she became primarily known for this ‘scandalous’ personal story. It would later prove a challenge to bring nuance to this skewed image and focus attention on her merits as a collector, gallery owner and patron of the arts. On the other hand, from the very beginning, her privileged background, her unconventional lifestyle and the attention the media paid to her eccentric personality during her lifetime gave her collection a face. How differently things turned out for Katherine Dreier’s collection of modern art. As early as the 1910s and 1920s, the equally wealthy Dreier began collecting the works of artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Van Doesburg and El Lissitzky, eventually assembling a collection of more than 800 works by 175 artists. After her death the works ended up in various museums, and very few people today are aware of their unique provenance.7 Nelly too was not disinclined to amorous adventures after Theo’s death in 1931. ‘Had I had a child from every relationship, I would now have eleven children, of eleven different nationalities.’8 As ‘one of the most beautiful women in Paris’,9 she was in a relationship from 1933 to 1936 with Jaime, a Spaniard who lived with her as a lodger for an extended period, and from about 1936 to 1939 she had an affair with the journalist Barrie Stavis.10 The most important man in Nelly’s life after Van Doesburg was the African Sourou Migan Apithy. The love affair with this black man fourteen years her junior – whom Nelly often called ‘my little Black Pete’ – lasted from 1939 to 1946.
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Theo van Doesburg painted a portrait of Nelly with her garçonne hairstyle in the early 1920s; and according to her biographer Mary Dearborn Peggy too must have looked like a real flapper at the time, with short skirts, bright-red ‘eternal wound’ lipstick, a 50-cm cigarette holder, short hair and half-moons drawn on in place of her shaven eyebrows.2 Sadly no portrait of her with this look has survived. The ‘new women’ smoked, drank alcohol in public, drove automobiles and went to bars on their own. 1 2
Guggenheim 2005, p. 48. Dearborn 2004, pp. 41, 42.
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[fig. 24] 3 Anaïs Nin was one of the better-known authors of erotica. In 1931–1932 she had a passionate love affair with writer Henry Miller and his wife. Based on her diaries from this period, Henry and June was published posthumously in 1986. 4 F.S. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, New York 1920. 5 His book La garçonne (1922) caused such a sensation that it was even taken out of circulation for a time, because it was deemed to have a pernicious influence on society. 6 Prose 2015, p. 54.
7 Even recent publications on women collectors, such as Feilchenfeldt, Tasch and Wimmer 2009 and Verlaine 2013, either fail to mention Katherine Dreier or mention her only in passing. 8 Van Moorsel 2000, p. 158. 9 Statement by Virginie Pevsner, in Dortch 1994, p. 67. 10 Van Moorsel 2000, p. 158.
‘Her passion for abstract art was fanatical, which was why she had come to me.’ Peggy Guggenheim on Nelly van Doesburg, 1999
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65 Nelly van Doesburg and Peggy Guggenheim at the Venice Biennale, c. 1952
68 Van Moorsel family, undated
69 Nelly van Doesburg in a dress designed by Franรงois Angiboult, c. 1923
CHAPTER 6 PEGGY IN NEW YORK
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Peggy had started on this catalogue when her collection had been stored at the Musée de Grenoble in 1940–1941. The book included essays by André Breton, Piet Mondrian and Hans Arp. But Peggy had also – with a flair for historical context and significance – included a short text by Adolf Hitler, in which he savaged the kind of art that was part of her collection. The yellow cover was graced by a line drawing by Max Ernst. The brief biographies of the artists were accompanied – Breton’s idea – by a photograph showing only their eyes. The catalogue sold for $3. Peggy did not hesitate to present her art collection in an unorthodox way. For example, she came up with the idea doing up the window displays of shops with works of art from her collection, so as to generate sufficient attention for the gallery she was about to open and the collection catalogue of which had recently been published. From 8 to 24 June 1942 she showed a selection of work from her collection along with a few copies of her catalogue in the window display of Brentano’s bookshop. ‘By the way. . . . Do drop by. Mondrian and Max and Kandinsky and Klee and Arp and Moore and Duchamp Valise and a bottle of Vail. It looks wonderful.’2 There was a similar display of her catalogue combined with work by Mondrian,3 Brancusi, Duchamp and Ernst in October 1942 at Scribner’s Sons Book Store.4
The art organizations that had emerged in New York in the 1920s and 1930s had succeeded in creating a favourable climate for the acceptance of modern art. In the years that followed, interest in modern art from Europe would increase. The 1930s had already seen an exodus to the United States by intellectuals, writers, actors, musicians, filmmakers and artists who could no longer work and were in danger under Hitler’s regime. At first the refugees came from Germany, and later from the countries Germany occupied during the war. When Peggy arrived in New York in 1941, she found a large number of artists she had met in Europe, including André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger and Piet Mondrian. [fig. 54]
In New York there was a network of art dealers, gallery owners, museum directors and curators who – when these artists were still living in Europe – had already maintained relationships with them and exhibited their work. They extended the recently arrived artists a warm welcome. Otherwise, the atmosphere in the United States was still quite antiimmigrant, partly because of the after-effects of the Great Depression and fears of losing jobs to foreigners. The major art dealers who were interested in European artists were often from Europe themselves: Pierre Matisse (son of the artist Henri Matisse, opened a gallery in New York in 1930), Karl Nierendorf (an art dealer from Cologne who specialized in Expressionism and had emigrated to the United States in 1936), Curt Valentin (a German art dealer who had fled the Nazis in 1937) and the Americans Julien Levy (photography and Surrealists) and Valentine Dudensing (Kandinsky and Mondrian). Artists such as Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Piet Mondrian, André Masson and Max Ernst got a solo show in one of these galleries not long after their arrival. In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim joined this network of galleries interested in European avant-garde with her gallery Art of This Century. With their art and ideas, the émigrés influenced the cultural climate of the United States. Certainly when, like László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Joseph Albers, they obtained important positions in architecture and art academies. In return, the new environment often led to changes in the work of the refugee artists. The German exiles – who could no longer identify with their native country and its culture – had to build a new life in the United States. The French artists, on the contrary, saw their stay in the United States as an involuntary pause until the end of the war. After that they wanted to return to France as fast as possible. Once she had settled down in New York, Peggy went back to active collecting. Within a year she had doubled her collection to 170 paintings and sculptures of the European avantgarde. She no longer bought the works of Mondrian, Breton, Tanguy and others from the artists themselves, but at galleries like those of Pierre Matisse and Valentine Dudensing. She often toured the galleries on Saturday afternoons, with Alfred Barr. When they were both interested in work by the same artist, she would gallantly let Barr – as in the case of the purchase of a work by Mondrian – have first choice.1 In May 1942 Peggy Guggenheim published the catalogue of her collection, Art of This Century: Objects – Drawings – Photographs – Paintings – Collages, in a print run of 2,500 copies.
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She also put on a window display for the department store Bonwit Teller in 1945, where Picabia’s painting Very Rare Picture on Earth was combined with a Correalist Rocker by Kiesler and a mannequin in a fashionable outfit. For many passers-by, this must have been the first time in their lives that they came into contact with modern art. Her plans for a museum in London and Paris had gone up in smoke because of the war, but she was to succeed in the city of her birth. In New York, however, she preferred to speak of an ‘art centre’, because she felt ‘museum’ sounded too pretentious.5 Moreover, she wanted not only to show her collection, but create a ‘research laboratory for new ideas’, ‘serving the future instead of recording the past’.6 In the spring of 1942 Peggy rented the top floor of 28-30 West 57th Street, where she would open her gallery, Art of This Century. The location was excellent: right in the middle of the gallery district and with museums like the MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the immediate vicinity. For the remodelling and interior design of the gallery-cum-collection presentation, she turned to the architect Frederick Kiesler in a letter that was short and to the point: ‘Dear Mr. Kiesler, I want your help.’7 Peggy, who always managed to secure the best advisers, realized that choosing Kiesler would guarantee an uncommon and daring interior design, and that was exactly what she wanted. [fig. 57]
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A t the Mondrian exhibition at the Valentine Dudensing gallery in New York (19 January–7 February 1942) Peggy Guggenheim let Alfred Barr have first choice; he acquired Pier and Ocean (1914) for the MoMA. She then bought Scaffold: Study for Tableau III (1914) and Ocean (1914).
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Frederick Kiesler had published his unorthodox ideas on the presentation of visual art and its relationship with its immediate surroundings in 1930 in the book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display.8 He wanted to erase barriers between art and the viewer as much as possible. He thought one of the ways to do so was to liberate paintings from their heavy frames and from the wall, as well as matching the design of the space with the content of the artworks presented in it. The traditional picture frames were consequently removed from the artworks in Peggy’s collection and replaced by simple metal or wooden 2
mithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Archives of American S Artists, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, Microfilm reels 2164-2199; MoMA Archives, New York, microfilm 2167:402. 3 Because of their outsized dimensions, Peggy Guggenheim was unable to exhibit the works by Mondrian that she owned, so she borrowed – at least for the presentation at Scribner’s Sons – Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1937/1942) from Valentine Dudensing. 4 For an article on the presentations at the two bookshops, see Coppes and Jansen 2015, pp. 64–79.
5 ‛I will . . . make an art center in N.Y. ‟Museum” is too pretentious a term.’ See letter from Peggy Guggenheim to Djuna Barnes, 12 September 1941, University of Maryland Libraries, Maryland, Special Collections, Djuna Barnes Papers. 6 Press release, ‘Peggy Guggenheim to open Art Gallery “Art of This Century”’, undated [circa 20 October 1942], Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Archives of American Art. 7 Letter from Peggy Guggenheim to Frederick Kiesler, 26 February [1942], Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna. 8 Kiesler 1930.
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61 54. Front row, left to right: Stanley William Hayter, Leonora Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann; middle row: Max Ernst, Amédée Ozenfant, André Breton, Fernand Léger, Berenice Abbott; back row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian
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54. Charles Wilp, Peggy Guggenheim with artists in exile, c. 1942 55. Max Ernst, cover for Art of This Century collection catalogue 56. Artworks from the collection of Peggy Guggenheim at a window display of Scribner’s Sons Book Store, 1942 57. Request of Peggy Guggenheim to Frederick Kiesler for the interior design of her gallery, 26 February 1942 58, 59. Abstract Gallery in Art of This Century, New York, 1943
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103 60. Peggy Guggenheim turning the large wheel to watch the objects of Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise at Art of This Century, 1942 61. Peggy Guggenheim with a pair of earrings designed by Yves Tanguy 62. Peggy Guggenheim with a pair of earrings designed by Alexander Calder 63. First edition of Peggy Guggenheim’s memoirs from 1946, with dust jacket designed by Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst
CHAPTER 7 NELLY IN NEW YORK
In the New York area she visited old friends Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy and Naum Gabo, as well as Katherine Dreier. This lady, who had such an amazing vision of modern art, also proved to have an unsuspected eccentric side, however: Dreier’s parrot was also present at the table during lunch. Afterwards, Nelly writes in her memoirs, Dreier – whispering sweet nothings – took the 32-year-old parrot onto her hand to take him to bed. She walked to an open lift with walls painted to match the wallpaper in the room. This had been Marcel Duchamp’s idea. Mrs Dreier raised the lift upstairs by pulling on a rope and put the parrot to bed. It was like a Surrealist performance.
Peggy had rebuilt her life in New York during the war, but she had not forgotten her friend Nelly van Doesburg. Contact between the two friends was re-established after the war. Peggy and Nelly wrote each other, and when Peggy travelled to Europe in the summer of 1946, she visited Nelly as well. Life in Europe was slowly resuming, and here and there exhibitions were being held. Nelly was once again focusing all her energy on raising awareness of Theo van Doesburg’s work and – although the war had only just come to an end – organized an exhibition of the group Art Concret at René’s Drouin’s gallery in Paris.1 Van Doesburg had founded this group in 1929 with artists Otto G. Carlsund, Jean Hélion, Marcel Wantz and Léon Arthur Tutundjian. They advocated a greater systematization in art. The work of art should be complete in the artist’s mind and need only to be executed. Peggy and Nelly must have discussed Nelly’s fervent wish to organize an exhibition of her husband’s work in the United States, for in the spring of 1947 a Theo van Doesburg retrospective was held at Peggy’s gallery. On the morning of 4 March 1947, Nelly van Doesburg arrived in New York on the ship De Veendam. Life on board, with its obligatory jollity and lowbrow entertainment, had not agreed with her. She was met on shore by René Lefèvre-Foinet, an old friend from Paris. He brought her to Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment, where she was to stay three months. Peggy had paid for Nelly’s crossing. Nelly had scarcely arrived in New York when she began her stay with a busy schedule. She lunched with Hans Richter, Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp, friends from Paris she had not seen for a long time, as they had returned to the United States during the war. In order to look charming Nelly had applied leg makeup; silk stockings were still not available in Paris, or only for extremely high prices; nylons were not available at all. Ladies who did not want to wear inelegant, thick stockings therefore resorted to leg colouring – otherwise known as ‘liquid stockings’. After lunch they went to Peggy’s gallery, where Nelly was not enthusiastic about Kiesler’s dominant arrangement of the room for abstract art. In the afternoon, she saw Frederick and Steffi Kiesler2 and in the evening there was a reception at the home of writer-editor Joseph Freeman and his wife, the journalist-painter Charmion von Wiegand.3 A few days later Peggy organized a party for Nelly attended by important people from the art world, including Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney and many friends from Europe who were now living as exiles in the United States. Nelly would carry on living like this, going out and seeing old friends as well as making new ones, in style for the next two years – for she had managed to have her tourist visa extended until April 1949. In New York Nelly was amazed by the enormous abundance and luxury, the streetlights and the richly stocked department stores. She visited all the museums and was enchanted by the Museum of Modern Art. On the other hand she was very disappointed by the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (the later Solomon R. Guggenheim museum), where, to her taste, the paintings were hung too low in excessively obtrusive frames. ‘The museum does abstract art more harm than good.’4 However, she also wanted to see Harlem. Against all advice – ‘You’re risking your life’5 – she went there regularly and enjoyed the jazz sessions in venues such as the Minton Playhouse. It was here that she met Thelonious Monk, with whom she is supposed to have had an affair.6 [figs. 64, 65] 1 2 3 4
A rt Concret, Galerie René Drouin, Paris, 15 June– 13 July 1945. F rederick Kiesler and his wife Steffi knew Nelly from her time with Theo van Doesburg. The Kieslers regularly stayed with them in Paris before moving to New York in 1926. J oseph (Joe) Freeman had met Nelly during the liberation of Paris, when he was in the American army. ‘ Je trouve que c’est un musée que fait beaucoup plus de tort à l’art abstrait que du bien’, Nelly van Doesburg, Memoires, typescript in French, RKD, NvD archive, inv. no. 3.
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In California, Nelly visited René Lefèvre at Silver Lake, stayed in Hollywood with composer George Antheil, whom she knew from Paris, spent an evening at the home of renowned architect Richard Neutra, saw Walter Arensberg’s art collection and met Charlie Chaplin. In San Francisco she had supper with eight Chinese people in Chinatown and had a fling with the Chinese barman at Tong’s Bar. She took a Greyhound bus to Salt Lake City, and from there travelled to see Mies van der Rohe in Chicago and Walter Gropius at Harvard University in Cambridge. In other words, an adventure with no shortage of new experiences. This was not the real reason she had gone to the United States, however. That was the exhibition of Theo’s work at Peggy’s Art of This Century gallery. This First American Retrospective Exhibition of Theo van Doesburg was an extremely important strategic step for Nelly.7 To secure Van Doesburg a place on the list of significant modern artists, establishing his name in the United States was imperative. Nelly hoped to accomplish this with this exhibition. She wanted to achieve what Van Doesburg himself had not been able to in the 1920s. Peggy Guggenheim, with her reputation and many contacts in the American art world, was of immeasurable value in this. [figs. 68, 69, 70, 71, 72]
The retrospective Van Doesburg exhibition at Art of This Century demonstrated his evolution from naturalism to abstraction. In addition, the diversity of his oeuvre was emphasized, with paintings, designs for stained-glass windows as well as drawings and photographs of his architecture. It was virtually a museum exhibition, with an extensive catalogue, for which James Johnson Sweeney, curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, had written an introduction. The Van Doesburg exhibition was the closing event in a series of exhibitions devoted to more or less established European artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti and Hans Arp. The retrospective, ‘meticulously and affectionately’ put together by Nelly van Doesburg, was a great success and got many positive reactions in the press.8 Peggy had also arranged for the exhibition, in more or less the same set-up, to travel to the LA County Museum of Art in Los Angeles,9 the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco,10 the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle11 and the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati.12 Thanks to the intervention of Mies van der Rohe, at the time the director of the architecture department of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the exhibition was also travelled to The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago.13 [figs. 73, 74, 75, 76, 77]
108 5
‘ Vous risquez votre vie’, Nelly van Doesburg, Memoires, typescript in French, RKD, NvD archive, inv. no. 3. 6 Wies van Moorsel calls this ‘probable’; see Van Moorsel 2000, p. 191. K. Schippers describes it in ‘Een explosie van ernstige onzin’, NRC Handelsblad, 23 June 1995, as a fact. In any event, Nelly wrote Thelonious Monk’s name and address all across the entire page of her diary of December 1948.
109 7 First American Retrospective Exhibition of Theo van Doesburg, 1883–1931, Art of This Century, New York, 29 April–31 May 1947. 8 Carlyle Burrows, New York Herald Tribune, 4 May 1947, Archive Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, Guggenheim 4, scrapbook, Art of This Century. 9 LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, circa 20 June– 15 July 1947. 10 Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 29 July–24 August 1947.
11 Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington, Seattle, opened on 9 September 1947. 12 Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 20 November– 15 December 1947. 13 The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, 15 October–8 November 1947.
90. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to John Senior, Jr., New York, in 1951
87. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to William N. Copley, c. 1948
85. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to Burton Tremaine, Miller Company of Abstract Art, Meriden in 1947/1948
86. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to Mr and Mrs Jan de Graaff, Portland, c. 1947/1948
91. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to Fredric and Hesketh Wertham in 1947 or 1949
93. Peggy Guggenheim sold this work to the Washington University Gallery of Art in Saint Louis, in 1947 89. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to Harry Lackritz, Chicago, in 1947/1948
88. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to Mary E. Johnston in 1947
92. Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to Fredric and Hesketh Wertham in 1947 or 1949
114 85. Theo van Doesburg, Composition XX, 1920, oil on canvas, 92 × 71 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid 86. Theo van Doesburg, Tree (also known as L’Arbre avec maisons), 1916, oil on panel, 68.5 × 54 cm, Portland Art Museum, Portland 87. Theo van Doesburg, Girl with Buttercups, 1914, oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm, with frame 89 × 89 cm, Centraal Museum, Utrecht 88. Theo van Doesburg, Composition Variation, c. 1918, oil on panel, 30 × 30 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati 89. Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition VII, 1924, oil on canvas, 63.5 × 64 cm, Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden
115 90. Theo van Doesburg, Simultaneous Counter-Composition, 1929–1930, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 91. Theo van Doesburg, Construction of Colors, 1923, gouache and graphite over print on paper, wrapped around wooden stretcher, 57 × 57 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA 92. Theo van Doesburg, Construction in Space-Time IV, 1923, gouache, pencil and ink on tracing paper, 47 × 40.5 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA 93. Theo van Doesburg, Composition VII, The Three Graces, 1917, oil on canvas, 85 × 85 cm, Washington University Gallery of Art, Saint Louis
With the exhibitions of De Stijl in Amsterdam and New York and the retrospective exhibitions on Theo van Doesburg in various cities in the United States, Nelly had achieved her objectives: Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl were enshrined in the international canon of modern art. As a self-possessed woman, she had accomplished this with flair, persuasion, stamina and charm. She had pursued this on her own for twenty years and worked at it devotedly, with courage, tact and perseverance. Peggy had supported Nelly in this with all the means she possessed. So for Nelly, the exhibition of Theo van Doesburg’s work at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in New York was the crowning of years of friendship with Peggy, a friendship rooted in art. Peggy had also realized her ambitions. She had succeeded in assembling a top-flight collection of the European avant-garde, emerging in the process as a new kind of woman collector: as a gallery owner, she had played an important role, both in London and in New York, in the publicizing and appreciation of the work of the avant-garde movements from before as well as from after the Second World War. Peggy and Nelly were friends, but they also needed each other to reach their goals: thanks to their friendship and collaboration the two women not only had a lot of fun together, but they also contributed significantly to the recognition of the work of Van Doesburg and De Stijl. After their American adventure, contact between Peggy and Nelly grew less intense. Peggy built a new life in Venice and expanded her collection, albeit to a more modest extent than before. By now an art expert in her own right, she no longer needed external advisers. Living in her house in Meudon, outside Paris, Nelly remained the oracle concerning anything to do with De Stijl. She brokered art acquisitions for clients she knew from her time in the United States and served as a liaison for the commissioning of rug patterns woven after existing artworks, an art form that became highly popular in the 1950s. [figs. 107, 108, 109]
In the 1950s Nelly often stayed with Peggy in Venice. Her palazzo – certainly in the years in which the Biennale was held – was the place to see old mutual friends again. Over the course of the 1960s these visits became less frequent, in part due to Nelly’s health problems. Until her death in 1975, however, Peggy and Nelly would remain friends. [figs. 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118]
130
131 Nelly van Doesburg, New York, c. 1949
145 Nelly van Doesburg and Peggy Guggenheim in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice, 1960s
Theo van Doesburg, Simultaneous Counter-Composition, 1929–1930 The Museum of Modern Art, New York Nelly van Doesburg sold this work to John Senior, Jr., New York, in 1951