Peggy Guggenheim has always been unloved. Not pretty enough, not smart enough, barely rich enough. We do not forgive women. She nevertheless multiplied the conquests, often with the greatest artists of her time, but above all reaped a reputation as a nymphomaniac. The era was not kind to her, many despised her when others took advantage of her.

The film devoted to him rehabilitates this brilliant secondary character in the history of art. It was to the director of this documentary that we already owed Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, a fascinating portrait of the star editor-in-chief of American Vogue in the 1960s, which dug the furrow of a historiography of peripheral figures of the century. The speakers who testify in front of his camera are often not tender.

"Clever or stupid, she was always Peggy Guggenheim"

Like the writer Edmund White, who had known Peggy in Venice. In his memoirs, he had drawn an eloquent portrait of her: “Although she was not interested in much, she was aware of her position, which in her eyes was that of a monarch. bonnet was in town, Peggy was throwing a party for him, dressed in a toga, full of historical significance, which was eating her up.

"This beige silk dress was made of hundreds of little pleats. Peggy told us that she rolled it up and tied it in a knot to send it to the dry cleaners in London. for photographers and gave wacky interviews to the press. Smart or dumb, she was always Peggy Guggenheim."

A taste that commands respect

Aware of her own limits, filled very early on by an eccentricity and an appetite for the men she had the talent to choose, a "star fucker" before her time endowed with a name, if not an immense heritage, which could open doors for her to circles of influence, she learned the art later on, as an autodidact, admitting that she didn't know much about it at first. But with a mind-blowing flair.

Arrived in Paris in the interwar period after leaving her native New York, she very quickly frequented its artistic sphere, which was experiencing the surrealist revolution. To lose her virginity, she married Laurence Vail at the age of 23, who was called "the king of bohemia" in the Parisian intellectual milieu. He somehow educated himself, despite a rocky marriage. It was obvious that the place of this woman too modern for her time, who had become a battered wife and a bad mother, was not that of a "housewife".

A collection that was initially refused by the Louvre

Peggy chooses to be a gallery owner. With a taste that commands respect today. She then put Beckett, Duchamp or Brancusi into her bed, and began to compulsively collect the works she bought at a modest price. And never being wrong. Returning to New York during the Second World War after having sheltered her collection (at the time refused by the Louvre), she then discovered the American avant-garde there and became the patron of Jackson Pollock, whom it contributes greatly to make known. It was a revolution in a world that instinctively refused abstract art.

We also remember this series of photos taken in her Venetian palace, wearing eccentric glasses and surrounded by her little dogs. Cut off in Venice after the war, she will end her life as a socialite on Christmas Eve 1979, without really any family and not really any more friends. The house where she is buried is now one of the most famous museums in the world.

Her name is also associated with that of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, to which she donated her collection but which she liked to denigrate, calling it "my uncle's parking lot", given the lack of respect that she had for this industrial parent. At the end of her life, when she was asked if she was nostalgic for no longer being able to speak with Max Ernst or André Breton, she answered that she would especially like to become young again and have lovers. "I can't be jealous of the past, only of the future." Peggy Guggenheim was a character of the present. And the time for tributes always rings a little late for those for whom the future lasts a long time.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, THE COLLECTOR by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (United States, 1:36). Already in the room.

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