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Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: ART ADDICT (Lisa Immordino Vreeland). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (November 20). See listings. Rating: NNN


Here’s a great example of a documentary whose strength turns into its weakness.

Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland has a fascinating subject in art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who single-handedly launched the careers of some of the world’s greatest modernists – including Jackson Pollock – and whose personal collection, housed in her former palazzo in Venice, remains one of the world’s greatest art troves.

Vreeland mines spectacular archival photographs and interviews with art scene denizens from then and now to paint a portrait of a unique character. Guggenheim was strangely underappreciated and resented, castigated for sleeping around when men in similar positions were lionized for doing the same thing. Generally, she struggled to win credibility. 

The doc’s problem stems from its essential gold. While preparing her 1986 biography of Guggenheim, Jacqueline Bograd Weld undertook a series of taped interviews with Guggenheim, segments of which can be heard for the first time here. An archivist’s dream, for sure, but every time those segments appear, the film stops dead in its tracks, because the once voluble Guggenheim was by then quite old and almost monosyllabic.

But what a character she was. Looking back on her life, she says she doesn’t miss her dead friends at all. She just wishes she were still young enough to have lovers.

Indeed.      

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