Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2008

(Abstract of the article by Alessia Borellini)

This essay offers a few notes on the origins of Peggy Guggenheim's interest in ethnic art and the evolution of what became a small passion for someone better known for her collection of masterpieces of modern and contemporary art. Her commitment to what she always called "primitive arts" developed in the context of a taste for the exotic, fashionable in the circles she frequented.

Peggy's true encounter with ethnic art dates to the time of her relationship with Max Ernst. Her brief and turbulent liaison with the surrealist artist began in 1941. An avid collector of tribal art, Ernst purchased works from trusted merchants such as Julius Carlebach. As soon as the artist sold one of his works, he invested the money in tribal sculptures from Oceania and the Americas, filling his house with works with which Peggy became familiar. It was an era that saw the beginnings of interest in "primitive arts" in America, reflected particularly in the publication of Robert Goldwater's Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), which attracted a wide audience of wealthy collectors previously unaware of the artistic achievements of these peoples.

The relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst ended in 1942, after which Ernst left with his entire collection of tribal art. A few years later, Peggy left America for Venice. In the late fifties she became interested in tribal art directly. During a long journey through Mexico and the United States in the spring of 1959, she visited the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Barnes Foundation and the Museum of Philadelphia. She also contacted Carlebach, and bought from him the core of what would become her collection of tribal art: twelve sculptures from Africa, America, and Oceania, including three Nayarit terracottas from Mexico, a Peruvian "false head" and feather poncho, an Amazonian dance costume, two malanggan sculptures from New Ireland, as well as probably a Baga d'mba yoke, a Kota reliquary, and a figurative flute stopper from Lake Chambri in Papua New Guinea.

Her memoirs reveal two reasons that brought her, fifteen years after her separation from Max Ernst, to populate her home once again with works of ethnic art. The first is psychological and marks her reconciliation with an earlier traumatic phase of her life. She effectively reconstructed a version of her former existence, but one that followed a more harmonious course. The second is economic. She understood that, devoted to tribal art, she could build a collection without incurring the mad sums that the art market claimed in other areas. Over the years, Peggy expanded her collection piece by piece to a total of fifty works. Two-thirds are still in the Venetian collection, while the rest went to her heirs. Twenty of these objects are included in the first major catalogue devoted to the Venetian collection, edited by Nicolas and Elena Calas, in a chapter entitled "Primitive Art," to which the end of the book is devoted.