The German photographer Stefan Moses met Peggy Guggenheim in Venice in April 1969, when the art world’s “last duchess”, then aged 70, was at her most formidable. He persuaded the collector to lead him around her Venice, which she did, in red stockings and with a pair of lapdogs, staring into his lens from behind moth-inspired sunglasses made for her by the American artist Edward Melcarth.
Peggy – she never needed the surname – fed the pigeons in St Mark’s Square, promenaded by the Bridge of Sighs, took Moses on her regular early evening cruise in her private water taxi with its red leather seats, and lounged on a chaise at her Grand Canal home and gallery, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Fifty years later, those pictures, and shots of her private collection, have been reproduced in Encounters With Peggy Guggenheim.
Moses’s indelible subject had long made herself a reputation for legendary encounters. In this photograph, as in life, Peggy appeared determined to remind the viewer of a past that involved a rumoured thousand love affairs with everyone from Samuel Beckett to Marcel Duchamp, and the inspired patronage of a generation of American and European artists.
Aside from this very public image, though, there is a sense that she also connected with Moses as a survivor. The photographer, who died in February this year, had escaped from a Nazi labour camp in his teens before establishing himself as a pre-eminent chronicler of postwar German society. Guggenheim’s own war had involved not only smuggling her art collection out of Europe and away from the Nazis, but also helping to save the lives of artists including Max Ernst (later her husband) and André Breton by getting them to New York. Peggy liked to call Venice a “living work of art”; as she approached her last decade, she was coming to think of herself in the same way.
Encounters With Peggy Guggenheim by Stefan Moses is out on 20 September (Hardie Grant, £22.50). To order a copy for £19.13 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846
