Peggy and Sue

It was another gorgeous sunny cold day in Portland, but we still weren’t up to a walk or much time outside in the wind. So we went to see a fascinating documentary, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict. 

Guggenheim was a woman of unimaginable privilege, but she found bourgeois life boring and built a place for herself among artists, misfits, and rebels. She was a generous patron and in many ways a visionary, and yet the sense of her that comes across in the film is of aching loneliness. Men--she seemed hungry for their attention and approval--exploited her. She had few friends. Her children were difficult and her daughter committed suicide. The names of her lovers and proteges are the names of all the great men (and a few women) of 20th century art. She encouraged genius, she sat in on some of the most creative conversations of her time, and she rescued and promoted people we might never have known about, without her. But was she ever seen and loved? We left the theatre feeling love for her, which is a testament to the skillful filmmaking of Lisa Immordino Vreeland.

After the film we went for a late lunch, got a window table, and I made a series of portraits of Sue. Portraiture is invasive. It intrudes. It breaks in on intimacy and transgresses on privacy. But I think Sally Mann is right: “If transgression is at the very heart of photographic portraiture, then the ideal outcome--beauty, communion, honesty, and empathy--mitigates the offense” (Hold Still, p. 293).