Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland on Finding a Lost Interview for 'Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict'

Thanks to a fortuitous discovery, the late art patron and collector narrates a documentary about her own life.

Bernice Abbott/Submarine Entertainment

Four years ago, director Lisa Immordino Vreeland created the quintessential documentary for fashion fans with Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, which opened a door into the world of her husband's late grandmother, famed BAZAAR editor Diana Vreeland. This year, she does the same for art obsessives with Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict. The film tells the fascinating story of the eccentric art patron's life, in her own words—Vreeland uncovered a lost interview the late Guggenheim gave to her biographer, Jacqueline Bograd Weld, buried in Weld's basement. Here, BAZAAR sits down with Vreeland to discuss telling Guggenheim's story, her influence and what she's working on next:

Harper's BAZAAR: Why did you choose Peggy Guggenheim for your next documentary subject? 

Lisa Immordino Vreeland: Because it was art history and she's another strong woman. I'm clearly attracted to these women. And it's a whole story of transformation and reinvention that I adore; it's the matter of somebody having a destiny for a certain life and deciding she wants to make that change. I don't want to say I always want to do women, I just happened to do two women in a row. But they're two really iconic women. If you're making a film, the one thing I've learned is you have to pick somebody really well-known to make it relevant. The connection with Diana Vreeland is she's not my family, she's my husband's family, and I just realized it made sense to do a film. And because of my name, it gave me access that would have been a little bit more difficult for some other people, maybe. In the case of Peggy, it's a totally different story. They had common traits because they were both brought up a certain way and they both wanted to break out and be something different, but Peggy's support of the arts was quite different from Mrs. Vreeland's, and Mrs. Vreeland was also a very different human being compared to Peggy. She had so much more in her, and Peggy really had a lot of shortcomings emotionally. She also had a lot of death around her. She had a very sad life that she counter-balanced with all this belief in these artists. They have such important legacies and they're very different. In Peggy's case there are few figures in the art world who were patrons, whose influence was so widespread. She had an effect in different countries—in London, in Paris, in New York and in Venice—and there are few people who have that, have such an influence. She also has it so much here in America because she donated paintings before she left. I was just giving a screening up at RISD and RISD has the first Pollock drip painting she gave and the Jean Hélion, and so it doesn't stop, and if you compare other historical figures who were part of the art world, there is nobody who has the swath of these countries. I think she had this very modern approach to life.

HB: Even watching the film, it feels like a very modern film. Her story really resonates. Her behavior—and her openness about her affairs, her abortions—wouldn't be very shocking today, but it was scandalous back then.

LIV: Think about this: it's 1946 and she writes [in her "informal" autobiography Out of This Century]—even though she used pseudonyms—she used the names of all these artists that were very easily deciphered. And she writes about her seven abortions. Women and men didn't do that. I love the fact that she lived life on her terms. She had, yes, the financial security to live life on her terms, but nothing took her down. She had a lot of personal things that could have taken her down.

HB: With the vast amount of information about her out there, how did you approach this documentary?

LIV: First of all there are books. There is her autobiography and then there is a selection of different biographies and a ton of different press articles. There were some very interesting ones that I dealt with. I basically looked at everything out there in English and French. The one thing I was looking for was more quotes that she gave, inspiring quotes about the art or the artist, which were impossible to find because she just [didn't do] that. Then, once we optioned Jackie's book [Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim by Jacqueline Bograd Weld], we became good friends and she opened up all of her research. It was all in these plastic bins and I just went through everything. It was amazing to have that access. 

There were some predominant people who became the voices of the film, and these were people who all knew her, and then there are these other voices, like Larry Gagosian, Marina Abramovic and Hans Ulrich Obrist, who are the biggest names in the art world today. They also became the voices because she influenced them. They understood this concept of treating art as one of the most basic human endeavors and she understood the concept of that and that wasn't something that many people understood at that time. And she not only did that, she embraced it. She did it on her own terms and she became one with the art and the artist. What is even more surprising, then, is that she did it in all the places she did. If you go into the details of it, even today, Burri, who is showing right now at the Guggenheim, he and Lucio Fontana saw her show in 1948 at the Biennale [in Venice] when it reopened, and for the first time they saw a Jackson Pollack painting, they saw paintings that were exploding off the canvases. They had never even seen anything like that.

HB: They couldn't even wrap their minds around it.

LIV: No they couldn't, but it made them think differently about art. Then they also saw Kandinskys for the first time in color. They had never seen a Kandinsky in color. They had only seen it in black and white in a magazine. It just made them think in a different way and this is how she spread her influence.

HB: So tell me about finding the tapes in Weld's basement.

LIV: It was very, very fun. I think it's also about building confidence with the person. Jackie recently told me, she said, "I always knew where the tapes were." Maybe in the back of her mind she always knew they were in the basement, but she wasn't forthcoming about it. Then I finally asked her and she was like, "I don't know, maybe they're down there." So I went down, and we saw these two big plastic bags. Then she said, "Don't look in the boxes where the books are because you're not going to find them in there." But she had told me they were in a shoebox, and so the last boxes we had, I put my had in the box and felt a shoebox. It was an old Nike sneaker box.

HB: Was she hesitant to share the tapes because of the content?

LIV: I don't know. You know, it's all revealed in her book and there is nothing that is hidden, but what was really important about these tapes was the fact that Jackie herself asked good questions and they were very revealing, because Peggy's answers were not that good at times.

HB: I'm thinking about the parts where Peggy said things like, "I wouldn't dare put that in my memoir," or something like that.

LIV: I think that Jackie had a lot of fun with [the book] and she worked really hard and she also had access to all the people who [by the time I started working on the documentary] had been dead for 10 or 20 years. In fact, that research, which was not necessarily transcribed or in tape form, was research that I looked at, and there were some very personal things that I didn't use because there is a line. I asked myself, does she [Weld] own this? Does she not own this? Already the fact of the seven abortions, that was enough for me. That kept me up at night.

HB: But she is open about it.

LIV: Yeah, and she shared it and that was the point. But I don't think we do her in anyway an injustice by leaving those things out, because this is really who she is. I think a film like this is important, especially documentaries, because people barely touch on the surface—they don't delve into anything anymore. Documentaries are interesting because we're digging under the surface.

HB: Exactly, it's not just something you can read in a Wikipedia article.

LIV: Well that's the thing, most people just depend and rely on that Wikipedia article, which is really depressing. It really is. I'll do anything to fight against that lazy approach. And you know this was Peggy Guggenheim, warts and all, what we told. I think it's important to do that.

HB: Anything about Peggy that surprised you as you were making the film?

LIV: You know what? The sadness. She had an attitude in a way that she wrote. Her autobiography was this kind of nonchalant, "Oh yeah, guess what." The surprising part was the really deep-seated sadness over a lot of things that had happened to her. 

Also, I knew that she wasn't considered an intellectual from the very beginning, but Gertrude Stein is the most obvious person to compare her to, and she was an intellectual. She was a writer, and she had this whole salon environment that people adore. She wasn't a collector, though. Her collection was built by her brother, Leo, and his wife. And there are not many people that are totally aware of that. They always say she built it, but no, she didn't build the collection. Peggy, though, always had a vision of wanting to build a collection and share it. It was never a different story, and that's a huge thing, because not even Isabella Stewart Gardner had that image. In her mind, she said, I'm collecting for myself, let Mr. Berenson go and get some other little Raphael or Canaletto somewhere. 

HB: I really love the line at the beginning of the film, "She wanted this art as a mirror for her own strangeness." Do you think she identified personally with the art, or was it her way of escaping all the sadness in her life?

LIV: I think it's a combination. That's Donald Kuspit who said that. I think that it is very much a combination of the two because she found herself. She found an identity with the art and these artists and it was a combination of these worlds that she finally felt good in her own skin and she felt that ease and felt a calling and a passion and a drive. All of a sudden she wasn't just a mother or a woman looking for a man. This happened when she was 40, and there was an option, because her friends suggested, you can open a publishing house or you can open up a gallery, and I think she would have been exactly the same if she opened up a publishing house. She would have found the most avant garde, and to find these things and identify this you have to have something inside of you and you have to be open about this. John Richardson used a Greek work, which is a pollinator, and also, in a funny way, she is a conduit and a facilitator. It's a funny role. She was an accidental tourist in this amazing life and she played a really pivotal role in it.

HB: Another line of hers, "It isn't in my nature to be afraid." She rescued art from war zones and she talked about her sex life and her seven abortions. She was one of the first people to undergo plastic surgery. Where do you think this bravery stemmed from? Is it, again, just her passion for her art? Or do you think she felt she didn't have anything to lose?

LIV: I think she didn't have anything to lose, because if you go out and you have a nose job and you never fix it, and you obviously have the means to fix it? I think she felt it within herself to say, who cares? She also had a purpose in life, she had a drive in her life. It's this whole sense of "running after the dream" and chasing it down and doing it despite all of these issues that continued in her life. The one thing that we always had to be very careful about was the whole sense of money and not make her feel entitled. 

HB: Oh yeah, I loved the line, "I only have $450,000," after her father died.

LIV: Yeah because $450,000 back then was probably five or six hundred thousand dollars. [What happened was[ her father ended up breaking off from his brothers and when he went off, he invested in the steel building the Tour Eiffel, and it was a horrible investment and he lost a bunch of money. And when he was coming back and he died on the Titanic, he was coming back with his tail between his legs. And then what happened was, he dies, they find the mistress and find out she was on the boat, and the mistress is paid off by the Guggenheim brothers. She [Peggy] kept living on with the mother and life did not change. Then all of a sudden there was this reality when all of the records and everything bounced, they were like, "we have no money" and they were kicked out of their apartment. You know, she felt inferior, but she still had money. The other thing is, she often had to sell works to pay off things and to do things. She didn't just go into her money. She was like, " I will sell this work to buy that one." And that was a hard thing. She didn't have this open access to her money. When she had decided she was going to do the museum with Herbert Read she said, OK, I'm putting myself on a strict diet. That meant that she wasn't gonna buy herself anything. It was all going into the art. There was a real commitment.

HB: Anything you left out of the film that you really wanted to include?

LIV: I think some of the shows. There were a lot of shows that were very important and we just couldn't do it because [the segment on] The Art of the Century was already so long, because Pollock makes up such a big component. You know, the collage show was a really important show that took place. The people who were in the show, it was Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell. And for Robert Motherwell, that became his most important medium. That is a huge show because it changed the way he created art.

HB: Can you talk about what you're working on next?

LIV: Yes, I'm working on Cecil Beaton. We're already shooting it. I shot his home and now I'm starting to produce it in 10 days in London.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict opens in theaters today.

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