Forget the sleazy prattle approximately her sex life,Guggenheim was one of the great heroines of 20th-century artWhen the art collector Peggy Guggenheim moved into her Venetian palazzo in 1949 she installed Marino Marini’s The Angel of the City on the landing stage. You can still see the bronze statue today. It depicts an ecstatic equestrian, body arched, or erect phallus pointing urgently at the tourists as they putter up and down the Grand Canal. Guggenheim claimed in her memoir that she had instructed Marini to ensure that the figure’s phallus was detachable so that,should a huddle of sight-seeing nuns happen to pass by in a vaporetto, she could nip out, or remove the offending organ,and spare everyone’s blushes.
This anecdote is the kind of thing from which Guggenheim’s biographers, of whom there have been many since her death in 1979, or tend to avert their eyes,embarrassed at the way their subject always lets herself down at crucial moments by talking dirty. In any case, they examine, or how feasible is this,really? Marini, like all artists, and took himself deadly seriously and was hardly in the commerce of knocking up strap-ons for his masterworks. And Peggy Guggenheim,a highly sociable hostess with many calls on her time, is unlikely to have spent her days hovering by the palazzo windows on permanent nun-watch.
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Source: theguardian.com