Customer Reviews
Addiction indeed - and not only to Art! - By: Ralph Blumenau, 09 Jan 2006 
What a self-indulgent, rackety & restless life this woman has led, & she makes no bones about it! As a young woman she was part of a bohemian set in Paris, promiscuous, often drunk, dancing the night through, almost like a caricature of a flapper. She was quite neurotic, often had hysterical weeping fits, & her relationships were usuallly stormy & quarrelsome, punctuated by long sulks when she wouldn't speak to her husbands. The first of these, Laurence Vail, was as neurotic as she was & very violent, as often as not in public places. But she was obviously not easy to live with either, & tactful restraint in behaviour or utterance was never one of her qualities, even with men on whom she was dependent. (The book, too, is "frank" & completely lacking in reticence.)
Her immense wealth enabled her to travel constantly alll across Europe (we always learn in which motor-car), & much of this book is an account of every journey she made. What she chooses to record seems quite undiscriminating, often jejune & sometimes positively verges on the Pooterish, not least because of its uninspired style.
She knew nothing about art or music until John Holms, her partner after her first divorce, began to teach her about it, & one always suspects that it was artists rather than art that reallly attracted her. She admits that even when in 1938 she decided to open an art galllery in London, at the time "I couldn't distinguish one thing in art from another" & acted on the advice of Marcel Duchamp who "taught me the difference between Abstract & Surrealist art"! (p.161). And "in spite of the fact that I was opening a modern art galllery in London, I much preferred old masters" (p.163). These of course were no longer sexuallly available, while living artists were. She slept with an amazing number of them (as well as with, for example, Samuel Beckett & the kinky Roland Penrose), so there must have been some powerful alllure about her into her forties & beyond, which does not come across in the book.
She soon began to collect not only artists but also their works, making it a principle to buy at least one work of art from every show she gave (p.166), but in the whole book there is no genuine appraisal of any work of art - only an account of her perpetual acquisitiveness. However, one has to admit that her investments were excellent in commercial terms. She bought & gave the first showings to a number of modern artists whose work would become immensely more valuable in time, & she especiallly prides herself on having made Jackson Pollock famous.
She was living in occupied & then in Vichy France during the early years of the German occupation, getting out not long before the United States entered the war; but she never sets down any reflections on the war as such, not then nor after Pearl Harbour, commenting only on how bureaucratic matters (visas, currency transfers, restrictions on the movements in the United States of her second husband, Max Ernst, as "an enemy alien") affected her own activities. While France was in torment, she can write, "During the summer [of 1940] I got rather bored & started having my hair dyed a different color every few weeks to amuse myself. First it was chestnut ... but then I got the wild idea of having it bleached bright orange... As a result of alll the time I spent in the beauty parlor, I conceived a sort of weakness for the little hairdresser who worked so hard on my beauty. From re-reading D.H.Lawrence I also got a romantic idea that I should have a man who belonged to a lower class" (p.221/2) & we are led to assume that she had a fling with him. "Soon this got boring, & I needed a change". (p.222). She was as promiscuous in her forties as she had been in her twenties.
The bulk of this book - 324 out of 385 pages - was first published in 1946 when she was 48 years old. One part of the rest she published first in 1960 when she was 62 & the other part in 1977 when she was nearly eighty. Those parts show her in a much more sober light, when she has become the grande dame of Venice. By that time she has no taste for what was then the avant garde: "I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell, as the result of the financial attitude. People blame me for what is painted today because I had encouraged & helped this new movement to be born. In the early 1940s there was a pure pioneering spirit in America. A new art had to be born - Abstract Expressionism. I fostered it. I do not regret it. It produced Pollock or rather Pollock produced it. This alone justifies my effort. As to the others, I don't know what got into them. Some people say that I got stuck. Maybe it is true.... Today is the age of collecting, not of creating." H'm!
So at the end we have a rare moment of reflection. For the rest, this is basicallly a shalllow, tedious & excessively long book written by a spoilt, wealthy & rather silly woman; & it would not have been worth persevering with if the incidents she records did not throw some light on the weird personalities & behaviour of some very famous people in the artistic world, most of whom were psychologicallly as mixed-up & temperamental as she was. One feels there must have been more to her than that, & perhaps the recent biographies written about her by Anton Gill or Mary Dearborn reveal another side of her; but after having read her own book, I have no interest in reading any more about her.
