It wasn’t just in Greenwich Village that America was enjoying the sense of relief and the economic boom that followed the war. This revolution had started before the war, finding its greatest expression in the visual arts and in music. Modern art really was new then. In the time of the frock-coat and the hobble-skirt, of the horse-drawn carriage and the steam engine, Cubism was born and Stravinsky wrote The Firebird. There had never been an artistic revolution quite like it.
It was fired by the First World War, which speeded up similarly revolutionary technological progress, but Picasso and Braque were painting Cubist pictures well before 1914, and in Italy Balla and Severini were experimenting with arresting the visual impression of movement while motion photography was still in its infancy. The period either side of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of frantic technological progress, yet in 1920 the bicycle was still one of the fastest modes of transport, air travel was unknown to all but a few, and cars, telephones and radios were rare. The telegraph had been developed further during the war, but was not yet in common use. The RMS Titanic was the first to transmit SOS distress signals as she sank. There was no television yet. Computers as we know them lay far in the future.
Peggy was born in the Victorian age. By 1920 she was in the jazz age; her life had been contemporaneous with the transition, and, having the will, she moved effortlessly with the times.
In the meantime, a party was in progress. In the few years following 1918, American women changed their wardrobe by 45 per cent: the sartorial revolution typified by the flapper showed how strong the desire was to get away from the pre-war atmosphere, with its restrictive morals, its nationalism, class-divisiveness and provincialism. When the conservative establishment tried to curb the new and alarming tendencies, most obviously in a fundamentally puritanical America by introducing the prohibition of alcohol nationwide in 1920, the result was an unprecedented crime wave and a record increase in the consumption of alcohol.
Nothing could stopper the bottle again. The genie had been let out. Peggy was a child of her time; and along with many young Americans, she didn’t just bob her hair, wear short skirts, and dance and drink – she left.
Peggy, still living at home, began to feel that the boundaries of the Sunwise Turn were also too narrow. She liked Laurence Vail, responding to his European manner and finding him less daunting than most of the habitués of the bookshop. Now, to Florette’s great relief, her daughter announced her intention of giving up work. Instead, she wanted to travel. She had been to Europe frequently as a girl, but not yet as a woman. The idea seemed to Florette to chime more harmoniously with her idea of what Peggy should be doing. Florette was unaware of the influence Laurence’s acquaintance had had on her; though it is just as likely that Peggy’s decision to go abroad was based on her cousin Harold’s own imminent departure.
Greenwich Village had been an undiscovered country for Peggy, but her sympathies lay with those who lived there. Many young male artists had been hardened in the fire of the war, but everyone was enjoying the euphoria that followed it, and many were also enjoying the economic boom it had created. Men who had served either in the army or with the ambulance corps in Europe had had their first experience of the old world, and had liked what they saw.
There had been precursors. Henry James had left America for Europe in 1875, and Gertrude Stein settled in Paris in 1902. The painter Marsden Hartley had lived in Berlin before the First World War, and when his German lover, an infantry officer, was killed during it, his death inspired Hartley to carry out a moving series of paintings. To someone from provincial America, New York was stunning enough, and provided a kind of halfway house; but for the artist the attractions of such cities as Paris, Rome, Berlin and London were irresistible.
It was Paris that most of them had got to know, and it was to Paris that they wished to return. France quickly became the focus of artistic expression in Europe after the war – an expression which reflected both disenchantment with the established order which the war had called into question, and the joy of freedom which succeeded it. Paris was at its centre, and for young artists from America there was an added, practical dimension: in the 1920s one dollar bought twenty French francs, and though this dropped back to fourteen francs, there it stabilised. You could live easily and even well on five dollars a day in France, including hotels and travelling expenses. The cost of living in general was half that of the USA. Matthew Josephson reports that a litre of Anjou wine could be had for nine centimes, and a good meal for two would only cost between two and three francs; John Glassco and his friend Graeme Taylor stayed at the Hôtel Jules César in Paris for the equivalent of twenty dollars a month, and breakfast in bed only cost fifteen cents a day on top of that.
Peggy, with a private income of over $20,000 a year, could look forward to living as well as she pleased. But the money was a mixed blessing. Unlike the people with whom she sought to associate, she had no need to earn a living.
Three of Peggy’s close contemporaries with whom her life was to interact, the poet and designer Mina Loy and the writers Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle, were all aware of nascent feminism, in the form of women’s suffrage and a consciousness that women artists should achieve the same recognition as men. In 1913, as an eleven-year-old, Boyle had been taken by her ambitious and artistic mother to the Armory Show in New York, an influential exhibition staged by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, of which Alfred Stieglitz was honorary vice-president, that put on show more than 1100 international modern works of art. Peggy, rising fifteen at the time, did not have the advantage of such a parent, and was scarcely feeling her way towards an artistic sensibility then. The somewhat older Mina Loy (she was born in London in 1882) was living in Florence when the Armory Show was on, but her friend, the iconoclastic Mabel Dodge, was closely involved in its inception. Mina, furthermore, had already spent some time, in 1900, at the Künstlerinnenverein in Munich, the academy for women artists founded in the year of her birth.
The real point here is that all these women had an early association with the artistic world, wanted to join it as active artists, and had to work for a living. Barnes never married, but Boyle and Loy did and, like Peggy, were poor mothers. Had they been born in a later age it is open to question whether they would have had families at all. They were essentially independent spirits, and they would not be fobbed off with the ‘image’ of emancipated womanhood portrayed in the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson. The Gibson girl may have been self-assured and vivacious, but she was still an idea of women as men would like them to be. She had none of the muscle of the suffragette. Women had a long struggle ahead of them, and it would take at least another sixty years before they even began to enjoy some truly equal rights, in the Western world at least. In artistic circles as elsewhere, men held sway, and male artists were more often than not sexual chauvinists. Peggy has been presented as a proto-feminist. She was never anything of the sort. But she did make her presence felt, and asserted her independence.
But not yet. Nor was she as free of her mother as she would have liked to be, or cared to admit. When she started her preparations for departure to Paris, her plans included Florette and a cousin of Peggy’s Aunt Irene, Valerie Dreyfus, as travelling companions. Nor of course were they destined for the Left Bank.
‘Soon after, I went to Europe. I didn’t realise at the time that I was going to remain there for twenty-one years but that wouldn’t have stopped me … In those days, my desire for seeing everything was very much in contrast to my lack of feeling for anything.’
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, Out of this Century
The first trip was a toe-in-the-water affair – Peggy isn’t being entirely truthful when she says she didn’t return