Mercedes Ruehl's Peggy Guggenheim: Very Provocative, Very Jewish

Wearing what the script describes as "a pair of extra large sunglasses and a long, white, elegant Fortuny gown with a large yellow stain across the back of the skirt," Mercedes Ruehl looked like she had just come from a cocktail party gone sour in the worst kind of way. Luckily, she had thrown the party herself, as she was playing the ostentatious, heiress and art-collecting wizard Peggy Guggenheim in the play "Woman Before a Glass."

From the start of the play, Ruehl convincingly portrays Guggenheim's wit, ruffling through her closet in vain looking for an outfit in which to meet "il presidente." After a few discarded potential dresses, she observes, "My God! You realize there's a history of 20th century designer gowns right here and I've nothing to wear! It's pathetic!" She rants about her "ugly uncle's museum in New York. The Guggenheim! It's not a museum. It's a parking garage, for crying out loud! Are you kidding me? All ramps!"

When Peggy Guggenheim the kvetch and the art aficionado emerge, so does Peggy Guggenheim the Jew. Ruehl enacted Guggenheim begging the Louvre Museum to hide her collection from the ever-approaching Nazis. "They sent a man to my apartment on the Ile St.-Louis," she said. "He looked at my collection and said, 'Je suis desole, madame, mais je ne vois rien ici qui vaux le peine.' Nothing here worth saving, he said." She smuggled her pieces - a treasure-trove of then anonymous paintings by Pollack, Kandinsky, Lipchitz, and many others - to America, "where I was still told to my face that modern art can only be loved...by Jews."

"We Jews understand [modern art] because wherever we are, wherever we go, we're always forced to always be outsiders. And because of that we see this art for what it is: not an answer, but a question. It's why Hitler wanted to destroy it all," Ruehl said.

The script accurately diagnoses Jews and the avant-garde. The list of modern art founders is hardly entirely composed of Goldbergs and Levines, but instead Chagall, Gustin, Hesse, Krasner, Lichtenstein, Modigliani, Pissarro, Rothko, and Soutine were all Jewish.

In fact, many of the gentiles of the avant-garde found themselves unwittingly circumcised. One of Guggenheim's two ex-husbands, painter Max Ernst (she was one of his many ex-wives), suffered misdirected anti-Semitism. As Ruehl puts it, "Max was in a French concentration camp and I got him away from the Nazis. It cost me a bundle, but hey! He was an artist! A great artist! Max was actually on Hitler's list: modern, decadent, Jewish art and artists to be destroyed. He wasn't even Jewish, poor slob."

The gentile Ernst certainly had an interest in Jewish women, though. He married two: Guggenheim and art historian and journalist, Louise Straus. Like Paul Klee, who taught painting at the modern Bauhaus school in Weimar and whom the Nazis erroneously denounced as Jewish for his abstract pickle paintings, Ernst suffered the unfortunate fate Arthur Miller described in his book, "Focus" (1945), which explores anti-Semitic banker, Lawrence Newman's Jewish look upon donning his new glasses. As Newman learned firsthand what it meant to be Jewish, Ernst and Klee arrived at the tail end of ill-informed anti-Semitism.

Though Ernst and Klee could hardly escape their "Jewishness," Guggenheim managed to wiggle her way out of a Nazi raid of her studio. One soldier asked her "in the most exquisite French I'd ever heard to tell him if I was a 'juive.' I looked at him, and I thought I've not heard so much hatred put into that word since being a child... So I looked at these three Adonises and with all the force and fury I felt I said, 'Je suis Americaine!' They asked my forgiveness and left."

One telling photograph of the Nazis' condemnation of "degenerate" art of both the Jewish and gentile variety from the current "Max Ernst: A Retrospective" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum (NY) is "Artists in Exile" (1942), which features fifteen exiled artists, including Tanguy, Chagall, Leger, Breton, Mondrian, and Lipchitz, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City. All these artists fled European fascism in their various countries, finding freedom to practice their art in New York.

Ernst perfectly matched Guggenheim's chutzpah. Writing about his German military service in WWI, Ernst wrote, "On the first of August 1914 M.E. died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918." Ernst's playfulness also shows in two of his paintings at the Met show. "Ubu Impersonator" (192) is an oil painting on canvas depicting a figure with arms and blue-green hair, but only a series of red hollow squares and a yellow beak where the head should be. The figure rests on a pointed needle instead of feet and resembles a spinnable top. The background contains a cloudy sky and a scythe stuck in the yellow sand, and thus owes much to the surrealist genre. The Ubu reference, of course, derives from French playwright and artist, Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Plays." Jarry's Pa Ubu and his Absurdist illogic and tyranny later became the inspiration for the Dadaists and the Surrealists.

In "Woman Before a Glass," Guggenheim is tough on the artists who created her children - she calls her collection her children - and yet, she is slow to talk about herself. "Both my grandfathers were peddlers. Mother's father, Granddad Seligman was born under a peddler's cart, for God's sake, in middle Europe somewhere, they all came from there, Jews of course, went to America as a peddler and founded the biggest bank in New York City. So, really, there's nothing there but money, money, money. So who cares?"

The entire art world cares, though, for Guggenheim achieved stardom as a brilliant art visionary, but she also stood out in the collecting world as a woman. Ruehl recounts Picasso's refusal to sell Guggenheim a painting, "I wasn't good enough! In 1940 I climbed up to this crappy little studio, a sweltering hot Parisian summer, and stood there.

He looked right at me and said, 'Oh no, madam! Wrong floor! Ladies' lingerie is two floors down!'"

The force that kept Peggy Guggenheim going was the same one that moved Max Ernst and the other avant-garde painters: responsibility. The script of "Woman Before a Glass" puts it best: "I collected [art] because... it was a responsibility to preserve the art of our own time. My own time. A duty no one else was willing to undertake. Save and preserve an Art that was a response to the madness of a world in chaos. A world where fascists were democratically elected in Italy and Germany and elsewhere. A time when Adolph Hitler denounced modern art as evil and decadent... and Jewish!"

Menachem Wecker paints and writes about the arts for a variety of venues. He resides pathologically at mwecker@gmail.com and welcomes responses.