14.2/1500, Peggy Guggenheim

Today worked well. I made some serious progress on my dissertation, writing 1500 words, 500 more than usual. Not to obsessively quantify, but yes--that heartens me. Ultimately, it's easier to write when you set these word-count mile markers. The task becomes far less intimidatingly infinite, you get started and build momentum, you can stop.

Writing all day about mystical experience and the "vague vistas" of consciousness it reveals, it was fitting that the fog lifted today and the sun shined on Padua in one of those wintry foretastes of spring that make you anticipate how sweet springtime will actually be. I can't wait.

My first writing break was pastries and cappuccino, my second a fourteen mile run that brought with it, thanks to the clear skies, a view of the snowy Dolomites off in the far distance, washed in the pink light of late afternoon. What a sight they'll be in the spring.

I completely love Venice. As I said in an email to a college friend the other day, Venice has places that seem completely sufficient unto themselves, places where I feel there's no place else I need to be on the planet than here. San Marco, in all its glory, has that effect on me, and I think it's because in Venice words like glory, beauty, luxury, retain something of their original and uncorrupted meaning. Only in Venice do ornament and luxury meet such extremes without flinching.

To establish a museum of modern art in Venice, then, was a huge risk--what art work could stand up to the classical perfection of the city, what exhibit space wouldn't seem blank and barren with all of Venice's magnificent density surrounding it? The astonishing thing is, the Guggenheim is one of its jewels, set off by the centuries-old splendor. Why is this?

For one thing, there's something about setting a modern art gallery inside what, for all intents and purposes, was once a house, that brings the works to life in a way that more conventionally sterile galleries, purpose built for showcasing art as art cannot. I'm thinking in particular of MOMA, where Wright's corkscrew design alienates rather than invites, there being literally no angle of repose on those sloping floors. Exhibited in Guggenheim's old house, the Picassos and Pollacks become somehow warmer, earthier, have a more organic relationship with the viewer. Put back into a space where life was lived, Rothko's abstract expressionism becomes even more expressive and its abstraction more precise, if that makes sense--as they intended, the emotion, not the art, becomes the abstracted thing in Peggy's high modernist living room.

I got so excited about the place that I bought her autobiography, Confessions of an Art Addict. I'm only about 1/5 of the way through it but so far it shambles unreflectively through her early life in the various expat Bohemias of 1920s Europe, detailing the pathetic blow-by-blow of her dysfunctional, adultery-and-violence riddled marriage to artist-manque Laurence Vail. Not a total failure as an artist, Vail exhibited some forgettable found-object type pieces with Duchamp and Joseph Cornell in 1942, but his more vivid legacy comes not from his art but from the tortured-genius histrionics he visited on Guggenheim (who gives as good as she gets). Taken uncharitably, Autobiography reads as a tale of two no-talent bohemians fumbling

alcoholically across an amused Europe. At least Peggy (thank goodness) will go on to make something of herself, by dint of will alone.