Dogwoof will be releasing Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict in UK cinemas 11 December. Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland follows up her acclaimed debut "Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel" with a film about one of the 20th Century’s most influential art collectors. Peggy Guggenheim championed some of the biggest figures of modern art including Alexander Calder, Mark Rothko, Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, as well as having a private life which would shock and scandalise society. This is the story of a true maverick, whose passion for modern art coloured every aspect of her life.
Peggy Guggenheim was an heiress who rejected high society to pursue an obsession with modern art and, with counsel from Marcel Duchamp, became a central figure in 20th Century art. From her beginnings as an amateur collector, in a few decades she would build one of the most important art collections in the world, now housed in her Venetian Palazzo. She risked life and limb to smuggle art and artists out of occupied France and saved invaluable works of art from the Nazis; she had numerous public affairs notably with writer and playwright Samuel Beckett, and was married to surrealist artist Max Ernst. To tell her incredible story, Vreeland uses a lost taped interview she conducted late in her life to frame the story, and includes archival material and interviews with leading figures from the art world such as Marina Abramovic, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert De Niro, Arne Glimcher, Larry Gagosian and many more. The result is a rich, multi-layered story of a woman who defied the conventions of her time to become a central figure of the 20th Century.