Romping through History

A rather interesting book review of Mistress of Modernism, Peggy Guggeheim. According to reviewer Michele C. Cone, Dearborn has portrayed not the dog-hugging old lady that some of us recall, but a young and interesting Peggy, as she appears on the book’s cover in the famous photograph of her by Man Ray from 1925. Here, her face, framed by a turban, softened by dangling earrings, has an affecting pensiveness. In her sleek cloth-of-gold evening dress by Paul Poiret, a long cigarette holder pressed between her fingers, she is the archetypal flapper. But this product of the mores of a society in transition had a singular generosity and an uncanny eye for good art, and her biographer generously pays tribute to those qualities.