Word: guggenheimer
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Last week the largest retrospective of Mark Rothko's paintings went on view in Manhattan. Organized by Art Historian Diane Waldman for the Guggenheim Museum, it will travel later to Houston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. It consists of almost 200 paintings, spanning a career of more than 40 years. They run from his first tentative exercises in the manner of Milton Avery, his mentor, whose soft, vibrating patches of color had an indelible effect on Rothko; thence to the curious, stilted subway scenes of the 1930s, and to the totemic abstracts of vaguely identifiable figures-in-landscape which were...
...Guggenheims, or the "Googs," as they were condescendingly labeled by New York's older, more staid Jewish families, exploited people as ruthlessly as they did minerals. Yet they could also be uncommonly generous, and before they exhausted their funds and energies, they set new standards for imaginative philanthropy. A list of their legacies includes the Guggenheim fellowships, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, and foundations that helped finance Robert Goddard's pioneering rocket research and the Leakey family's exploration into the origins...
Once blessed by luck in almost every business enterprise, the Guggenheims later lost their magical touch. The family story was like the Rothschilds' in reverse: a third-generation Guggenheim, M. Robert, distinguished himself as Ambassador to Portugal by flipping a spoon down a guest's cleavage at a state dinner, then attempting to fish it out. Lisbon declared him persona non grata. Many lost all purpose, several died young, and a disproportionate number committed suicide. Simon's son George, for instance, bought a big-game rifle at Abercrombie & Fitch, checked into a hotel, and shot himself...
...Some Guggenheim descendants have fared better, of course. Peggy Guggenheim was the patron of modern artists like Jackson Pollock, and with relatively small funds she has lined the walls of her Venice palazzo with one of the world's greatest collections of modern art. Roger Straus Jr. runs one of the country's best publishing houses, Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Iris Love has won fame as an archaeologist. For the most part, however, the old Guggenheim daring has disappeared, and the family fortune, divided and divided again by succeeding generations, was made smaller still by nationalistic foreign governments...
...Once the Guggenheims were the richest Jewish family in the U.S. Today, no males who bear the family's name still practice Judaism. Solomon's grandson, who now heads the shrunken business empire, is an Episcopalian with an archetypically Waspish name, Peter Lawson-Johnston. Meyer was right. His famous bundle was scattered by history, and the name Guggenheim is now celebrated only on the doors of museums and foundation offices...