Читать книгу Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict - Anton Gill - Страница 6

This book is made up of material derived from private and public archives and collections, published works, unpublished works, letters, diaries, interviews, gossip, e-mails, telephone conversations, videotapes, faxes, websites and so on. Despite the fact that the subject is recent, a number of discrepancies of spelling have cropped up in proper names. Where that has happened, I have used the version most commonly used by others.

I have not tampered with usage, grammar or spelling in direct quotations from original material such as letters, though I have tidied up typographical errors – for many years Peggy Guggenheim used an ancient typewriter with a faded blue ribbon, and her typing was not accurate. I have left eccentricities of spelling alone (Peggy habitually spelt ‘thought’ ‘thot’, and ‘bought’ ‘bot’), and have provided an explanation only if the level of obscurity seemed great enough to warrant one. Round brackets in quoted passages belong to the passage; glosses within such passages are in square brackets.

Titles of artworks in Peggy’s collection are generally the same as those used by Angelica Z. Rudenstine in her catalogue of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Other paintings and sculptures are given the names they’re most commonly known by.

I’d like to express my thanks here at the outset to all who helped. A lot of people had a profound personal contact with Peggy, and shared their memories of her with me generously. I am most grateful to them – their names are in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. I have had to be selective in the use of some tangential detail for reasons of both focus and of space. Readers interested in further exploration of the background to this book are referred to the bibliography. Inevitably what I have written will lead to a certain amount of disagreement. Some of the material conflicted, and some was clogged with gossip and rumour. I can only say that to the best of my ability I have checked all the matter I have used for correctness, and that I have tried to keep speculation to a minimum. I thank Marji Campi, Barbara Shukman and Karole Vail for looking over the manuscript, but I alone am accountable for any errors. I have not, however, consciously sought to mislead or offend anyone in this record of the life of a complex, anarchic, remarkable woman.

Anton Gill

London, 2001