Charmed Life, A.
McCarthy, Mary. A Charmed Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace…, (1955).
Small 8vo.; printed Cecil Beaton photo of McCarthy affixed to rear endpaper; blue paper-covered boards, spine browned and frayed.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed to Peggy Guggenheim on the front endpaper: Endorsed, with love, Mary August 3, 1956, with Guggenheim’s note above: Peggy Guggenheim from Mary. Guggenheim, one of the greatest benefactors of art of this century, seemed to have a sixth sense for the masters of modernism. She opened her first gallery in London in the late 1930s and promoted Brancusi, Cocteau, Arp, Kandinsky, and other surrealists, cubists, and abstract artists who have stood the test of time. During the war she returned to New York and in 1942 opened a gallery with her husband, Max Ernst; in exhibitions at “Art of This Century,” she launched Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, among others. The catalogue she produced under the title Art of This Century was a great success; the 2000 copies printed were sold worldwide. It included essays by Breton, Mondrian, and Arp; “manifestos of the different movements in art in the last thirty years”; statements by Picasso, Ernst, de Chirico and all the other artists represented in the book, along with photographs of their eyes. In 1946 she expatriated to Venice, opening her collection there to the public twice a week. That palazzo has now been transfigured into a museum housing works by the salient artists of the modernist movement. Her memoir, Confessions of an Art Addict, came out in 1960.
In the summer of 1956 Guggenheim, among McCarthy’s post-war “sponsors” in Europe, drove her from Venice to Padua. According to McCarthy’s biographer Carol Brightman, Guggenheim told her friend: “I couldn’t let you go alone, especially after I remembered the ending of A Charmed Life.” Struck by this graciousness, especially in light of the less than flattering caricature she had drawn of Guggenheim a decade earlier in her story, “The Cicerone” (Guggenheim was the model for Miss Grabbe), McCarthy immediately declared: “I will never hear another word against her.” This inscription was almost certainly presented after the road-trip to Padua.
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