Faculty Research Fellows Zoom Talk with Richard Meyer

Richard Meyer: "The Nude in Peggy Guggenheim’s Living Room”

 

This paper is drawn from a larger project on Morris Hirshfield, a Brooklyn tailor and slipper-maker who achieved international recognition as a self-taught painter in the 1940s. Among the most prominent of Hirshfield’s collectors was the heiress and pioneering taste-maker Peggy Guggenheim.  This paper considers how gender and sexuality unexpectedly shaped the display of a Hirshfield painting in the townhouse Guggenheim shared with the surrealist Max Ernst, her husband at the time.