Tonight (Friday Sept 24th), Diane Cilento opens her world tour of 'Woman Before a glass" at the Karnak Playhouse.

The play, by award-winning US playwright Lanie Robertson, whose other hits include Nasty Little Secrets, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Stringbrean, Bringing Mother Down, will be directed by award-winning Director Kate Gaul.

Diane Cilento is to star in this Australian premiere of the one-woman, tour-de-force 'Woman Before a Glass' about the life and times of art icon Peggy Guggenheim. The play runs this weekend 24th to 26th Sept and then again next weekend from 1st Oct to 3rd (See Advert opposite).

Diane Cilento will undoubtedly make this role her own and the Port Douglas region is very fortunate to be the first to have the chance to see her step into this spectacularly demanding one-woman show.  It is set in Venice, and presents Peggy reminiscing on her life, her famous family, her loves… and of course her art.

Who was Peggy Guggenheim?

Firstly it's important to understand that The Peggy Guggenheim Collection  is one of the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the 20th century.

And the lady herself was born, Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim, was born on August 26, 1898, to a wealthy New York City family.  She was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R.Guggenheim, who established the Guggenheim Foundation.

In 1938, she opened her first gallery for modern art in London featuring Jean Cocteau and began to collect works of art.  After the outbreak of World War II, she purchased as much abstract and Surrealist art as possible. She called her London Gallery 'Guggenheim Jeune', the name being quite ingeniously chosen to associate the venue with the famous French Bernheim Jeune.  Whilst her successful little gallery was open, Marcel Duchamp, whom she had known since the early 1920s taught her about contemporary art and styles and he conceived several of the exhibitions held at Guggenheim Jeune.

The gallery held exhibitions on Wassily Kandinsky (his first one-man-show in England), Yves Tanguy and Wolfgang Paalen.  She also held group exhibitions of sculpture and collage, which included now classic moderns Antoine Pevsner, Henry Moore, Henri Laurens, Alexander Calder, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Kurt Schwitters.

After the second world war interupted her expansion plans, she decided to buy paintings by all the painters who were on a list that Herbert Read, the English anarchist poet, and critic of literature and art, had prepared for her. 

Having plenty of time and considerable funds she went on a buying regime to buy one picture a day. When she had finished this considerable feat, she had acquired ten Picassos, forty Ernsts, eight Mirós, four Magrittes, three Man Rays, three Dalís, one Klee, one Wolfgang Paalen and one Chagall and in April 1940 she rented a large space in the Place Vendôme to house her formidable collection.

A few days before the Germans reached Paris, she abandoned her plans and fled to the south of France, from where, after months of safeguarding her collection and artist friends, she left Europe for New York in the summer of 1941. There, the following year, she opened a new gallery called The Art of This Century Gallery. Her four galleries were dedicated to Cubism, Surrealism and Kinetic art, with the fourth, being a commercial gallery.

She is credited with having advanced the careers of Jackson Pollock, William Congdon, Wolfgang Paalen, Ada Verdun Howell and German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in December 1941.  

In 1947 she returned to live in Venice, Italy. In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection and it became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant amount of works by Americans.

By the early 1960s she was loaning out her collection to museums throughout Europe and America, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.  In fact on her death on 23rd Dec 1979 she left her collection to Guggenheim Foundation.

Editors Comments: You simply have to go and see our very own colourful character, Diane Cilento portraying an equally colourful character with an equally passionate love of art, Peggy Guggenheim.  It's like the meeting of two international super powers, only this time there's no weapons of mass destruction just a mass of desiderata and super talent.  You'll be sorry you missed it!