Rise of the Patriarch

Peter Lawson-Johnston paints a rich family history in ‘Growing Up Guggenheim.’

By: Ilene Dube

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TIMEOFF/FRANK WOJCIECHOWSKI
Peter Lawson-Johnston


   It’s hard to imagine Peter Lawson-Johnston dressed in anything less than his impeccable attire, from the crisp pin-striped shirt down to the smoothly pressed socks. The patriarch of the Guggenheim empire surprises a stranger on first meeting when he tells how, at 6 a.m. daily, he takes it all off to swim in his backyard pool. In winter, he says, he puts on two terry cloth robes, walks out to the heated pool, lifts the blanket and takes the plunge. He employs a snorkel to breathe at his own pace and avoid a stiff neck.
   The 78-year-old also keeps fit playing golf. He had both hips replaced two years ago, and when asked if his game is affected, he quips, "Not from my hips, it’s because of my yips." He hunts quail while visiting one of his two South Carolina plantations (one was inherited from Grandpa Solomon Guggenheim). "We don’t kill what we don’t eat," he summarizes.
   On a wall of the living room hangs his portrait, painted about 20 years ago on Martha’s Vineyard by Helena Johnson. It captures his ruddy complexion, his sartorial refinement, his calm, confident demeanor. The portrait is used on the cover of his just released book, Growing Up Guggenheim (ISI Books, $35). It tells the rags-to-riches story of the Guggenheims, starting with Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s great-great grandfather, Simon, who fled Switzerland. As a Jew there, he could not own land or hold a job at which he might earn more than a subsistence.
   Simon settled in Philadelphia in 1848 with his son, Meyer, and the penniless twosome peddled stove polish door-to-door. Driving ambition led them to found a number of businesses, and Meyer eventually earned his fortune in the mining business. He had 11 children, and though Jews they attended Catholic schools in Philadelphia. Meyer’s wife instilled a love for the arts and raised them to be philanthropists, a tradition that has endured the generations of Guggenheims. When Meyer died in 1904 he left seven sons millionaires.
   Solomon, Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s grandfather, led a lavish life, with grandiose homes, chauffeurs and butlers. Yet, he recalls, both his grandparents and mother tended to be penny wise. His grandmother would follow his grandfather from room to room, turning off lights. When parking meters cost a nickel, his mother would drive round and round to find one that still had time on it. His grandparents, with bird-like appetites, were known for the small portions they served and guests often had to stop at Howard Johnson’s afterward to fill up.
   Slight in stature, Mr. Lawson-Johnston admits to having a bird-like appetite of his own. "It turns me off at a dinner party when they present a plate that has too much; I lose my appetite," he says, comfortably settled in what he and his wife of 55 years, Dede, refer to as the "conceit room." Its walls are lined with framed photographs of their four children, 10 grandchildren, and themselves with the likes of Princess Di.
   In the book, Mr. Lawson-Johnston claims to be "neither a collector nor a particularly astute judge of art… with the stunning exception of Peggy (Solomon’s niece, the famed art collector), few of the Guggenheims, whose name is practically synonymous with the art of the 20th century, have themselves been deeply informed collectors or curators."
   It was late in life that Solomon began collecting contemporary art, guided largely by the vision of Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, an artist and visionary from Germany who may have been his lover. Under her influence he began acquiring works by Kandinsky, Leger, Chagall, Braques, Klee and Modigliani.
   Solomon and his wife exhibited these in their apartment in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Their daughter and Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s mother, Barbara, grew up there, and often fancied the character Eloise, in the books by Kay Thompson, to be modeled after her. When the collection grew to several hundred pieces, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in a former car showroom in midtown. In 1945, Frank Lloyd Wright was engaged to design the world-famous Guggenheim Museum at 89th Street and Fifth Avenue that set out to defy the rectilinear grid of Manhattan.
   Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s mother married three times. He was the product of the first marriage; he was 3 when his parents divorced and he did not see his father again until he was 20. Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s brother, Michael, was born to Barbara’s second husband. The two brothers had a close and loving relationship, although Michael’s homosexuality was never discussed. Michael was not free to come out until his mother died.
   As an adolescent, Peter was shipped off to board at the Lawrenceville School, where a faculty member became his surrogate father. (He served as president of the board of trustees at the Lawrenceville School in the early ’90s.) Mr. Lawson-Johnston majored in philosophy at the University of Virginia, and a friend who owned The Baltimore Sun offered him a job as a reporter until the soon-to-be heir could figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
   Mr. Lawson-Johnston would phone in his stories to the young rewrite man, Russell Baker, who was also getting his start in journalism. Both were bored, and when Mr. Lawson-Johnston was assigned to cover the yachting beat, he found the sacrifice of his weekends inconvenient. A newlywed in the early 1950s — he’d met Dede when she was a debutante — he couldn’t afford to work for $35/week, and so began to work his way up in his family’s mining business.
   Throughout his years growing up, he feared being unmasked as a Jew. His grandparents had never been especially religious, and when his mother married his father, she became an Episcopalian. Although Mr. Lawson-Johnston is a member of Trinity Church in Princeton and attends Christmas Eve services at the Lawrenceville School chapel with his extended family, he still considers himself half Jewish.
   When Solomon died, Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s cousin, Harry, became the successor to the patriarchy. Harry appointed Mr. Lawson-Johnston vice president of business administration for the museum and a partner in Guggenheim Brothers, the mining operation. Harry also gave him responsibility for Solomon’s plantation, and brought him on the board of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. This organization, formed with Harry’s buddies Charles Lindbergh and Gen. James Doolittle, sought to "improve man’s relations to man" during the time of space exploration. Ultimately, Harry ceded the whole shebang to Mr. Lawson-Johnston, who became principal heir as well as head of all the Guggenheim enterprises and philanthropies.
   Under Mr. Lawson-Johnston’s leadership, the museum has grown from one building in New York to a global enterprise, with the Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain, and others in Las Vegas, Berlin and Venice.
   These days, he still commutes to New York four days a week. He is honorary chairman on the museum’s executive committee, president of the Peggy Guggenheim Board in Venice, president of the board of trustees at University of Virginia, on the boards of The National Review, McGraw-Hill and Jupiter Island Holdings, and president of the Plantation Society. "I don’t believe in retirement," he says. "Solomon kept up his commute from Long Island to New York until he died at 89. I look forward to commuting daily."
   The one thing he has given up? "Arguing politics at dinner parties," says the self-described pro-choice conservative, alone in the art world, who counts liberal Princeton-based publisher Don Wilson as one of his very best friends. "It’s like arguing about religion. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind. Just because you don’t agree with a person’s philosophy doesn’t mean you can’t love them." Besides, Dede has said she won’t go to dinner parties with him if he argues about politics.
   As for his claim that he doesn’t collect art, there were several significant specimens sighted in his home: A Jean Dufy and a Miro, both inherited from Harry; and a Frederic Remington, inherited from Michael, to whom it had been left by their mother. "Punch Sulzberger, president of ‘The (New York) Times’ and (chairman of the board of trustees of) the Metropolitan Museum, once said, ‘Why should I collect art when I have the whole Metropolitan Museum?’ That’s my excuse."
Growing Up Guggenheim is available in bookstores and on the Web: www.isi.org