Wife Peggy
Guggenheim, Kay Boyle, Partner Jean Connolly
Queer Places:
Villa Coustille, Moyenne Corniche, 06360 Èze, France
Laurence
Vail, born in Paris on
January 28, 1891 and
died in Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes) on
April 16, 1968 is
a French novelist, poet, painter and sculptor.
In 1931 Laurence Vail and Kay Boyle moved in Villa Coustille, a red stone house hidden in a thick grove of pine trees high above the old town on the Moyenne Corniche,
in
Villefranche-sur-Mer. They form their own coterie which includes Robert Carlton
Brow, Mary Reynolds, Marcel Duchamp,
Emma Goldman,
Alexander Berkman,
Allan
Ross MacDougall, and James Stern.
Son of the American painter Eugene
Lawrence Vail (1857-1934),
Laurence Vail was the lover of Djuna
Barnes, then married in 1922 the
billionaire and patron Peggy
Guggenheim,
with whom he has two children, Sindbad and Pegeen.
After his divorce, he remarried in 1932 to
the writer Kay Boyle,
with whom he had lived since 1929 and
who gave him three more children.
By the mid 1940s Jean Connolly
had dropped
Clement Greenberg and was
involved with Laurence Vail, the Surrealist artist and former husband of
Peggy Guggenheim, heiress,
angel of expatriate European artists, and owner of Art of This Century
Gallery. With bohemian aplomb, however, it was the two women who began living
together in Guggenheim's duplex at East 61st Street, New York. Thank to this
arrangement, Rupert Barneby and
Dwight Ripley
found themselves frequently in New York at the center of Upper Bohemia. "Jean
Connolly, Dwight Ripley, Matta, Marcel Duchamp
were around a great deal," recalled Lee Krasner, the painter who was Jackson
Pollock's wife. "They were at all the parties." Rupert and Dwight were at the
now famous party during which Pollock's Mural was first shown and Pollock
relieved himself in the fireplace. Barneby remembered Marcel Duchamp, the
avatar of cool in the art world today, as a "pompous pundit." He recalled
Guggenheim herself as "mean"; she "dressed like a hag," her stagy
consersational asides were "like a dagger in the heart."
He was dubbed the "King of Bohemia" by
the Parisian intellectual milieu of the 1920s.
His works are kept in the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
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