A documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Rating unavailable.

The art world is always shaped in part by neurotic dabblers. But few collectors, promoters, or gallerists have left marks as lasting as those made by Peggy Guggenheim.

Born in 1898, Marguerite Guggenheim survived so many upheavals, her life would have been interesting apart from any creative ambitions. Her father, Benjamin, went down with the Titanic, and she became poor relation and black sheep to her gruff uncle Solomon, the mining magnate after whom the Guggenheim Museum is named.

Young Peggy worked in a bookstore before hitting Paris in its between-the-wars heyday, befriending and collecting the works of Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Calder, and many others, including surrealist Max Ernst, whom she briefly married. She championed their modernism in London and New York galleries, and was able to save a huge trove of it when the Nazis invaded France.

Self-conscious about her plain appearance (and a bad nose job she never got fixed), Peggy was famously promiscuous, bedding postwar artists like Jackson Pollock almost as a precondition of representation at her galleries in Manhattan and, later, Venice.

Such things are touched upon in Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, rather haphazardly assembled by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who previously profiled Diana Vreeland, her grandmother by marriage. Considering the aesthetic preoccupations of its subject, it’s a shame that more care wasn’t lavished on the visual material, here padded out with generic newsreel footage and stills. There are also problems with the core material: recently rediscovered audiotapes of the latter-day Guggenheim in conversation with gaga biographer Jacqueline Weld. The voices come through with wildly fluctuating sound levels and quality—something relatively easy to fix with today’s technology.

Still, Guggenheim is unusually frank about her life and career, and the movie helps put to rest the absurd argument that her taste was shaped by the men around her. She may have exercised iffy judgment in some areas, but she always knew what she liked.