This year the Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates 40 years from the opening of the museum in Venice in 1980. Today’s post is dedicated to a fascinating woman that described herself as an “art addict”: Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979).
Peggy was both an art collector and a patron. She stayed in Venice from 1948 to 1979 where she decided to exhibit her collection at what is today the Palace Venier dei Leoni located on the Grand Canal, a beautiful 18th-century palace. She was not the first one of the family to work in the art business, in fact, she was the niece of the founder of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Before coming to Venice, she had lived in France where she established new friendships in the avantgarde intellectual circle. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp are only two of the most famous names that are included in this circle. It is during her time in Paris that she became interested in “buying one painting a day”, as she told in an interview in 1969.
The first pieces that will later become the founding collection for the museum in Venice belonged to what we would call today international modernism. This includes pieces by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Paul Klee among the others. She had already made plans for the foundation of a modern art museum in Paris and New York but because of the outbreak of World War II and her Jewish heritage, she was forced to flee multiple times. Thanks to Peggy’s patronage in modern art, she was able to expand the career prospects of many artists that still hold international fame today such as Jackson Pollock, Vasily Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst, who she later married (he was her second husband). After the divorce in 1946, Peggy decided to move to Venice. She had collected art until the 1960s when she decided to stop acquiring new pieces in order to dedicate the time and money to present new ones made by artists that she already owned.
Today the Peggy Guggenheim Collection includes pieces by both European and American artists, including pieces from the major modernist movements such as Surrealism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, styles that at that time did not hold particular importance and that were even classified as “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime. For Peggy, according to the curator Karole Vail, “her life and her art collecting were completely intertwined.” What Peggy was looking for in art was creativity and iconoclasm, something that marked her unique art taste and collection.
What do you know about Peggy? Tell us about it in the comment section below!
Peggy Guggenheim in Paul Poiret Couture and Vera Stravinsky headdress, photo by Man Ray, Paris, 1924 
Peggy Guggenheim arranging Alexander Calder’s “Arc of Petals” (1941), Greek Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1948 
Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock in front of “Mural” (1943), ca. 1946 
Peggy Guggenheim with her dogs on the terrace of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, photo by David Seymour, 1950s 
Peggy Guggenheim, photo by Man Ray, 1920s
