Peggy Guggenheim’s Venice

BY: Howard Karren

When Peggy Guggenheim—whose grandfather made a fortune in mining and smelting, and whose father died aboard the Titanic with his valet and chauffeur—turned 21 in 1919, she inherited $2.5 million. With that money, she amassed one of the great collections of 20th-century modernist art, which she ultimately donated to her uncle Solomon’s foundation, which maintains its New York Frank Lloyd Wright–designed museum, the Guggenheim Bilbao, an upcoming museum in Abu Dhabi, and Peggy’s palazzo in Venice, which is open to the public and houses her collection in an enchanting setting on the Grand Canal.

Her life was like a bohemian fantasy: She moved to Paris in 1920, befriended Man Ray, Brancusi and Duchamp, claimed to have slept with hundreds of illustrious men, married a Dada sculptor named Laurence Vail and had two kids (they divorced in 1928). She opened a gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London in 1938, which had celebrated shows of works by Jean Cocteau and Wasilly Kandinsky, and made plans to create a London modern art museum. Looking to amass the museum’s collection, she went on a spectacular buying spree just as World War II was beginning to wreak havoc across Europe, then fled back to New York in 1941 and opened her legendary Art of This Century Gallery. She married the surrealist painter Max Ernst and pushed the career of Jackson Pollock. Divorcing Ernst and closing her gallery after the war, she returned to Europe and in 1948 bought the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice, turning it into her home and exhibition space and remaining there till she died in 1979.

Not being an artist herself, Guggenheim did what she could to surround herself in a cascade of talent, and the remnants of that well-lived life continue to dazzle at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. In the Renaissance shrine that is Venice, her modernist palazzo is a haven for the visionaries of the 20th century. For visitors to the the city they call La Serenissima, it’s a must.

 

Here seen from across Venice’s Grand Canal, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished 18th-century palace (only part of the first level was ever completed), was bought by Peggy Guggenheim in 1948 as her home and to exhibit her collection. She died in 1979—she is buried in a courtyard, next to her beloved Lhasa Apsos—but her museum, now run by her uncle Solomon’s foundation, houses one of the finest modern art collections in Italy. Photo: David Head © Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.