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Marguerite 'Peggy' Guggenheim (August 26, 1898-December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, bohemian, and socialite.
Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Guggenheim collected art in Europe and America between 1938 and 1946. She exhibited this collection as she built it.
In 1949, she settled in Venice, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice.
Guggenheim's parents were of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her mother, Florette Seligman (1870-1937), was a member of the Seligman family. When she turned 21 in 1919, Guggenheim inherited US$2.5 million, equivalent to US$42.2 million in 2022.
Guggenheim's father, Benjamin Guggenheim, a member of the Guggenheim family, who died in the sinking of the Titanic, had not amassed a fortune comparable to his siblings; therefore her inheritance was far less than that of her cousins. She had a sister, Barbara Hazel Guggenheim, who became a painter and art collector.
She first worked as a clerk in an avant-garde bookstore, the Sunwise Turn, in Midtown Manhattan, where she became enamored of the members of the bohemian artistic community.
In 1920, she went to live in Paris. Once there, she became friendly with avant-garde writers and artists, many of whom were living in poverty in the Montparnasse quarter of the city. Man Ray photographed her, and was, along with Constantin Brâncuși and Marcel Duchamp, a friend whose art she was eventually to promote.
She became close friends with writer Natalie Barney and artist Romaine Brooks and was a regular at Barney's salon. She met Djuna Barnes during this time and in time, became her friend and patron. Barnes wrote her best-known novel, Nightwood, while staying at the Devon country house, Hayford Hall, that Guggenheim had rented for two summers.
Guggenheim urged Emma Goldman to write her autobiography and helped to secure funds for her to live in Saint-Tropez, France, while writing her two volume Living My Life.
Guggenheim wrote her autobiography entitled Out of This Century, later revised and re-published as Confessions of an Art Addict that was released in 1946 and is now published by Harper Collins.
More information: Guggenheim Museum
In January 1938, Guggenheim opened a gallery for modern art in London featuring Jean Cocteau drawings in its first show, and she began to collect works of art.
Guggenheim often purchased at least one object from each of her exhibitions at the gallery. After the outbreak of World War II, she purchased as much abstract and Surrealist art as possible.
Her first gallery was entitled Guggenheim Jeune, the name ingeniously chosen to associate her gallery with both the epitome of a gallery, the French Bernheim-Jeune, and bearing the name of her own well-known family.
The gallery on 30 Cork Street, next to Roland Penrose's and E. L. T. Mesens' show-case for the Surrealist movement, proved to be successful, thanks to many friends who gave advice and who helped to run the gallery. Marcel Duchamp, whom she had known since the early 1920s when she lived in Paris with her first husband Laurence Vail, had introduced Guggenheim to the art world; it was through him that she met many artists during her frequent visits to Paris. He taught her about contemporary art and styles and he conceived several of the exhibitions held at Guggenheim Jeune.
The Cocteau exhibition was followed by exhibitions of Wassily Kandinsky (his first solo exhibition in England), Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen, several other well-known artists, and some lesser-known artists.
Peggy Guggenheim held group exhibitions of sculpture and collage, with the participation of the now-classic moderns Antoine Pevsner, Henry Moore, Henri Laurens, Alexander Calder, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brâncuși, John Ferren, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Kurt Schwitters. She also greatly admired the work of John Tunnard (1900-1971) and is credited with his discovery in mainstream international modernism.
Following World War II and her 1946 divorce from Max Ernst, she closed The Art of This Century Gallery in 1947 and returned to Europe, deciding to live in Venice, Italy.
In 1948, she was invited to exhibit her collection in the disused Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In 1949, she established her collection in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (unfinished palazzo of the lions) on the Grand Canal.
Her collection became one of the few European collections of modern art to promote a significant number of works by Americans. In the 1950s she promoted the art of two local painters, Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani.
By the early 1960s, Guggenheim had almost stopped collecting art and began to concentrate on presenting what she owned. She loaned out her collection to museums in Europe and in 1969 to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, which was named after her uncle. Eventually, she decided to donate her home and her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a gift that was concluded inter vivos in 1976, before her death in 1979.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is one of the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the twentieth century. Works in her collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism, and abstract expressionism.
Guggenheim lived in Venice until her death in Camposampiero near Padua, Italy, following a stroke. Her ashes are interred next to her dogs in the garden of her home, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Later it was renamed as the Nasher Sculpture Garden in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
More information: Venice Museum-Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
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