Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim was a catalyst for the explosion of modern art in the 20th Century through her patronage, collecting and galleries. She was born in 1898 to an enormously wealthy family. Her father was Benjamin Guggenheim, who died as a passenger of the Titanic, and her uncle was Solomon Guggenheim, the funder of many museums. She did not attend college, but worked in the war effort during World War I and at a bohemian bookstore. After the war she moved to Paris where she met the avant-garde painters and writers who would become friends, lovers and life-long friends. She married the writer and sculptor Laurence Vail in 1922. They later divorced and Guggenheim fell in love with John Holms with whom she lived with in England until his untimely death during an operation. After Holms’ death she opened a gallery in London in 1938 that championed Surrealists and Cubists under the curatorial hand of Marcel Duchamp. Guggenheim began the groundwork for a museum in London to show her collection, but the onset of World War II forced her to abandon the project. On the advice of Duchamp she moved back to Paris and began to collect art at an accelerated pace, until the Nazi occupation of France put a stop to this project. Among the many works she acquired are those of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Salvador Dali and Fernand Leger. Guggenheim was finally forced to flee France for the United States along with her ex-husband and children, as well as Max Ernst, whom she married in 1942. Her new gallery in New York, Art of This Century, began to show both the European artists in her collection and a new generation of American abstract expressionists of The New York School, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. She closed the gallery in 1947 and moved to Venice, where she purchased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal. The pace of her collecting slowed, and she worked with the Tate in London and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York to exhibit her collections. She began to withdraw from the limelight, spending quiet hours in Venice with her succession of Lhasa Apso dogs. Peggy Guggenheim died in 1979; her ashes are buried at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, which continues to be a jewel of the modern art world.
