Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), was a self-described “art addict” who sought to distinguish herself from her business-oriented relatives and make her mark on the world through collecting and traveling in avant-garde circles. Peggy’s collections, galleries, and museum were all stamped with her distinct tastes and style.
Her singular career spanned the modern era, linking the Dada and Surrealist movements with Abstract Expressionism. She collected and championed artists from Vasily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock to Yves Tanguy, and made few distinctions between her business and private lives: her two marriages were to artists, Dadaist Laurence Vail and Surrealist Max Ernst, amid a string of liaisons and intrigues with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Constantin Brancusi.
Largely self-taught when it came to art, Peggy was guided by her interest in creativity and iconoclasm, and found her way to her métier through her personal connections in the avant-garde world after arriving in Paris in the 1920s. She moved in the same circles as Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, writer and artist Djuna Barnes, and painter Romaine Brooks; she was photographed by Man Ray and dressed by the legendary designer Paul Poiret.
As she described in this 1969 interview, it was while visiting a foundry with Jean Arp, where she held his small bronze Head and Shell (Tête et coquille, ca. 1933) in her hand, that she was moved to collect her first piece of art.
It was not until she moved to London in the late 1930s, fleeing the Nazi occupation of the continent, that Peggy opened her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune. Around this time, Samuel Beckett told her that “one should be interested in art of one’s time,” which became one of her mottos and lent itself to the name of her celebrated second gallery, Art of This Century in New York. From Paris to London, she quickly amassed one of the most prominent collections of Cubist and Surrealist art, during a period when few others (including her uncle and Rebay) held these works in high regard. Her initial collection, acquired at a rate of one painting per day on frenzied trips to Paris during World War II, cost her only $40,000 for a group of works by Brancusi, Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso, among others.
Peggy’s efforts protected not just her collection but also the livelihoods of her artists, who were among those branded “degenerate” by the Third Reich and had to flee, many settling in New York. By opening Art of This Century in 1942, Peggy created an American outpost for the European avant-garde, providing artists in her circle with connections, sales, and commissions. She soon forged relationships with a new generation of American artists such as Robert Motherwell, Pollock, and Clyfford Still, who had their first notable gallery shows at Art of This Century. Peggy counted Pollock’s success as among her proudest achievements.
Peggy’s flair for the dramatic shaped the design of her gallery: the Cubist gallery had turquoise floors, blue canvas walls, and the art on pulleys; in the Surrealist gallery there were curving walls, amorphous wooden furniture designed by architect Frederick Kiesler, flashing lights, and recordings of trains that played intermittently.
Art of This Century had a rather short run. By the late 1940s, with the war over, Peggy had tired of the pace of the gallery business and embarked on a third chapter in her career, museum owner. She relocated to Venice and displayed her collection in the 1948 biennale, helping to reestablish the exhibition series after the war. Many of the artists she championed had never before been exhibited in the Giardini, and one pavilion that year was specifically dedicated to artists repudiated by the Nazis. A few years later Peggy acquired the 18th-century Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal to house her art and set up shop as one of the city’s most celebrated patrons and eccentrics.
It was not until 1969, when the exhibition Works from the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, that it seemed possible that the younger Guggenheim’s collection could one day form part of an expanded Guggenheim constellation. In the interview above, when asked about the future of her collection, she demurred “some museum or university will have to look after it.” The Peggy Guggenheim Collection was signed over to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1976, and officially became part of its holdings after her death in 1979.