- Guggenheim, Peggy
-
orig. Marguerite Guggenheimborn Aug. 26, 1898, New York, N.Y., U.S.died Dec. 23, 1979, near Venice, ItalyArt collector and patron of the New York school of artists.Granddaughter of Meyer and Daniel Guggenheim, she inherited a large fortune in 1921. In 1930 she moved to Paris, where she took up a bohemian life, and in 1932 to London. She returned to New York City in 1941, married artist Max Ernst, and in 1942 opened a gallery where she exhibited many of the radical artists she supported, among them Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Hans Hofmann. After World War II she settled in Venice and exhibited her outstanding collection of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is still open to the public.
* * *
▪ American art collectorbyname of Marguerite Guggenheimborn August 26, 1898, New York, New York, U.S.died December 23, 1979, near Venice, ItalyAmerican art collector who was an important patron of the Abstract Expressionist (Abstract Expressionism) school of artists in New York City.Peggy's father was Benjamin Guggenheim, a son of the wealthy mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim, and one of her uncles was Solomon R. Guggenheim, who founded the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Benjamin died in the Titanic disaster in 1912, and his daughter came into her fortune in 1919. Unhappy with her bourgeois existence, she married the writer Laurence Vail in 1922 (divorced 1930) and adopted a bohemian lifestyle. She moved to Paris in 1930, and in 1938 she opened a gallery to exhibit and sell modern art.Guggenheim returned to the United States in 1941 and married the Surrealist painter Max Ernst (Ernst, Max) (divorced 1946). In 1942 she opened another art gallery, Art of This Century, in New York, and many of the artists she supported received their first one-man shows there. Among the important painters she sponsored were Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson), Mark Rothko (Rothko, Mark), Robert Motherwell (Motherwell, Robert), and Hans Hofmann (Hofmann, Hans).After World War II Guggenheim moved to Venice, where she settled in an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal. There she displayed some of her art collection to the public, and in 1979 she donated the collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which owns the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Known as the Guggenheim Collection, this donation contains many masterpieces of modern painting and is still on display in Venice.Additional ReadingMemoirs include Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century (1946) and Confessions of an Art Addict (1960; reissued 1997), which were published in a combined edition under the title Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, (1979; reissued 1987). See also Laurence Tacou-Rumney, Peggy Guggenheim: A Collector's Album (1996; originally published in French, 1996); and Karole P.B. Vail, Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (1998).* * *
Universalium. 2010.