A visit to Peggy’s
You find the house tucked behind a high wall fronting on to the Grand Canal. It was an unfinished palace, designed in 1748, and has the classical facade that you see throughout Venice. Peggy Guggenheim altered it to include several outdoor courtyards, painted clean white walls and hung her art collection among her furnishings.
The collection is so strong because it has been assembled not just in Italy, but in all the places Guggenheim lived. It was then brought to Venice, where she decided to settle in the later part of her life. There are works amassed with the help of Marcel Duchamp, from when she was in London. In 1938, she opened a gallery there.
Others come from 1939-41, when she was avidly collecting despite the war. She bought more when she returned to her native New York, opening the museumgallery Art of the Century. Also included are the surrealists, particularly works by one-time husband Max Ernst, the Italian futurists, a fantastic group of de Chirico paintings, the thin figurative works of Giacometti, early abstract painters like Kandinsky, and a huge range of Picassos.
Layered on this are the American abstractionists – Rothko, de Kooning, Calder and Jackson Pollock, whom she was credited with launching. This gathering makes it one of the finest private collections in the world.
Venice did well when Guggenheim made her home there. It’s thought she originally intended to set up in London, a return to where her art collecting started, but a curator from the Tate was so caustic in insulting her works that after showing them at the 1948 Biennale she bought the Palazzo.