PEGGY GUGGENHEIM
One of the greatest collectors of the 20th century, this unconventional US heiress singlehandedly put Venice on the modern art map. By Jason Mowen
One of the greatest collectors of the 20th century, this unconventional US heiress put Venice on the modern art map
When Venetian aristocrat Nicolò Venier commissioned the construction of a new palace on the Grand Canal in the mid-18th century, he could never have imagined its colourful fate. To begin with, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was never completed and the part-built structure, initially designed to tower over its neighbours as a monument to family greatness, forms the only single-storey palace on the canal today. Then, forgotten to a century-and-a-half of decay, it was brought back to life by three extraordinary women.
The first to take up residence was the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the enormously wealthy, and equally eccentric, Italian aristocrat who fashioned herself into a ‘living work of art’ towards the end of the Belle Époque. The next was Lady Doris Castlerosse, a London socialite who, freshly divorced and facing scandal on multiple fronts, sought social redemption in Venice, holding court at the palazzo for just one glittering season on the eve of World War II. It was, however, the Venier palazzo’s third and final chatelaine, American heiress and patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim, who would leave the most lasting impression.
Today, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is one of the world’s most beloved museums of modern art, but the pivotal role Guggenheim played in the movement’s development is often underestimated. Born into the ‘poor’ branch of New York’s vastly wealthy Guggenheim family in 1898, she struggled within the confines of her haute bourgeois upbringing. Armed, however, with a rebellious spirit and a trust fund that afforded her an annual income of $22,500, she travelled to Europe in 1920, where she would live, immersed in the bohemian world, for the next 21 years. “She wanted to come into her own as her own person and art became the vehicle,” says art historian and author John Richardson. “She wanted this art as a mirror for her own strangeness.”
Guggenheim became a kind of patron and collector that had not existed before. She saw out most of the ’20s in Paris, then the epicentre of the art world, where, with then-husband writer Laurence Vail, her circle included the likes of Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau and Constantin Brâncusi, not to mention the great Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, who gave the young heiress the base of her education in the arts. The ’30s were split between Paris and London, and it was in the latter that she opened her first commercial gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, where she would show Yves Tanguy, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore and Wassily Kandinsky — even a children’s group show that included a 16-year-old Lucian Freud — as well as Brancusi and Cocteau.
Intending to open what would have been London’s first modern art museum, she returned to Paris and famously resolved to buy a painting a day on the eve of the Nazi occupation. She only narrowly
escaped with the collection intact, and her life — Guggenheim was Jewish — before fleeing to the safety of New York with a motley crew of friends and family that included artists André Breton and Max Ernst, her latest lover.
While Guggenheim’s return to New York was not one of choice, her years there proved abundantly fruitful. She was largely responsible for introducing Surrealism to the city’s art scene — her interactive museum-cum-gallery, Art of This Century, was a temple to the avant-garde — not to mention instrumental in the development of the New York School (what we now call Abstract Expressionism), essentially launching the careers of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, to name a few. If ever there was a link between European and American modernism — particularly Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism — it was Guggenheim.
Guggenheim’s heart, however, was always in Europe, and in 1947 she left permanently for Venice, a city with which she’d had a longstanding love affair. “There is no normal life in Venice,” she said in an interview in 1978. “Here everything and everyone floats.” (There had also been countless real affairs, many of which she revealed in her 1946 memoir Out
of This Century. “My book,” she said, “was all about fucking”, which goes some way to explain why, when she left New York, her reputation — unjustly — obscured her accomplishments.)
Needing somewhere to store her art during the search for the right home, fate was to present another golden opportunity the following year. It was the planned relaunch of the Biennale, and the Greek Pavilion was going to be empty as Greece was too busy crushing a communist insurgency to concern itself with art. A local artist, Giuseppe Santomaso, suggested that the pavilion be filled with the collection of Signora Guggenheim. It was a huge success. It was the first time the collection had been on display and Venice, largely as a result, was on its way to becoming one of the art capitals of the world. Its owner was delighted: “I felt as though I were a European country.” It was the Biennale’s press secretary who told her of a “lovely abode” on the Grand Canal that had just come on the market. Despite its grim state, she knew the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was the perfect niche both for herself and her magnificent collection.
If ever there was a link between European and American modernism, it was Peggy Guggenheim
BELOW Guggenheim, Alfred Barr Jr, and Margaret Scolari Barr at the 24th Venice Biennale, 1948.