Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim was an American art collector, patron, and socialite whose support of European modernism and contemporary American artists helped shape the course of 20th-century art.
Born to the wealthy Guggenheim family in New York, she inherited a fortune after the death of her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, who died aboard the Titanic in 1912. Rather than settling into a life of expected conventionalism as a wealthy heiress, Peggy moved to Europe in the 1920s and immersed herself in the avant-garde art and literary communities of Paris and London.
Peggy initially worked at the progressive New York bookstore, Sunwise Turn before moving to Europe, where she became acquainted with artists and writers, including Michel, Duchamp, Man Ray, Djuna, Barnes, and Laurence Vail, who she married in 1922. She later divorced and became increasingly involved in the European avant-garde movement. Her friendships and relationships with artists also helped introduce her to the world that would become the focus of our career as a collector.
In 1938, Peggy opened Guggenheim Jeaune in London, a gallery dedicated to modern and avant-garde art. With advice from her artist friends, she exhibited work by figures including Jean Cocteau, Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dalí. Although the gallery was only open for a year, it established Peggy as a serious patron instead of just a wealthy art collector.
When World War II reached France, Peggy returned to New York. In October 1942, she opened Art of This Century, a museum gallery in Manhattan designed by architect Frederick Kiesler. The gallery exhibited modernist European artists alongside young American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, William Baziotes, and Robert Motherwell. Peggy provided Jackson Pollock with financial support and a contract, helping launch his career as an artist who would become one of the most important figures in the abstract expressionist movement.
Peggy’s personal life was almost as unconventional as her career. She was married twice — to Veil and briefly to Surrealist artist Max Ernst — and had numerous relationships with men, including writer Samuel Beckett, artist Yves Tanguy, and others she documented in her memoirs. Her autobiography, Art of This Century, first published in 1946 and later revised as Confessions of an Art Addict, was frank about her romantic and sexual life.
Accounts of Peggy’s relationships with women are less straightforward, but have been documented by biographers and historians. She was closely connected to the lesbian literary and artistic circles surrounding artist Djuna Barnes, and was reported to have had relationships with women, including Barnes and artist Thelma Wood. More recent accounts of her escapades have described female lovers alongside her various relationships with men.
After closing Art of This Century in 1947, Peggy moved permanently to Venice. She purchased the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal and opened her collection to the public in 1949. The palazzo became her home, gallery, and the permanent home of her collection. She continued to acquire and exhibit modern art, while becoming one of Venice’s most recognizable cultural figures. Today, the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation recognizes her as one of the most influential art patrons of the 20th century, while her collection encompasses movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, European Abstraction, and early American Abstract Expressionism.
Piggy remained in Venice until her death in 1979. Her collection became the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, now one of the world’s major museums of modern art. Her legacy extends beyond the artist she collected: she helped create opportunities for artists, championed experimental art before it was widely accepted, and lived with an independence that was unusual for a woman of her generation.
Although Peggy never adopted a modern label for his sexuality, her documented relationships with women and men — and her extraordinary willingness to write about her intimate life — make her an important figure in bi history. Her life was defined by the same refusal to follow the conventions that shaped her approach to art: she collected boldly, loved freely, and built a life largely on her own terms.