It was 1980, just a few months after her death in December 1979, when Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian home opened its doors to the public, becoming the leading museum for contemporary ar in the lagoon. 45 years on: an anniversary that invites remembrance. But who was she, really? What was this eccentric American patron, often seen floating by on a gondola along the Grand Canal, truly like? She was not beautiful. Her body, slightly awkward, would grow heavier with age. Thin lips. A nose job, badly done, when in 1920 she “couldn’t think of anything better” to celebrate her newfound financial independence than turning to a scalpel in search of a bit of confidence and the illusion of beauty. Peggy Guggenheim wasn’t elegant, either. She hadn’t inherited her father Benjamin’s class. Legend has it he stood in formal evening wear, champagne glass in hand, waiting, olympic and unflinching, for his fate as the Titanic went down. Peggy, however, always preferred shock to chic. Encouraged by her first husband, Laurence Vail, himself an eccentric and worldly man. He pushed her to be photographed by Man Ray in Paris in 1923. Her hips wrapped in luxurious gold lamé, a blouse adorned with arabesques slipping carelessly off her bare shoulders, and a gaze that both promised and beckoned an early glimpse of the skilled seductress she would become.
She would discover her allure because of her excesses. Overly bold, intelligent, in love as in art and business. She collected paintings, lovers, and famous husbands. An irresistible femme fatale. A generous patron. And a feminist by temperament, not by ideology. After her marriage ended, she shared nights and sheets with John Holms and Samuel Beckett. Her passion for writers soon gave way to a passion for artists. Useful her relationship with Marcel Duchamp who became her advisor for exhibitions at the Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery she had meanwhile opened in London. And he guided her well. Cocteau, Kandinsky, Arp, Brancusi, Moore, Magritte: rotated on whose
walls a preview of 20th-century art history. Alongside works by her other great loves: the adorable but married Yves Tanguy, the statuesque Max Ernst, who took refuge with her in America at the outbreak of war, and whom she would eventually marry: another unhappy marriage, marred by frequent, furious quarrels and his many betrayals. He never gave up the charms of his previous lover, the uninhibited Leonora Carrington, nor of his future wife, Dorothea Tanning.
Still, Peggy, tenacious and spirited, carried through with her long-held dream of opening a gallery-museum. In 1942 she inaugurated Art of this century in New York, where exhibitions of abstractionists, surrealists, and emerging talents followed one another: Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, de Kooning. When in 1947 she suddenly decided to move to Venice, the departure was, as a regretful and farsighted Greenberg admitted in “The Nation”, “a grave loss for American contemporary art”. The presentation of her collection at the 1948 Venice Biennale brought her international acclaim. Among those paying tribute were President Einaudi, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, and art historians Berenson and Venturi. A success beyond expectations that, above all, it introduced Europe to the avant-garde movements from across the Atlantic. By the end of the year, she bought Ca’ Venier dei Leoni, from which she would reign - shining, strange, and welcoming dogaressa - for thirty years.
A full-time patron, she gave an artist’s stipend to Tancredi. She bought works by Bacci, Consagra, Dorazio, Santomaso, and Vedova. And from abroad: Alechinsky, Bacon, Dubuffet, Tobey, Picasso. She would live long enough to experience one final, sweeping love: Raoul Gregorich, 23 years younger, a simple man with no interest in art. And then two great, tragic losses: in 1954, the death of the young lover in a car accident, and in 1967 the suicide of her daughter Pegeen after taking a high dose of barbiturates. She followed twelve years later, leaving her palace and collection to her uncle Solomon’s foundation in New York, on one condition: that the collection remains in her beloved Venice. Testamentary wish honored.
