GREAT MUSEUMS: Peggy Guggenheim Collection,Venice

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the name not only of the collection of one of the most influential art patrons of the 20th Century, Peggy Guggenheim, but also of the Museum in Venice, which is housed in Peggy Guggenheim’s former home, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archive

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice, where Peggy Guggenheim lived and which is now the location of her museum, is an unfinished 18th century Grand Canal Palace. In 1920 she went to live in Paris. Once there, she became friend with avant-garde writers and artists and started to by artworks. Her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek Pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, Abstract, and Surrealist art made the Pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori. In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Sala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the Summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy died aged 81 on 23/12/79. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim’s private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world. The Collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical Painting, European Abstraction, Avant-Garde Sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism. These include: Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Léger, Brancusi, Severini, Picabia, de Chirico, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Miró, Giacometti, Klee, Ernst, Magritte, Dalí, Pollock, Gorky, Calder and Marini. The Museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian Museum since Peggy Guggenheim’s death, as well as long-term loans from private collections. In October 2012, 80 works of Italian, European and American art after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, they include paintings by: Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection. The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections and Foundation, by: Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier and Takis, as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections by: Calder, Kapoor, Marini, Nannucci and Smith.