GUGGENHEIM, PEGGY

(1898-1979), art dealer and collector. Born into one of New York's elite Jewish families, Guggenheim spent her life embracing the avant-garde in art and literature.

In the 1920s Guggenheim became acquainted in expatriate Paris with the leading literary figures of her generation including James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. In 1938 she opened the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery on London's Cork Street, enlisting Marcel Duchamp to help her outline the course her gallery should take and to introduce her to the artists she should exhibit. In the two years she ran Guggenheim Jeune, she exhibited such artists as Jean Cocteau, Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, and Henry Moore. Guggenheim made it a point to buy one work from each exhibition.

Although the gallery was losing money, she decided to start a museum for modern art in London. Her adviser in this venture was the art historian Herbert Read. But with the outbreak of World War II in 1939 her plans for the museum were abandoned. Finding herself in Paris, however, she declared her intention of buying a "picture a day." Because of the war, many artists were eager to sell their works even at bargain prices in order to leave France. Between September of 1939 and the fall of France in 1940 Guggenheim bought the bulk of what would become the Peggy Guggenheim Collection including works by Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Duchamp, and Max Ernst, all for approximately forty thousand dollars.

As the situation in Europe worsened, Guggenheim, too, was forced to return to America. In October 1942, she opened her gallery, Art of This Century, in New York. This was to be her greatest achievement. Designed by the Viennese architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery had curved gumwood walls and pictures mounted on baseball bats. Here Guggenheim exhibited her newly acquired collection of modern masters and, more important, promoted the work of undiscovered talents—this at a time when only a handful of New York galleries showed any modern art, let alone modern American art.

At Art of This Century, Guggenheim gave solo shows and first exhibitions to many of the artists known today as the New York school—Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, and others who changed the face of American art. She particularly promoted the career of Jackson Pollock. In her house and gallery Guggenheim played hostess to the European artists who made New York their wartime home, including André Breton, Salvador Dali, Tanguy, and Duchamp.

When the war ended, Guggenheim returned to Europe. She made Venice her new home, buying the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, where she installed her fabulous modern art collection. There she continued to play hostess to the illustrious and to exhibit her now priceless collection to a growing public for modern art. When she died, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation took over the collection.

Guggenheim appears to have been lucky in everything but love. She had two failed marriages—to Ernst and to the writer Laurence Vail—and many celebrated affairs including ones with Tanguy and Samuel Beckett.

Guggenheim's exhibition and promotion of abstract expressionism and the New York school energized the movement. Without her flair for publicity and her championship of Jackson Pollock the New York school would not have been the same.

Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century (1979); Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (1986).

Jacqueline Bograd Weld

See also Abstract Expressionism; Painting and Sculpture; Pollock, Jackson.