How Peggy Guggenheim Shaped the Modern Arts Movement

by · WWD
Peggy Guggenheim at her Venice home and museum in 1979. She wears a gold Fortuny evening dress and jewelry of her own.Tim Jenkins/Fairchild Archive

Legendary art patron Peggy Guggenheim, whose Palazzo Venier dei Leoni home in Venice remains a living museum, once told WWD that “in art there is always a new movement waiting to be born.”

Peggy, as WWD referred to her, remains one of the 20th century’s most prolific collectors. An original in her own right, she advised, critiqued, collected and befriended many of the century’s greatest artists. Her early travels in the 1920s and 1930s blurred the lines between escapism and art acquisition.

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In 1979, she told WWD that she couldn’t afford the Renaissance paintings she preferred, so she turned to lesser-known modern artists. Tutoring from painter Marcel Duchamp led to the opening of Jeune, her first gallery, in London in 1938. There, she introduced a reluctant audience to Henry Moore, Brancusi, Calder and Kandinsky.

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Three years later, she opened the landmark gallery Art of This Century in New York. It was there that she helped launch the career of American modernist Jackson Pollock, playing a pivotal role in the development of the Abstract Expressionist movement and shifting the center of visual art from Europe to America.

While she was never shy about how she amassed her collection, her insistence that “I like it or I don’t like it, but I can’t explain it” offers a simple affirmation that collecting need not be governed by economics, but by the passions one chooses to live with.