Peggy, The Wayward Guggenheim - September 6th, 2024

'Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim' by Jacqueline Bograd Weld (1986) “re-creates the colorful and eccentric life of Peggy Guggenheim, a wealthy and promiscuous woman” whose patronage of many of the twentieth century's most influential artists and writers created the foremost collection of modern art in Italy.

ISBN-10:‎ 0525243801
9 x 6 x 2 in
Hardcover w/ dust jacket
Published by Dutton Press
*First edition, uncommon

Peggy Guggenheim (b. New York, 1898 – d. Venice, 1979) opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in January 1938 with a show of drawings by Jean Cocteau. Peggy was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly alter the course of post-war art. After opening her Jeune gallery, Peggy began collecting for the purpose of establishing a museum; from 1939 to 1941, she busily acquired works for the future museum, resolving to ‘buy one picture a day.’ In July 1941, Peggy returned to her native New York, where she opened her museum-gallery Art of This Century on October 20, 1942. 

Here she exhibited her collection in four distinct spaces designed by Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler: the Abstract Gallery, the Surrealist Gallery, the Kinetic Gallery, and the Daylight Gallery. Guggenheim also held temporary exhibitions of young, then unknown, artists such as William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, and Jackson Pollock––all pioneering American Abstract Expression. One of the principal sources of this movement was the Surrealist works the artists encountered at Art of This Century.

In 1947, Peggy returned to Europe to show her collection at the 24th Venice Biennale in 1948; this was the first time the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Pollock, and Rothko were exhibited in Europe. She bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live, and where from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.