Collezione Peggy Guggenheim

In an unfinished Grand Canal palazzo, the American collector who championed Jackson Pollock built her final home and her lasting monument. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection keeps her twentieth-century paintings, the Schulhof bequest and a sculpture garden a few steps from the Accademia bridge.

Why it matters

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is among the most important museums of European and North American twentieth-century art in Italy, and it earned that rank through a personality as much as through inventory. Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), niece of the copper-and-museums Guggenheims, collected at the exact moment European modernism scattered and American painting erupted, and the palace she settled in after showing her collection at the 1948 Biennale became the bridge between the two. Unlike most Venice museums, this was somebody's house: she hung her pictures at home, opened the rooms to paying visitors in her lifetime, and left both the palazzo and the collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The result, run today from New York with an advisory board created in 1980, joins her personal collection, the Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof collection, a sculpture garden and a programme of temporary exhibitions.

What to notice

• The palazzo itself: begun in 1748 to designs by Lorenzo Boschetti and deliberately visited today as an unfinished shell, its single grand storey making the low, wide facade read almost like a warehouse among its neighbours.
• The sculpture garden, where Peggy Guggenheim's ashes rest beside the works she collected.
• The sequence of rooms that follows her collecting story: London's Guggenheim Jeune of 1938, whose second show was the first solo exhibition of Kandinsky in Britain; the Art of This Century gallery she opened in New York in October 1942 in a design by Frederick Kiesler; and the young Americans she backed there, above all Jackson Pollock, with Rothko and Motherwell.
• The Schulhof rooms, a quieter counterpoint of postwar European and American art assembled by Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof and given to the museum.
• The garden's view back across the Grand Canal toward the Rialto bend — the museum sits between the Accademia bridge and the Salute.

Context and history

Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898. After her London and New York gallery years, she returned to Europe in 1947 and showed her collection in the Greek pavilion of the 1948 Venice Biennale, the edition that introduced Pollock and company to European eyes. She bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Dorsoduro bank and lived there for the rest of her life; Venice made her an honorary citizen in 1962. From 1951 she admitted the public to her home several afternoons a week during the warm months, a habit that foreshadowed the museum. She died on 23 December 1979; the palazzo had passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970 and the collection in 1976, and under the Foundation the house became the permanent museum it remains. Her grave in the garden turns the whole site into a biography in stone, canvas and lawn.