Guggenheim, Peggy (Marguerite Guggenheim), 1898–1979, American modern art patron and collector, b. New York City. The daughter of Benjamin, niece of Solomon, and grand-daughter of Meyer Guggenheim, Meyer Guggenheim, 1828–1905, b. Aargau canton, Switzerland, emigrated (1847) to the United States, prospered as a retail merchant in Philadelphia, and in time built up a flourishing business importing Swiss embroidery.
..... Click the link for more information. she grew up in luxury, inherited a fortune, and became a friend, patron, and sometime lover to a number of avant-garde artists and writers. She moved to Paris (1930) and then to London, where she opened (1938) Guggenheim Jeune, a gallery showing mainly abstract and surrealist art, e.g., works by Brancusi, Brancusi, Constantin (bränky

`zē, Rom.
..... Click the link for more information. Kandinsky, Kandinsky, Wassily or Vasily (kăndĭn`skē, Rus.
..... Click the link for more information. Magritte, Magritte, René (rənā` mägrēt`), 1898–1967, Belgian surrealist painter.
..... Click the link for more information. and Max Ernst, Ernst, Max (mäks ĕrnst) 1891–1976, German painter.
..... Click the link for more information. whom she married (and divorced). World War II impelled her return (1941) to New York, where she opened (1942) Art of This Century, one of the earliest and most important venues for abstract expressionism abstract expressionism, movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also called action painting and the New York school.
..... Click the link for more information. , a movement whose artists she actively supported. Guggenheim amassed a superb collection of modern art, which was installed in her Venice palazzo when she moved there in 1946. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is now administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Bibliography

See her memoirs (1946 and 1960, combined and updated 1980); biographies by J. B. Weld (1986) and A. Gill (2002); L. Flint, Handbook: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (1983), L. Tacou-Rumney, Peggy Guggenheim: A Collector's Album (1996).

Guggenheim, Peggy

orig. Marguerite Guggenheim

(born Aug. 26, 1898, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 23, 1979, near Venice, Italy) Art collector and patron of the New York school of artists. Granddaughter of Meyer and Daniel Guggenheim, she inherited a large fortune in 1921. In 1930 she moved to Paris, where she took up a bohemian life, and in 1932 to London. She returned to New York City in 1941, married artist Max Ernst, and in 1942 opened a gallery where she exhibited many of the radical artists she supported, among them Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Hans Hofmann. After World War II she settled in Venice and exhibited her outstanding collection of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is still open to the public.

Guggenheim, (Marguerite) Peggy (1898–1979) art collector, patron; born in New York City (niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim). She graduated from the Jacobi School, New York City, (1915), became a radical bohemian, and settled in Paris soon after the end of World War I. She married young, was divorced (1930), and then was married to Max Ernst (1941–46). She opened a modern art gallery in England, the Guggenheim Jeune (1938), where she exhibited and collected works by avant-garde artists. In 1939 she was in France buying modern works suggested by the art critic, Herbert Read. She escaped the German invasion of Paris and arrived in New York City with her children and her art collection (1941). She opened a new art gallery, Art of This Century (1942). In 1946 she divorced Ernst, moved to Venice, and established a new gallery in her villa there. Her memoirs, Out of This Century (1946) and Confessions of an Art Addict (1960), were notorious for the details of her love life. Her collection and the Venice gallery were donated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.