Guggenheim, Peggy

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.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.