This was published 7 years ago
Peggy Guggenheim museum: Portrait of a life of passion
By Steve Meacham
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, an art museum in her former home on the Grand Canal, is now the seventh most visited art gallery in Italy.Credit: Getty Images
The American multi-millionairess Marguerite (Peggy) Guggenheim, who died in 1979, is recognised as one of the greatest art collectors of all time.
The paintings and sculptures she gathered – particularly in the onslaught of World War II when so many of those works by contemporary artists might have been lost to the Nazis – represent an incredibly intimate snapshot of 20th-century art.
And yet, by her own autobiographical account, she was as much of a sex addict as a patron of fine arts.
Guggenheim sunbathing on the terrace of her Palace on the Grand Canal, 1953. Credit: Getty Images
She boasted she'd bedded at least 1000 men, only two of whom were her husbands (Laurence Vail, who first introduced her to the international art world, and the German artist Max Ernst).
She also admitted to having had seven abortions by one lover alone. And many of the paintings and sculptures she collected were by artists she enjoyed affairs with.
But that's not why I'm about to enter the most visited building in Venice after the Doge's Palace.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.Credit: Alamy
Among her many friends Guggenheim counted Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, Man Ray, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Salvador Dali and Henry Moore. She's also credited with giving several world-famous artists their first international exhibitions, including Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock.
So what do you experience here at the museum, her ultimate legacy?
First see her mansion from the water, whether from a gondola or a vaporetto ferry. Then take the short 15-minute walk from St Marco's Square over the Grand Canal towards the Gallerie dell'Accademia.
A member of staff admires one of Capogrossi paintings.Credit: Getty Images
What looks like a single-storey art deco gem is actually an unfinished 18th-century palace (Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, or "Palace of the Lions").
Built in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, it was intended to be one of the great grand palaces of the Grand Canal. Yet it never rose to a second storey, and no one knows why. Perhaps money just ran out?
Money never ran out when Guggenheim moved in. Her father had drowned when Titanic hit that iceberg when she was just 13, and before he'd accumulated the riches of other Guggenheims.
A gondolier dressed in period costume crosses the Grand Canal.Credit: Getty Images
Still, she inherited a fortune of $US2.5 million when she turned 21 in 1919 (about $US50 million today).
By the time she settled in Venice in 1951 she was already renowned as a collector. She began opening her home to the art-loving public the year she moved in. But a year after her death at 81, it became a full-time museum run by the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation. (Peggy had had the foresight to transfer both her palace and her collection to the charity established by her philanthropist uncle, which also runs the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao).
Her home is now the seventh most visited art gallery in Italy.
Guggenheim's palace on the Grand Canal.Credit: iStock
Among the artists whose works you'll see at the palace are De Chirico, Miro, Dali, Picasso, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Giacometti, Calder, Pollock and Magritte.
Yet for all the great art on display, the main reason to visit the palazzo is to pay homage to Peggy Guggenheim herself. Her indomitable spirit and bohemian personality still inhabit every centimetre of the building.
But how did she accrue such an incredible collection? The crucial year in her life was 1939. She was already rich, successful, safe – and Jewish. Yet she arrived in Paris in just a month before World War II broke out.
Guggenheim with her pet dogs outside her Venetian palace.Credit: Getty Images
In the weeks before Paris was invaded by the Nazis, she resolved to buy as many works by contemporary artists she admired as possible: "I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day," she said, knowing if Hitler's troops invaded France they would either be burned or pilfered.
Her choices were exemplary. Ten Picassos. Four Magrittes. Three Dalis. Forty Ernsts. The list goes on. In just seven years, she amassed a collection that would take a public gallery a century to approve.
And then she went on collecting...
Admiring The Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Yet what is the most admired object in Peggy Guggenheim's museum?
Her bed.
Can you imagine the artistic secrets it contains?
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
TRIP NOTES
MORE INFORMATION
Stills from the film 'Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict'.
GETTING THERE
Emirates/Qantas operate daily flights from Sydney and Melbourne to Venice via Dubai. See emirates.com/au or qantas.com
TRAVELLING THERE
Peggy Guggenheim at her desk in the library of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice, late 1960s.
Venice is included on a 12-day Ultimate Italy trip by Luxury Gold by Insight Vacations from $7325 a person. It includes 11 nights in outstanding accommodation, six evening meals including a Michelin starred dinner on the Isle of Capri, a Tuscan cooking demonstration, an exclusive behind the scenes visit to the Uffizi Gallery's private Vasari Corridor in Florence.
See insightvacations.com/luxurygold or phone 1800 001 771.
Steve Meacham travelled as guest of Insight Vacations.
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