The Collector: Peggy Guggenheim

15 August 2025

By the late 1940s, the socialite, patron and collector Peggy Guggenheim was done with New York. She shuttered her Art of This Century gallery and returned to Europe, acquiring Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished 18th-century building on Venice’s Grand Canal where she would reside for the rest of her life alongside a fleet of Lhasa Apso terriers.

Beginning in 1951, Guggenheim welcomed the public to see her collection, which she displayed in salon style, mixing objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas with modernist works by Picasso, Calder, Kandinsky, and more.

Guggenheim described some of her “un-Venetian” home decor in her memoir, “Confessions of an Art Addict.” “In place of a Venetian glass chandelier, I hung a Calder mobile, made out of broken glass and china that might have come out of a garbage pail,” she wrote. Of the dining room she remarked that “The Cubist pictures look admirable with the old furniture.”

Photos courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Keystone Features/Stringer.

Image: Guggenheim in the palazzo’s dining room, standing beside the Umberto Boccioni sculpture “Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses,” 1914–15. On the chests to either side of her are an Ago Egungun headdress (left), made in the first half of the 20th century by a Yoruba artist in what is today Nigeria.

Authors: Tobias Czudej, Susan McDonough

The Collector

15 August 2025

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