Happy Birthday Peggy Guggenheim! How The Feminist Art Collector Changed The Game

Today is August 26, Peggy Guggenheim’s birthday. The pioneering American art collector was born on this day in 1898, her legacy will never be forgotten as a modern art collector and feminist that art history can’t ignore.

It’s an entertaining one, too. She may have been a black sheep to her own family, but she was a heroine in her own right. In a time when women were confined to their households, Guggenheim had a vision to show artists like Man Ray, Barnett Newman and Frank Stella, in a time when they were still considered avant-garde. She took risks long before many others did in the art world.

In 1948, Guggenheim bought a palazzo in Venice facing the famous Grand Canal. While it was her home for decades, it is now an art museum called the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which recently reopened to the public after being closed for months due to the pandemic.

This museum personifies Guggenheim’s own special vision to show her collection. As she once said: “I look back on my life with great joy. I think it was a very successful life. I always did what I wanted and never cared what anyone thought. Women’s lib? I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it.”

Alongside some of her original modern furniture, this is where visitors can see her elaborate modern art collection, featuring artworks by Alexander Calder and Wassily Kandinsky. Alongside the vine-covered terrace and café, Guggenheim is buried in the garden with her Lhasa Apso dogs, each of who have their names listed on a gravestone (from Hong Kong to Peacock).

In addition to leaving behind two autobiographies, one of which is called Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, she meticulously documented her life from the 1940s to the 1970s with letters, newspaper clippings and audio recordings. They are archives of her public life, and one of her memoirs has been reviewed as such: “She lived a life of sex, privilege and money—but all she wanted was credibility within the male-dominated art world”).

There is no doubt that Guggenheim was the most influential women art collector of the 20^th century. Though her father died in the Titanic in 1912, and she inherited his fortune and devoted her life to collecting artwork, mostly abstract and surrealism, she devoted herself to purchase one artwork a day. She helped launch the careers of Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and Max Ernst (who she married, then later divorced after he found a younger lover).

She opened her art collection at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice in 1951, which is on permanent view today. In total, she spent 30 years in Venice, from 1948 to 1979, and the palace has a serene, homey vibe as if Guggenheim’s own spirit never left the premises. In her former living rooms, salons and even the bedrooms, guests can peruse artworks by Rene Magritte, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon, some of which are in the leafy garden. There are also photos of Guggenheim taken by Ray Wilson, which offer a window into her personal life.

While Guggenheim made her name in New York and London before arriving in Venice, she made a splash when she first participated in the Venice Biennale of 1948, when she showed her collection at the Greek Pavilion, as Greece was ravaged by the Civil War at the time. At the time, Typalde Forestis, the ex-Consul General of Greece, wrote a letter to Guggenheim that she never forgot. It said: “ I am sure that they will be very pleased to know that the Greek Pavilion is especially suited to your famous collection of modern art.”

“My exhibition had enormous publicity and the pavilion was one of the most popular of the Biennale,” she wrote at the time. “I was terribly excited by all this, but what I enjoyed most was seeing the name of Guggenheim appearing on the maps in the public gardens next to the names of Great Britain, France, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, I felt as though I were a new European country.”

There is no doubt that Guggenheim was a style icon, too. She was defined by her wacky sunglasses (there’s a British VOGUE style guide to becoming Peggy Guggenheim) and there are countless photos of her seated in gondolas, standing among artwork or butterfly kissing friends at art openings.

Many of the color photos of Guggenheim were taken in the 1960s (some of which were taken by Tony Vaccaro), and trace her style, which was elegant, relaxed and effortlessly chic. In the 1960s, there’s a relaxed feeling that showed Guggenheim’s own decision to keep her collection in Venice permanently, making it her home until her passing, one in which she welcomed many people to experience art through her own eyes.

Guggenheim kept every piece of press written about her, whether it was good or bad. She would circle or underline phrases, and write in the margins of memories from certain events or exhibitions (British Vogue writer Lee Miller wrote about her 1948 pavilion at the Venice Biennale as ‘most sensational’).

But she put her modern art collection on view in strange times. It was the tail end of Italy’s dictatorship, so the Italian press was lukewarm. Either way, to say that Guggenheim enjoyed publicity would be an understatement. But it wasn’t just vanity. She knew it was her responsibility to promote her artists, which were at the forefront of contemporary art in her time.

The Irish novelist Samuel Beckett, who was a friend of Guggenheim, told her to dedicate her life to contemporary art, as if it were a living organism. Guggenheim never backed down from a challenge to show her artists in a grand way and was never afraid to take risks to support artists she believed in, especially those who were unknown.

It has been 41 years since Guggenheim passed away at the age of 81 in 1979. For her 80th birthday, her last birthday in 1978, friends made a banner at her birthday party that read “Peggy Guggenheim: The Ultima Dogaressa.” She was known to Venetians as ‘the last dogaressa,’ or ‘the last (female) doge,’ and was granted honorary Italian citizenship in 1962.

It truly was a place she loved. As Guggenheim once said of Venice: “It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.”