Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim

Born into one of America's wealthiest, most eccentric families, Peggy Guggenheim was to abandon the cloistered world of her childhood and hurl herself into a life of adventure. In 1920, at age twenty-two, she set sail for Paris. There she met her first husband, the irrepressible and charming Laurence Vail, who introduced her to the enchanted, hypnotic whirl of the Left Bank. With him she befriended the writers, musicians, and artists who were transforming the age: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and many more. After indulging in a series of scandalous love affairs, Peggy opened an art gallery in London in 1938, where she continued to cultivate a taste for the avante-garde in art and men. She began buying paintings from each artist she showed, launching a lifetime addiction to art. WW II trapped her in France, where she went on a buying spree, snapping up "a picture a day" by modern masters including Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, and Miró. Escaping to New York with her husband-to-be, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, she opened a spectacular gallery, Art of This Century. There she showed her own collection alongside works by young, undiscovered artists of the New York School: Motherwell, Hofmann, Rothko, and the tormented but brilliant Jackson Pollock. It was Peggy who gave Pollock his first one-man show, who believed in his genius when no one else would buy his work, and who became his patron, supporting him in exchange for dozens of paintings. Soon after the war ended, Peggy left New York to go house hunting in Venice. She installed herself and her fabulous collection in a palazzo on the Grand Canal and proceeded to surround herself once again with outrageous personalities and a persistent whiff of scandal. The Venetians called her "the Last Dogaressa" and the great and famous made her house an obligatory pilgrimage. Today the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the foremost assemblage of modern art in Italy and a major tourist attraction.