Collections: Poor Peg's Treasure

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"Oh God, I'm glad I'm a poor Guggenheim," says the lady in the silver fingernails with a twinkling pixy's ex pression in her eyes. But a Guggenheim Peggy emphatically is, granddaughter of the U.S. copper magnate, daughter of a millionaire who changed into his dinner jacket while the Titanic sank under him, and niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who bankrolled the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum in Manhattan.

Peggy inherited only $900,000 (half in 1912, half in 1939) and she has always persisted in behaving like the poor relation she is.

Like a modern Bo Peep, Peggy, at 22, set out for Europe in 1920 to find herself amidst the lost generation. She was determined to become a patroness of this century's avantgarde, and set herself the goal of collecting its art.

Almost instantly she revealed her gen ius for attracting mates and mentors, occasionally overlapping. In London, it was Herbert Read who made out her shopping list. In Paris, it was Marcel Duchamp who galloped her around the studios, introducing her to such greats as Arp, Kandinsky and Jean Cocteau, while Peggy made good her resolve "to buy a painting a day." Dynamite Chronicle. Their advice proved good. When Peggy fled from Vichy France in 1941 for New York, she went encumbered with her future husband, Surrealist Max Ernst, her ex-husband, Laurence Vail, and art that had cost her only $40,000. The collection that adorns her Venice palazzo now is insured for $5,250,000. She had snatched up incendiary works from nearly all the key art movements since 1910—at a song. Now, for the first time in 14 years, the public outside Venice is getting a look at her collection in London's Tate Gallery.

It is a bombshell and London is rapturous. Wrote the Sunday Telegraph: "Peggy Guggenheim has achieved what many a museum has tried to do, and done it better." The collection is a chronicle of revolution. Beginning with a 1911 Picasso, through cubism, Dada, surrealism and on to the U.S. abstract expressionists, she has swooped up the dynamite that has given the words "modern art" their meaning (see color).

Last Duchess. Perhaps Peggy's finest moment came during her World War II years in Manhattan, when she opened her now famous "Art of This Century" gallery. There she gave one-man shows to a group of such young unknowns as Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, thus foster-mothering the generation that was to make the U.S. a world art power. "Abstract expression began in my gallery," she says. "You couldn't explain it. It was like a sudden burst of flame." Peggy fed the fire as long as she could resist returning to Europe. In 1949 she established herself in her 18th century Venetian palazzo, began collecting Lhasa terriers for lap dogs and adding young artists to her fold, while gondoliers awarded her the title of "the last Duchess" for her ribald, regal ways.

To most art experts, her Italian contemporaries pale beside her earlier purchases. Peggy does not agree. "People in 20 years will be saying the same things about the new people as they were about Pollock back then," she says. Pop? "This whaddayacallit, phooey," she says, but Jasper Johns and