GUGGENHEIM, PEGGY

born Aug. 26, 1898, New York, N.Y., U.S. died Dec. 23, 1979, near Venice, Italy byname of Marguerite Guggenheim American art collector who was an important patron of the Abstract Expressionist school of artists in New York City. Peggy's father was Benjamin Guggenheim, a son of the wealthy mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim, and one of her uncles was Solomon R. Guggenheim, who founded the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Benjamin died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and his daughter came into her fortune in 1919. Unhappy with her bourgeois life, she married Lawrence Vail in 1922 (divorced 1930) and adopted a bohemian lifestyle. She moved to Paris in 1930, and in 1938 she opened a gallery to exhibit and sell modern art. Guggenheim returned to the United States in 1941 and married the Surrealist painter Max Ernst (divorced 1946). In 1942 she opened another art gallery, Art of This Century, in New York City, and many of the artists she supported received their first one-man shows there. Among the important painters she sponsored were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hofmann. After World War II Guggenheim moved to Venice, where she settled in an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal. There she displayed part of her art collection to the public, and in 1979 she donated the collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which owns the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The collection, which contains masterpieces of modern painting and is still on display in Venice, is known as the Guggenheim Collection. Peggy Guggenheim's memoirsOut of This Century (1946) and Confessions of an Art Addict (1960)were published in a combined edition under the latter title in 1980.