orig. Marguerite Guggenheim
born Aug. 26, 1898, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Dec. 23, 1979, near Venice, Italy
Art collector and patron of the New York school of artists.
Granddaughter of Meyer and Daniel Guggenheim , she inherited a large fortune in 1921. In 1930 she moved to Paris, where she took up a bohemian life, and in 1932 to London. She returned to New York City in 1941, married artist Max Ernst , and in 1942 opened a gallery where she exhibited many of the radical artists she supported, among them Jackson Pollock , Robert Motherwell , Mark Rothko , and Hans Hofmann . After World War II she settled in Venice and exhibited her outstanding collection of Cubist , abstract, and Surrealist art; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is still open to the public.