Venice · Dorsoduro
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
An unfinished palace on the Grand Canal, holding the collection she assembled in one extraordinary decade
The sculpture garden and the terrace on the canal, where she kept her gondola
Peggy Guggenheim bought a painting a day in Paris in 1940 as the Germans advanced, got the collection and herself out, and settled in 1949 in a one-storey eighteenth-century palace that its owners had never finished. She lived here for thirty years with the art, the dogs and the gondola.
The collection is compact and extremely strong: Pollock, whom she discovered and funded, Ernst, whom she married, plus Picasso, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Magritte and Brancusi, in domestic rooms that make the works feel owned rather than institutionalised.
The detail
Good to know
- House
- Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, never completed
- Lived here
- 1949 to 1979
- Strengths
- Pollock, Ernst, Picasso, Duchamp
- Garden
- Sculpture garden and her grave
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