Peggy Guggenheim Museum Venice, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, is a small museum located along the Grand Canal in Venice, within Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, and as part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
The museum primarily houses a personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), the ex-wife of artist Max Ernst, and a granddaughter of magnate Solomon R. Guggenheim.
The collection is located in a building, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which was once also the private home of Peggy Guggenheim. In comparison to other Guggenheim museums around the world, the Venetian Guggenheim holds a collection that is somewhat smaller and more concentrated.
PHOTO: Peggy Guggenheim as seen from Grand Canal.
Works on display include prominent examples of American modernism and Italian Futurism, but also sub-collections of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.
Notable individual artworks range from Picasso to Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Brancusi to William Congdon, Conrad Marca-Relli and to Pollock.
For many visitors, of particular value is the collection of abstract Italian art, with important works by Lucio Fontana, Afro Basaldella, Agostino Bonalumi, Toti Scialoja, Giuseppe Santomaso, Tancredi Parmeggiani, Emilio Vedova, and Carla Accardi.
The most famous individual artwork is a bronzework “Angel of the City” from 1948 by Marino Marini, located in front of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Also, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is one of the major Italian museums in the field of European and American art of the first half of the twentieth century.
Until 1979, the year of the death of Peggy Guggenheim, by the will of the owner, once a week, most of the palazzo was open & free to the public so that they could enjoy the complete collection of works of art. Peggy Guggenheim herself is buried in an urn that is placed in a corner of the garden.
Annually, the museum is visited by over 346,000 people.
A major expansion to the museum’s collections was received as a donation in October 2012, expanding the collection by 83 works by some of the most important contemporary artists, including: Alberto Burri, Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, and Anish Kapoor.