Three years after the war was over, it was intended that the 1948 Venice Biennale showcase the new and exciting in modern art, a celebration of all that had been lost for a decade. But things were not going to plan. At the last minute, the Greeks pulled their exhibition as a civil war raged back home. There was Marc Chagall’s colourful expressionism at the French and at the Italian pavilion a room devoted to Picasso. Henry Moore’s sculptures were on show at the British pavilion, but then so were a handful of Turners. As to kick-starting a new and optimistic era for art, it was looking… underwhelming.
To the rescue came expat American Peggy Guggenheim: collector, patron, force of nature. The Greeks’ loss was her opportunity. From her fledgling collection came 136 artworks, comprising 73 artists, and at once the small triple-arched pavilion, across a bridge towards the rear of the Biennale gardens, exploded with life. A riot of colour and imagination, the greatest name of modernism looked down from bright white walls: Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Dalí, Man Ray, Motherwell and, not least, her ex-husband Max Ernst. It marked the first time that paintings by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko had been seen outside the US. An Alexander Calder mobile spun in the summer breeze.
’s photographer Lee Miller was there to record the opening: “sensational” she wrote and reported that the crowds “are astonished. They buzz and talk and compare and glow…” (She had recently married Roland Penrose, himself a collector and promoter of surrealist art, who had had a short-lived affair with Guggenheim in London some 10 years before.)
Not everyone got it but Guggenheim had set the scene for Venice Biennales to come: challenging, unsettling, provocative. Seldom troubled by self-doubt and a tireless self-promoter, she said in her autobiography that what she enjoyed the most was seeing the name Guggenheim “next to the names of Great Britain, France, Holland… I felt as though I were a new European country.”
Guggenheim had already made her mark in the UK: in 1938 she opened her pioneering first gallery on London’s now illustrious Cork Street, a stone’s throw from the Royal Academy, where, this autumn, a number of pieces Guggenheim exhibited by the avant-garde artists she helped discover – Kandinsky, Dalí and Hepworth among them – will be brought together once more in a new show, Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector, which charts the radical, transformative impact she had on contemporary art.
In her eighteenth century Venetian palace, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, 1964.
Her life in London was short-lived: she moved to Paris and soon fell in love with Venice. Within a year of the Biennale, she had settled permanently there, acquiring a low-rise palazzo on the Grand Canal, the half-built Venier dei Leoni, where her collection still resides today.
Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector is at the Royal Academy, W1, from 21 November to 14 March 2027