FOR WHO: Curious to learn about the life of one of the women who made history in contemporary art collecting

‍

WHY: Because it tells us how he built one of the most important art collections in the world.

‍

LANGUAGE: Italian

‍

--

Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898 into a wealthy Jewish family of American industrialists. After inheriting a huge fortune, she decided to abandon her studies and set off to discover Europe: she stayed there for about twenty years, frequenting the literary and artistic world, which had its main centers in London and Paris, and becoming a patron in the broadest sense of the term: in the interwar period, armed with a "shopping list" compiled with the help of her adviser Marcel Duchamp, she came to buy a work of art a day. She also "collected" its authors, with a devouring passion: friend and lover of many, wife, for longer or shorter periods, of some, muse for all. In 1941 she returned to the United States with her collection, which she organized in the Art of This Century, an art gallery that quickly became internationally famous. In 1948 she exhibited her collection at the Venice Biennale. Fascinated by the beauty of the city, she never left it again. She bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, overlooking the Grand Canal, and made it a house-museum. A Life for Art is the story of her extraordinary life and her troubled relationships with famous writers and artists. And it is, too, the story of an important artistic period, and of the undeniable influence Peggy Guggenheim had on it. An existence entirely devoted to art, until the year of her death (1979), which caught her in Venice, in whose salons she had reigned as 'the last dogaressa.'"