Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Modern art in Peggy Guggenheim's former Grand Canal home, with a sculpture garden and canal terrace.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection occupies Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal that was never finished above the ground floor, giving it an unusually low, white profile among its neighbours. The American collector Peggy Guggenheim bought the building in 1948 and lived there until her death in 1979, opening her rooms to visitors during the summer months. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation took over the house and opened it as a public museum in 1980.
The collection covers European and American art of the first half of the twentieth century, with Cubist, Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist works by Picasso, Ernst, Pollock, Magritte, Brancusi and Calder among others. Visitors move through the domestic rooms, the Nasher Sculpture Garden where Peggy Guggenheim is buried, and a canal-side terrace holding Marino Marini's Angel of the City. Temporary exhibitions and the Gianni Mattioli Collection occupy adjoining wings.
Highlights
- Peggy Guggenheim's unfinished palace on the Grand Canal
- Cubist, Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist masterpieces
- Nasher Sculpture Garden and the collector's grave
- Marini's Angel of the City on the canal terrace
