About Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector, bohemian, and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim collected art in Europe and America between 1938 and 1946. She exhibited this collection as she built it. In 1949, she settled in Venice, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in the city.
An old school patron of the arts, Guggenheim financed the artistic careers of many an artist she found promising, including the legendary Jackson Pollock. She conducted her sex life the way any man with money and influence would have in her day, which is to say she slept with whomever she pleased whenever she pleased, something which today might be considered promiscuous, but in her day was merely a woman exercising agency over her own life.
According to both Guggenheim and her biographer Anton Gill, while she was living in Europe, she "slept with 1,000 men." She claimed to have had affairs with numerous artists and writers, and many artists and others have claimed to have had affairs with her. When asked by conductor Thomas Schippers how many husbands she had had, she replied, "You mean my own, or other people's?" In her autobiography, Peggy provided the names of some of those lovers, including Yves Tanguy, Roland Penrose, and E.L.T. Mesens.
Her first marriage was to Laurence Vail, a Dada sculptor and writer, with whom she had two children, Michael Cedric Sindbad Vail (1923–1986) and Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (1925–1967). They divorced circa 1928, following his affair with writer Kay Boyle, whom he later married. Soon after her first marriage dissolved, she had an affair with John Ferrar Holms, a war hero and writer, who struggled with writer's block. She then lived with the writer and Communist activist Douglas Garman for several years. Starting in December 1939, she and Samuel Beckett had a brief, but intense affair, and he encouraged her to turn exclusively to modern art. She married her second husband, artist Max Ernst, in 1941 and divorced him in 1946. Among her eight grandchildren is Karole Vail, who was appointed director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 2017.
