Peggy, Dogaressa dell'Arte

There are few museums in the world where you can breathe the air of the founder as inside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. It is not possible to admire the paintings and furnishings, a great gift that the Lady gave to humanity, without being attracted by her incredible life. And it was a privilege to visit it with a teenage daughter just to be able to tell her a few glimpses of the life of a great woman of the 20th century. Although rich by birth, she did not disdain youthful jobs to have a minimum independence of action and thought: she cared more about this last freedom than her own life. It is precisely from a free mind that great adventures can be born. Once patrons, then collectors, we certainly owe the birth and survival of art to them. But what makes the project of this Woman who I would like to simply call Peggy unique is the desire to open this world to everyone, enticing the international public of all ages and social classes towards the extraordinary planet of Art. Her life, today told from the walls of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, makes us reflect on the concept of destiny. If her wealthy father Benjamin Guggenheim had not died, Peggy would not have inherited the sum of $450,000 at the time, necessary to buy “living art”; if her marriage to Laurence Veil had not ended, she would not have moved to Europe, between London and Paris, where she met, in her own gallery Guggenheim Jeune, the greatest artists of the Avant-garde, such as Kandinsky, Picasso, Boccioni, Dal, Mondrian, Duchamp, Ernst, who later became her husband. If the Second World War had not broken out, she would not have taken refuge, Jewish by birth, in America, where she discovered the greatest exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock, who owes much of his success to her. Finally, that strange and unfinished Palazzo Venier dei Leoni: it was purchased precisely because it was incomplete, affordable in price and in the management of the important gallery garden where the dogs could roam, where Peggy rests in peace with her beloved puppies. These reflections, very personal to tell the truth, were born during the visit to this splendid gallery that has the spectacular gift of capturing the attention not only of expert adults but also of very young people, like my daughter, still nostalgic for that visit, long dreamed of, too short unfortunately and certainly more exciting than the "social drug". In a certain sense I saw come true what the Director of the Collection, Karole P.B. Vail, wrote in the difficult Covid period that severely tested the survival of the Guggenheim "Living", together with all the staff, "means carrying forward our mission: to conserve and preserve the legacy of Peggy Guggenheim by educating on the value of the artistic process, as a tool for personal growth and development of critical thinking. We consider art a primary asset and as such we believe it should be accessible to everyone. For you and for future generations we therefore want to be able to open the museum 6 days a week, continue to guarantee educational projects, totally free of charge, the programming of temporary exhibitions, the publication of catalogs. In other words, the life of the museum". Visionary and courageous, therefore, another fundamental quality for young women: in 1938 Peggy was opposed in London for the Guggenheim Jeune by the solid opposition of the director of the Tate Gallery and much criticized in Renaissance Florence by critics who were too traditionalist for the then exhibition at the Strozzina, 1949, a cause of lese fiorentinità. "My motto was to buy a painting a day and I followed it to the letter". 

Thanks to Peggy Guggenheim, masterpieces of cubism, abstraction and surrealism, have become the most complete exhibition of modernism ever presented up to that time in Italy. Looking out over the lagoon you are hypnotized by the roar of the waters; the waters that tragically swept away her father in the Titanic tragedy, from which Peggy developed an understandable phobia for ships, have in a certain sense saved the life of this Venetian, modern dogess.

Valentina NIccolai