Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection occupies the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, a low, unfinished eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro district of Venice, Veneto, which the American heiress and collector Peggy Guggenheim bought in 1948 and made her home until her death in 1979. It is one of the most important museums of European and American modern art in Italy. Guggenheim assembled the collection with extraordinary speed and judgement, much of it during and just after the Second World War, guided by advisers such as Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Read, and it reflects her personal taste across the principal movements of the first half of the twentieth century — Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, Surrealism, and the American Abstract Expressionism she did so much to promote. The galleries, arranged through the rooms of her former residence, hold works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Brancusi, Giacometti, Max Ernst (for a time her husband), Magritte, Dalí, Mirò, and Duchamp, alongside the Americans Jackson Pollock — whose career she launched with his first solo show — Mark Rothko, and others. Sculpture is displayed throughout the Nasher Sculpture Garden and the canal-side terrace, where Marino Marini's equestrian 'Angel of the City' famously faces the water. Guggenheim herself is buried in the garden beside her dogs. Since her death the palace and collection have been run by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which has expanded the exhibition spaces, added the holdings of the Italian collector Gianni Mattioli and the Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof bequest of postwar art, and maintains an active programme of temporary exhibitions. The intimate domestic scale of the rooms, the major works hung close at hand, and the unique setting on the Grand Canal make the Peggy Guggenheim Collection a singular encounter with modern art, quite different from a conventional gallery.