Exclusive After-Hours Peggy Guggenheim Collection Private Visit

Overlooking the Grand Canal, housed in a treasure chest of Istrian stone, welcome to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the most important museum in Italy for European and American art of the 20th century, created by the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) acquired the majority of her works between the years 1938 and 1947, in Europe and in New York, with the advice of friends, artists, and art critics. The American patroness exhibited her collection for the first time in Europe at the 1948 Venice Biennale.

A year later she purchased Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished palazzo of the 18th century, where she would live for 30 years and where her museum is located today. At an international level, the collection is one of the most important collections of its kind, notable for the quality of its works and for its historic breadth: during the visit you can admire masterpieces of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism by artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Pollock, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miró, de Chirico, Dalí, and Calder. In 2012, the Foundation’s holdings in Venice were enriched by 80 works of Italian, European and American postwar art bequeathed by the American collectors Hannelore B. Schulhof and husband Rudolph B. Schulhof.

Artists represented in this donation include some whose works were already represented in Peggy Guggenheim’s collection and others whose work was not (such as Eduardo Chillida, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns and Tony Cragg). The Peggy Guggenheim Collection also exhibits sculpture outdoors in its gardens and on its terraces, by artists such as Marino Marini, Alexander Calder, Germaine Richier, and Henry Moore.