The story
At the far end of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, a small stone plaque marks the grave of Peggy Guggenheim, the American heiress and collector, beside the graves of her dogs. She died in 1979, after three decades of living in this house among the pictures she had bought.
The palazzo was never finished. Building began in the 18th century for the Venier family and stopped after the ground floor, which is why it sits so low among its neighbours. Peggy bought it in 1949, the year after her collection was shown at the Venice Biennale, and from 1951 she opened her rooms to visitors in the summer. Today the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, set up by her uncle, runs it as a museum.
Much of what hangs here she bought in Paris and New York around the Second World War, when she set out to buy a picture a day. Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian pioneer of abstraction, appears at three moments of his career, with Landscape with Red Spots from 1913, White Cross from 1922 and Upward from 1929. Paul Klee, the Swiss-born painter, is here with Portrait of Mrs. P. in the South, and René Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist, with Voice of Space, a sky of floating bells over a landscape.
The Italian Futurist pictures came from somewhere else. Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist, painted in 1913, belongs to the Milanese collector Gianni Mattioli's collection, which has been on long-term loan to the museum since the late 1990s.
