Peggy Guggenheim:

Her Life and Legacy

Jacky Klein / Courtauld Institute of Art, London

How did the socialite and muse, Peggy Guggenheim, become one of the greatest collectors in the history of modern art? Friends with the leading cultural figures of her day – including Jean Cocteau, Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Marlon Brando, Louise Bourgeois and Igor Stravinsky – she was photographed by Man Ray and Lee Miller, took advice from Marcel Duchamp, and married the artist Max Ernst (among others). She moved with ease between the social elites of New York and the bohemia of Paris. In this lecture, art historian Jacky Klein will reveal why – seemingly out of the blue – Guggenheim started collecting contemporary art in the 1930s; what impact her galleries in London and New York had on artists and the wider art world; how and why her name became inextricably linked with the city of Venice; and ultimately, how a New York heiress played such a pivotal role in the making of mid-century Modernism.