Peggy Guggenheim

Collector and founder. Peggy Guggenheim bought the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on Venice's Grand Canal in 1949 and soon began opening her home and its collection of Cubist, Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art to visitors. Since her death in 1979 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has run it as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of Italy's most visited modern art museums. Her role was taste and nerve: she bought Pollock and Ernst when few would.