30 YEARS ON: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
“To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.” This well-known sentiment, from an essay by Peggy Guggenheim in a 1962 book by Michelangelo Muraro (Invitation to Venice), expresses the American collector’s feelings about Venice, where, after a nomadic life between Europe and the United States, she decided to make her home in 1948. A year later she acquired Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal, where she both lived and exhibited her collection of modern art, opening the palazzo to the public each summer from 1951 to 1979. At Easter 1980, not long after Peggy Guggenheim’s death (23 December 1979), Palazzo Venier opened to the public for the first time under the auspices of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.