Peggy Guggenheim

In this stunning volume, a previously unpublished collection of photographs from her personal albums and family archives reveals a Peggy Guggenheim fascinated by the instantaneous, posing with natural sensuality for such celebrated photographers as Man Ray or Berenice Abbot, but also for her intimates, in private moments and on historic occasions, with her lovers, husbands, children, and friends. Beginning with her gilded childhood among the powerful Guggenheims of Manhattan, these photographs record Peggy's plunge into the Bohemian world of Jazz-Age Paris, an interlude with avant-garde writers in the English countryside, and her return to Montparnasse, in the company of James Joyce, but in the arms of Samuel Beckett. In the late 1930s, under the aegis of Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Read, she launched her first artistic undertaking by opening the gallery Guggenheim Jeune on London's Cork Street. But the Second World War sent her and her already celebrated collection into exile in New York along with the European surrealist artists, many of whom she had helped escape from war-torn Europe. There she married Max Ernst and staged her groundbreaking exhibitions of young, unknown American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko. When the armistice was declared, Peggy returned to Europe, settling in a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, where she became known as "the last dogaressa." The ultimate provocation, the Palazzo Guggenheim became the Renaissance setting for her remarkable collection of twentieth-century art an obligatory stop-over for an international cultural elite.