Palazzo Venier dei Leoni

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a museum of 20th century avant-garde art displaying masterpieces collected by the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) between 1938 and 1947 in London, Paris and New York, and then brought to Venice for the first time for the 1948 Venice Biennale. In the same year, Peggy Guggenheim bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an unfinished Grand Canal palace attributed to the architect Lorenzo Boschetti (1749), where she lived for 30 years and where from 1951 she opened her house as a museum.

In 1976 she left her palazzo and collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which now administers it together with the other Guggenheim museums in New York, Bilbao, and Berlin.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection displays works originating from four separate sources:
” The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (also known as the Permanent Collection)
” The Gianni Mattioli Collection
” The Raymond D and Patsy R Nasher Collection
” Other works belonging to the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation

Among the artists represented in the collection: Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Brancusi, de Chirico, Giacometti, Duchamp, Arp, Max Ernst, Miro, Tanguy, Calder, and Pollock. Works from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Sculpture Collection, Dallas, Texas, are exhibited in the garden.

As of September 1997, the museum houses as a long term loan twenty-six masterpieces of Italian Futurism from the Gianni Mattioli Collection: Boccioni, Balla, Severini, Carra, Russolo, Depero, Rosai, Soffici, Sironi, and also Morandi and Modigliani.

There is a Museum Shop and a Museum Cafe in the new wing (open during the same hours as the museum), where temporary exhibitions of modern art are frequently mounted on the basis of an annual program.