26 August marks the birthday of the remarkable, revolutionary American art collector, patron and socialite, Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim. Born on 26 August 1898 to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who died on the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim described herself as an “art addict” and over her career carved a path that was distinctively her own in the world of collecting and avant-garde art. She first travelled to Europe in 1921 and opened her gallery in London in 1938. By 1942 she had returned to New York to establish her museum-gallery there. She would later return to Europe and acquire a building on Venice’s Grand Canal, which now houses part of her collection today. She was lifelong friends of countless era defining artists and intellects, including Marcel DuChamp, Jean Cocteau and Samuel Beckett – who encouraged Guggenheim to treat contemporary art as a “living thing” which forever shaped her vision and approach. There she introduced her collection of Cubist, abstract art from Europe to New York via her gallery, helping to launch the movement in the US, and showed artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, then little known. Art was never only a business for Guggenheim who cared deeply about art and the artists she worked with. As she put it in her own words: “I dedicated myself to my collection. A collection means hard work. It was what I wanted to do and I made it my life’s work. I am not an art collector. I am a museum.”

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