The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in the city.

[1] She first worked as a clerk in an avant-garde bookstore, the Sunwise Turn, in Midtown Manhattan, where she became enamored of the members of the bohemian artistic community.

Man Ray photographed her,[3] and was, along with Constantin Brâncuși and Marcel Duchamp, a friend whose art she was eventually to promote.

Barnes wrote her best-known novel, Nightwood, while staying at the Devon country house, Hayford Hall, that Guggenheim had rented for two summers.

[4] Guggenheim wrote her autobiography entitled Out of This Century, later revised and re-published as Confessions of an Art Addict[5] that was released in 1946 [6] and is now published by Harper Collins.

Peggy Guggenheim held group exhibitions of sculpture and collage, with the participation of the now-classic moderns Antoine Pevsner, Henry Moore, Henri Laurens, Alexander Calder, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brâncuși, John Ferren, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Kurt Schwitters.

When Guggenheim realized that her gallery, although well received, had suffered a loss of £600 in the first year, she decided to spend her money in a more practical way.

Shortly after her departure the Second World War broke out, and the events following 1 September 1939 made her abandon the scheme, willingly or not.

"[9] When finished, she had acquired ten Picassos, forty Ernsts, eight Mirós, four Magrittes, four Ferrens, three Man Rays, three Dalís, one Klee, one Wolfgang Paalen, and one Chagall, among others.

In the meantime, she had made new plans and, in April 1940, had rented a large space in the Place Vendôme as a new home for her museum.

Taking place at Segal's office, the same location as Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery, the exhibition lasted for 31 hours spread out during May 15 to May 21.

Aiming to "sharpie women into history", Segal set out to collect works by every artist shown in the original exhibition so that their art could be shared with the world.

[15][16] Guggenheim's interest in contemporary art was instrumental in advancing the careers of several important modern artists, including the American painters Jackson Pollock and William Congdon, the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, the sound poet Ada Verdun Howell, and the German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in December 1941.

[5] Following World War II and her 1946 divorce from Max Ernst, she closed The Art of This Century Gallery in 1947 and returned to Europe, deciding to live in Venice, Italy.

Melcarth, known for his figurative paintings and eroticized depictions of the male body, designed Peggy a pair of hand-sculpted bat sunglasses, rising in ranks amongst Guggenheim’s Tanguy earrings and Calder jewelry as the late collector’s signature accessory.

Eventually, she decided to donate her home and her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a gift that was concluded inter vivos in 1976, before her death in 1979.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is one of the most important museums in Italy for European and American art of the first half of the twentieth century.