The Bitter Legal Battle over Peggy Guggenheim’s Blockbuster Art Collection

Almost four decades after her death, Peggy Guggenheim is the central figure in a continuing art-world imbroglio: the seemingly endless legal battle by some of her descendants over her superlative 20th-century art collection—and the Venetian palazzo housing it—she left to her uncle’s foundation. Have Guggenheim’s wishes been ignored and her legacy desecrated?

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Gore Vidal once described Peggy Guggenheim “as the last of Henry James’s transatlantic heroines, Daisy Miller with rather more balls.” Guggenheim, who died in 1979 at the age of 81, has also been called everything from “fascinatingly complex” and a “vibrant, accomplished and active woman” to “Daffy Duck dressed in slinky silk” and “glamorous but lightweight and oversexed.” As one critic put it, “Even her sunglasses made news.”

For much of the 20th century she was the enfant terrible of the art world and one of its most influential patrons. In 1949, she bought an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal, in Venice, and turned it into an avant-garde salon that was said to have “more than once shocked Venice’s Renaissance soul.” Guests included Tennessee Williams, Somerset Maugham, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, and Marlon Brando. She built one of the great collections of modern art, 326 paintings and sculptures that would become known as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, including works by Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marcel Duchamp. (“Her choices affected the course of twentieth-century art history,” wrote one of her biographers, Mary V. Dearborn.) Before Guggenheim died, she donated the palazzo, along with her collection, to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, started in 1937 by her uncle, who opened the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1959. (“My uncle’s garage, that Frank Lloyd Wright thing on Fifth Avenue,” she called it.) The Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened six days a week to the public in 1980 and has become the most visited museum of modern art in Italy. Its annual attendance has increased tenfold in 35 years to about 400,000.

But the collection has also been the focus of a bitter—and seemingly endless—legal battle between the Guggenheim Foundation and some of Peggy Guggenheim’s descendants, who claim that her collection has been repeatedly mismanaged. They even accuse the foundation of desecrating her grave. The legal briefs have become increasingly acrimonious. The foundation says that it has faithfully carried out Peggy’s wishes, that she never said the collection should remain as she left it, and it describes the descendants’ claims as “distortions,” “pointless,” “ridiculous and outrageous,” and “devoid of good faith.” It also says that a 2013 letter to the foundation from the descendants’ attorney “leaves little room for doubt as to their genuine objectives: they believe they can obtain a financial settlement” from the foundation.

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