Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, and is one of the city’s most visited attractions. It originated from Peggy Guggenheim’s vast personal collection of Surrealist and abstract art, amassed with the support of her friends Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett. Her goal was to “buy a picture a day.” After leaving Europe during the war, she returns to Europe in 1947, and things start to move very quickly – Peggy shows her collection for the first time in the Greek pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1948, buys the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, stages the first European exhibition of Jackson Pollock in 1950, and opens her collection to the public in 1951. Quite apart from it being one of the finest collections of modern art in the world, the spectacular surroundings lift the experience to new heights.