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.)
