The Last Duchess

All Venice likes to guess at what goes on behind the blank white walls of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, a curiously truncated structure that jealous city officials stopped at mid-construction in the 18th century for fear that it would dwarf the city hall across the way. Up from the gondola landing stands Sculptor Marino Marini's strident Angel of the City (1948), a youth on horseback equipped with a detachable phallus that is respectfully removed whenever the Patriarch of Venice floats by to bless the city. Inside the palazzo, behind a 12-ft., barbed-wire-topped wall, lies more than $2,000,000 worth of modern art works, the lifetime collection of U.S. Expatriate Peggy Guggenheim.

Collector Guggenheim's vast private museum embraces, as British Critic Sir Herbert Read once put it, "all the major movements which since about 1910 have transformed the very concept of art." Items: Marcel Duchamp's Lonely Boy on Train, from the same period as his famed Nude Descending a Staircase; examples of the 1913 Moscow Suprematist movement by Founder Malevitch and Follower Lissitzky; key works by Mondrian, Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso and Pollock. So famous is her collection that Venice's international Biennale once gave her a pavilion all to herself. Says Peggy: "It was wonderful, I was listed with Germany and France. I felt like a whole country all by myself."

Bequest to Venice. Now 59, with her hair died raven black and fingernails painted silver, Peggy Guggenheim is a flamboyant yet somehow regal character, whom Venetians call "L'Ultima Dogaressa" (The Last Duchess). Gondoliers have made a fortune ferrying her guests and visitors (Peggy herself travels in her own private gondola or fast speedboat), who come to sit on her zebra-striped couches, gaze at the display of modern paintings, constructions and sculptures. Infectiously gay and gossipy, Peggy Guggenheim has made her palazzo not only one of Venice's institutions but a crossroads of the artistic world.

Last week Peggy Guggenheim moved to keep it that way, and by so doing dashed the hopes of museum directors round the world. After long pondering the future of her collection (she once offered to will it to famed Renaissance Specialist Bernard Berenson, now 92, and was laughingly refused), Peggy called in her attorneys to set up a foundation that would permanently preserve her palazzo collection, thus in effect bequeathing it to the Venetians.

Spree in Paris. Peggy Guggenheim, member of the wealthy copper clan, had a conventional Manhattan upbringing before she married into the lost generation. With her dilettante first husband Author Laurence Vail, she gave some of Paris' wildest parties, posed for Photographer Man Ray in a cloth-of-gold, fringed sheath, balancing a foot-long cigarette holder. Her yen for art and artists did not come until after her divorce, when she started her own London gallery, soon decided to found her own museum of modern art. At the outbreak of World War II, she took the proposed museum's purchase list across the Channel, embarked on a frantic buying spree of "a picture a day'' in Paris that netted her a museumful of art at knockdown prices.

Returning to Manhattan five months before Pearl Harbor (along with her two children, ex-husband, and future husband), she regularized things by marrying German-born Surrealist Painter Max Ernst because "I did not like the idea of living in sin with an enemy alien." In opposition to her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and his Museum of Non-Objective Painting, she set up her "Art of This Century" gallery, with a "library" of abstract and surrealist paintings that rocked the New York art world.

Floating Dream World. "She always told us she belonged to Hemingway's generation and would go back to Europe when the war was over," recalls Painter Robert Motherwell. But while hostilities lasted, Peggy kept the pot boiling, managed to give first Manhattan shows to, among others, Painters Jackson Pollock, William Baziotes, Clyfford Still, and Sculptor David Hare. She had just time to publish her kiss-and-tell-all "informal memoirs" (TIME, March 25, 1946) after World War II before going back to Venice, a city she picked because "it is a sort of dream world. Everything floats. I want to live as I like and do what I want. In Venice you can do anything."

Living in her Venetian palazzo with twelve little Lhassa terriers (named "Tiepolo," "Baby," "Sir Herbert Read," etc.), three servants and a houseful of art, twice-divorced Peggy Guggenheim has gone right on keeping open house, though she complains: "I'm going mad. I can't pluck my eyebrows without thousands of people staring at me." She also continues to discover hungry artists, turning them into gilt-edged investments. Current favorites are Tancredi Parmeggiani, 30, whose lean, Pollock-like abstractions now bring up to $2,000 apiece, and Edmondo Bacci, 44, whose works are now owned by a score of collectors and museums. Peggy's own estimate: "Tancredi is more decorative, but Bacci's stronger." When Tancredi recently threatened suit to liberate himself from her "artistic, moral and financial domination," Peggy snapped, "He hasn't got a case," added: "I kill myself for artists. The hell of it is I hate them."

But Peggy has no thought of quitting yet. Says she: "I'm still collecting 20th century art, and I've got a long way to go. A fortune teller predicted that I would meet the great love of my life at 60. I'm looking forward to that." Then in a burst of confidence she adds: "I'm not kidding myself. I don't even think about love any more. My only love is art and my collection. I think it's the best thing I ever did in my whole life."

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