In Venice, there is not only the Peggy Guggenheim museum (her former home) along the Grand Canal of the sinking city. In fact, there is also an exhibition right now called 1948: The Biennale of Peggy Guggenheim, which shows what Peggy’s very first biennale looked like – and it involves a hand-painted flag. Until January 14, 2019, visit the museum to learn how.
It also traces the fabulous outfits Peggy wore while installing art in the Greek Pavilion at the 24th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, as Greece was having a civil war and couldn’t participate. This exhibit marks the 70 year anniversary of the biennale, where she showed her collection, from Jackson Pollock to Alexander Calder.
As Peggy Guggenheim wrote about the exhibit in her book, Out of this Century, she had a natural knack for self-promotion. “My exhibition had enormous publicity and the pavilion was one of the most popular of the Biennale,” she wrote.
“I was terribly excited by all this, but what I enjoyed most was seeing the name of Guggenheim appearing on the maps in the public gardens next to the names of Great Britain, France, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, I felt as though I were a new European country.”
Photos via guggenheim-venice
