In the spring of 1912, a thirteen-year-old girl in New York waited for a father who was never coming home. Benjamin Guggenheim had gone down with the Titanic, not fighting for a place in a lifeboat but dressed in evening clothes, prepared to die like a gentleman. He left his daughter almost nothing. The Guggenheims were among the richest families in America, but Peggy was the poor one, the charity branch of a dynasty that treated her like a stray.

She ran from the marble halls of New York into 1920s Paris, into the cafes and studios and beds of the most dangerous men of her age. And when Hitler’s armies marched on the city, she went shopping, one painting a day, racing to pull masterpieces off the walls before the Germans could seize them. Marguerite Guggenheim was born on August 26, 1898, in a brownstone on West 69th Street. The family called her Maggie; the world would come to call her Peggy.

Her grandfather James Seligman had arrived in America in steerage with forty dollars and built an international banking fortune. Her other grandfather, Meyer Guggenheim, had landed in Philadelphia selling stove polish and within twenty years controlled mines and smelters on four continents. When her mother, Florette Seligman, announced her engagement to Benjamin Guggenheim, the Seligmans considered the marriage beneath them. The old refinement never quite forgave the new money, and the condescension never washed out.

Benjamin was Meyer’s fifth son, the handsomest and the least interested in smelting. He had charm without appetite for work, a weakness for Paris, and an eye that wandered. Florette bore him three daughters, and by the new century Benjamin had built a mansion on East 72nd Street, marble and tapestries and a glass dome over a spiral staircase. In that house Peggy would dream about for the rest of her life, everything had been provided and nothing was quite right.

Her verdict on her childhood was delivered without ornament: it seemed to her one long protracted agony. She had no friends, she did not go to school until she was fifteen, and there was a nurse who threatened to cut out her tongue. Her older sister Benita was the beauty of the family, the one fixed point of love in the house, and Peggy attached herself to her with the whole force of an otherwise unspent heart. The affairs began when Peggy was five or six.

Benjamin was never there, and in 1911 he pulled out of his brother’s partnership, set up his own business in Paris, and effectively stopped coming home at all. The decision cost him his share of one of the great fortunes of the age. In the spring of 1912, he needed to be in New York for business and for his youngest daughter’s birthday, and a coal strike canceled his booked passage. He took the next available crossing, the maiden voyage of the largest moving object human beings had ever built.

He boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg on April 10 with his valet and his mistress of the moment. Four nights later, the ship struck ice four hundred miles off Newfoundland. His bedroom steward survived and later presented himself to the family in New York to tell them what happened. He had woken the two men, helped them into life belts, and seen them out onto the deck.

Sometime later he found them again, the life belts gone. They had gone back to the cabin and changed into evening clothes. We’ve dressed up in our best, Benjamin said, and are prepared to go down like gentlemen. They had given their places in the boats to women and children.

He was forty-six years old. His body was never recovered. Peggy was thirteen. I have never really recovered, she said decades later, as I suppose I have been searching for a father ever since.

Benjamin had left them almost nothing. The estate was a muddle of depressed stocks, and the brothers quietly advanced the widow whatever money she asked for, letting Florette and her daughters go on living at full scale on charity they did not know was charity. When Florette discovered the truth, she ended the arrangement with a Seligman’s pride. The household shrank, the paintings and tapestries and jewelry were sold.

They were never poor, but within that society the fall was total. Among the Guggenheims, Peggy was now the charity branch. She came into her inheritance at twenty-one, and freedom first bought her motion. In the winter of 1920, she went to Cincinnati to have her nose rebuilt.

The operation was a disaster, and by her own merciless accounting the result was worse than what she had started with. The nose became the first campaign in a war she could not win and refused to surrender. She found work at a bookshop called the Sunwise Turn, a place where money did not quite matter and books did. There she met Laurence Vail, an aspiring playwright with long blonde hair, charming, reckless, dangerous in the way only a man with no responsibilities and absolute confidence in his own magnetism can be dangerous.

She married him in 1922, and by the next morning she felt extremely let down. Years later she put it more simply: I was never in love with Vail. I just wanted sex. He drank, and when he drank, the charm reversed itself into a temper that turned furniture into weapons and his wife into a target.

He rubbed jam into her hair, threw her shoes out of windows, dragged her across floors, and once pushed her head beneath the surface of the bathwater. They had two children, a son called Sinbad and a daughter, Pegeen. On New Year’s Eve 1925, during a trip to Italy, Laurence threw Peggy against a wall. She was pregnant.

In December 1926, he struck his sister’s lover over the head with a champagne bottle in a Montparnasse cafe. In 1927, Peggy accidentally opened a telegram addressed to Laurence: her sister Benita had died in childbirth. That October, Peggy’s younger sister Hazel, sitting on the parapet of a cousin’s sixteenth-floor terrace with her two small sons, lost both children over the edge. The deaths were officially ruled accidental.

The family was coming apart. On the first anniversary of Benita’s death, Peggy got drunk and danced on a table, and somewhere in the noise a tall Englishman with auburn curly hair and brown eyes full of animal sadness took her to a tower and kissed her. John Holms was the son of a British civil servant, sent to Sandhurst at seventeen because the war had come. In France he had beaten four German soldiers to death single-handed.

After the war the drinking never stopped. He conceived the ambition to become a writer and never produced the work. To this man Peggy handed herself over completely. He held me in the palm of his hand, she wrote, and from the time I once belonged to him to the day he died, he directed my every move, my every thought.

He called her dog nose, and she kept it. But his silences were long, and the violence was not gone. When she told him about an attraction to another man, he made her stand naked before an open window in December as he threw whiskey into her eyes. In January 1934, Holms went into the hospital for a routine operation.

His heart stopped under the anesthesia. The autopsy revealed every organ ravaged by alcohol. It was as though I were suddenly set free from a prison, Peggy wrote, but I had no idea how to live or what to do. A young publisher named Douglas Garman wrote to her, and eight weeks after Holms’s death they began an affair.

She bought a house and put it in his name because she intended to kill herself. She did not. The affair curdled into argument and violence. In December 1936, Garman refused to marry her, and they separated.

In the summer of 1937, Peggy walked the great international exposition in Paris with her dying mother. In the Spanish Pavilion, Picasso’s Guernica stretched across the wall. A few weeks earlier her oldest friend had written with a suggestion: stop wasting your life, start a publishing house or open a gallery. Peggy chose the gallery because she thought it would be cheaper.

Her mother died that November, and Peggy inherited $450,000. She hired a woman named Wyn Henderson, and they called the gallery Guggenheim Jeune, the junior Guggenheim, to capitalize on the family name and signal that this one would be younger, fresher, and more dangerous than her uncles. Through Marcel Duchamp she was welcomed into studios and salons that would otherwise have been closed to a woman whose family name meant copper, not canvas. Duchamp taught her the difference between abstract and surrealist art and introduced her to all the artists.

I have him to thank for my introduction to the modern art world, she wrote. On the day after Christmas, 1937, she met a tall, lanky Irishman with enormous green eyes. Samuel Beckett walked her home that night, and they went to bed and did not get out of it until the following evening. Beckett talked her out of her reverence for the old masters and into the present tense.

Modern art, he told her, was a living thing, and buying it was not indulgence but duty. Her gallery opened on January 24, 1938, on Cork Street. Six weeks later Hitler’s army marched into Austria, and by autumn the people walking through her door carried gas masks over their shoulders. The second show was a Kandinsky retrospective, the first exhibition of his paintings ever mounted in England.

She wrote to her Uncle Solomon suggesting he purchase one. The reply came from his mistress, Baroness Hilla Rebay, a letter of pure contempt telling Peggy she was a woman with money and no eye playing at something she did not understand. But buried in the bile was a line more prophetic than she intended: Peggy should forget the gallery and start a collection instead. That summer, Peggy bought paintings by Yves Tanguy, whose pale canvases frightened her, and she bought the best in the show because she knew it was the best.

She took Tanguy to bed before the paintings were hung. In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Plans for a museum of modern art in London died in a week. Peggy crossed to Paris with the museum money and a new ambition: a painting a day.

In that narrowing window, with no certainty that their work or their lives would survive the year, the artists sold to the American woman who came knocking. The longest negotiation was with Brancusi, who asked four thousand dollars for Bird in Space and would not come down. Months later, with the Germans nearing Paris, Peggy arrived to collect the sculpture. Brancusi had been polishing it by hand, tears streaming down his face.

She offered the collection to the Louvre, and the Louvre refused it. She had it crated and shipped to the barn of a friend’s school near Vichy, listed on the documents as household goods. Three days before the Germans entered Paris, Peggy and a friend loaded a convertible with two Persian cats and canisters of hoarded gasoline and drove east, against the current of a country in flight. Through the autumn and into winter she moved between Megève and Marseille, where Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee were forging papers and securing visas for artists and intellectuals.

Peggy financed the escape of André Breton and his family. In December 1940, plainclothes police raided the villa where the refugees were housed and arrested everyone inside, holding them on a ship in the harbor. That winter, Max Ernst arrived, just released from a prison camp. He was legendary for his beauty, and there was something in the gap between his courtesy and his violence that Peggy could not look away from.

The courtship was two sentences. When can we meet again? Tomorrow at four. They crossed France, then Spain, then Portugal.

In Lisbon they boarded a Pan American Clipper, a flying boat that carried them west across the Atlantic. Max spoke little to her, and painted landscapes dense with vegetation and populated by women, Leonora Carrington’s face in canvas after canvas. Peggy appeared only as a grotesque. I was jealous that he never painted me, she wrote.

It was a cause of great unhappiness to me and proof that he did not love me. She married him anyway, to keep him in the country. Art of This Century opened on October 20, 1942, on the top floor of 30 West 57th Street, two lofts remade by a Viennese architect into something New York had never seen. The floors were turquoise, the walls billowed like dark sails, and the paintings floated on rope pulleys at eye level.

The press came, the public came, and Eleanor Roosevelt came. The woman who had been told she had no eye had built the most radical gallery in America. In the spring of 1943, a jury for a show of young artists chose a large canvas by a painter named Jackson Pollock, a brooding, barely verbal man from Wyoming working as a handyman under the bullying supervision of Peggy’s uncle’s mistress. Peggy had dismissed the work.

But Mondrian stood before it for twenty minutes, and then he turned and told her this may be the most exciting painting I have seen in a long time, here or in Europe. Peggy gave Pollock a contract of $150 a month against future sales, enough for him to quit the museum and paint full-time. The first solo show opened that November, and Robert Coates in The New Yorker called Pollock a real discovery. The Museum of Modern Art bought The She-Wolf for $600.

By 1947 the war had been over for two years, and Peggy was ready to leave. She sold the gallery and bought an unfinished one-story palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. She installed the collection, hung the Pollocks and the Kandinskys, and opened the palazzo to the public three days a week, giving the tours herself in a bathrobe. She glided through the canals in her private gondola, wearing the enormous butterfly-shaped sunglasses that hid the face she had hated since Cincinnati and framed the eye that had found Pollock.

The young Venetian artists waved as she passed. There was one last love affair, with a man twenty-three years younger who had no interest in art, who wanted a sports car, and who was killed driving it outside Venice. After Raoul there were no more great love affairs. But Pegeen was in Paris, and Pegeen was not well.

She had married young, had three sons, and her depression deepened with the drinking and the pills. In February 1967, an argument with her husband lasted until exhaustion ended it. Pegeen went to sleep in the maid’s room. When he woke, the room was silent.

The official cause of death was an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. Peggy refused to believe her daughter had taken her own life. There was no one in the world I loved so much, she wrote. I felt all the light had gone out of my life.

She kept a memorial room for Pegeen in the palazzo, with brightly colored paintings and a photograph of her daughter with her hand raised to her throat, as if she were just on the point of speaking. Twelve quiet years followed. Dogs, a dozen at a time, followed her from room to room and rode in the gondola with her when the evening light came off the water. On the roof she sunbathed naked, the butterfly glasses on her face.

In 1976, the collection was transferred to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The art that had been crated as household goods and hidden in a barn near Vichy and shipped across the Atlantic was permanent at last. A woman who had been always leaving had built something that did not.

On December 23, 1979, a stroke took her, at eighty-one. Her ashes were buried in the garden of the palazzo beside the dogs. The gravestone reads simply: Peggy Guggenheim. Today the Calder mobiles turn slowly in the air off the Grand Canal, and the Pollocks hang on white walls, and the Brancusi gleams in the entrance hall.

The light comes through the windows and turns violet as the hours progress, and the water reflects against the ceiling, and in the silence after the last whistle of a tune a father had invented himself, the woman who had lived through war and abuse and loss was finally home.