On the night of April 14, 1912, Benjamin Guggenheim, a copper magnate and son of one of America’s wealthiest industrial families, stood on the deck of the sinking Titanic and made a choice that would echo through the lives of his descendants for generations. He removed his life jacket, changed into evening clothes, and returned to the deck, telling a steward who survived to record his words that the men were prepared to go down like gentlemen. He was 46 years old. He left behind a wife, three daughters, and a thirteen-year-old girl named Marguerite, already regarded within the family as the difficult one, the unconventional one, the one who would spend the rest of her life as Peggy Guggenheim.
Her father’s death did not make her rich immediately. The money arrived in stages over two decades, culminating in a $450,000 inheritance from her mother, Florette Seligman Guggenheim, who died in 1937. That money, coming twenty-five years after her father vanished into the Atlantic, was the fortune Peggy used to build a new life. She arrived in Paris in 1921, a young American with a trust fund and access to the expatriate circle of Dadaists, Surrealists, and writers who filled the cafés of the Left Bank.
There she met Laurence Vail, a writer and sculptor known as the King of Bohemia. They married in 1922. Their son, named Sinbad after the sailor, was born in 1923. Two years later came a daughter, whom Peggy named Pegeen, a diminutive of her own name.
The marriage dissolved around 1928, after Peggy fell in love with the English writer John Holms and Vail began an affair with the poet Kay Boyle. The divorce was finalized around 1930, and the custody arrangement that followed shaped both children’s lives. Seven-year-old Sinbad went with Peggy. Five-year-old Pegeen went with her father.
Peggy was thirty-two, a woman who had built her entire adult existence around art and freedom, neither of which coexisted easily with school routines and bedtimes. Laurence Vail was charming, volatile, and by Peggy’s own account prone to public outbursts that included throwing food and breaking objects in restaurants. Neither parent was a monster. Neither parent restructured a life around the needs of two small children.
In January 1938, Peggy opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London with her inheritance. She showed Kandinsky, Cocteau, Tanguy, Brancusi—work no one else in London was exhibiting at that moment. When war broke out in 1939 and the German advance moved through France, artists began to understand what occupation would mean for their work and their lives. Peggy began buying one painting a day.
She bought from desperate sellers at collapsed prices while other collectors fled to safety. She shipped the collection across the Atlantic disguised as household goods, and every painting survived. She arrived in New York in 1941 with the collection, with the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, who became her second husband, and with her sixteen-year-old daughter Pegeen. Sinbad, then eighteen, remained in Europe.
Peggy left him there. On October 20, 1942, she opened Art of This Century on West 57th Street in Manhattan. The gallery, designed by Frederick Kiesler, had curved walls, paintings mounted on baseball bats, works displayed from behind curtains and on a mechanical wheel, and a vibrating floor. Within weeks, every significant name in the New York art world had walked through the door.
The most consequential discovery was a young man from Wyoming who had been working as a maintenance man at her uncle’s museum. His name was Jackson Pollock. Peggy recognized what she was looking at before most critics had the vocabulary to describe it. She commissioned a mural for the entrance hall of her townhouse, paid him $150 a month, and gave him his first solo exhibition in November 1943.
She made Jackson Pollock. At the height of her influence, her daughter was seventeen and already in depression. Pegeen had begun painting in the Surrealist-influenced style her mother’s gallery championed. Her paintings were full of families at celebrations, couples dancing, children playing in bright colors.
They were not records of her life but of the life she wished had been available. She painted every table set for celebration she had not sat at, every couple whose warmth she had not received, every dancing child that was herself. In one painting, a woman gives birth, her face in visible pain, the child arriving alone without the celebration that surrounds every other scene. Her first suicide attempt came in 1938, when she was thirteen.
The depression had not begun then; it was already there, and 1938 was simply the moment it became visible enough to record. After the war, Peggy returned to Paris, where she met the French painter Jean Hélion, a significant figure who had helped introduce abstract art to America and had escaped a German prisoner-of-war camp. They married in 1946 and moved to Paris. They had three sons.
The marriage ended in 1956. Pegeen left Hélion, took only the youngest son Nicholas, and went to Venice, to her mother’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. The pattern of her own childhood had repeated with surgical precision: the children split, the youngest taken, the return to the mother. At a Francis Bacon opening in London in 1957, a man she did not recognize walked up to her and said they should leave.
She took his hand. He was Ralph Rumney, an English painter and founding member of the Situationist International, a man of radical instinct and no money who had no idea she was Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter. He fell in love with her immediately. When Peggy Guggenheim learned who her daughter had chosen, she offered Rumney $50,000 to leave.
He refused. That refusal set the final chapter of Pegeen’s life in motion. Peggy confronted her daughter with a phrase Rumney recorded and no one disputed: “You’re screwing your way up to quite a collection. ”
Rumney and Pegeen married in 1958.
Their son Sandro was born the same year. Peggy never forgave Rumney for saying no. Pegeen’s husband drank. He had a temper, though there is no documented physical abuse.
Pegeen had spent the 1950s in and out of mental health clinics, managing depression, alcoholism, and anorexia. By the time she and Rumney moved to Paris, to the Île Saint-Louis, she was dependent on prescription medication—medication she obtained through her mother, who supplied the money, the access, and the physician relationships. The woman who had watched her daughter attempt suicide at thirteen, who had described finding her with slit wrists in a bathtub in a register so flat it contained no sentence of consequence, was part of the supply chain for the thing that was killing her. On March 1, 1967, Pegeen Vail Guggenheim died at forty-one in a locked Paris apartment from an overdose of barbiturates.
The coroner confirmed the cause. The manner—deliberate or accidental—was never resolved. The French legal system eventually accepted that it was self-inflicted. Rumney found her.
Peggy Guggenheim, then sixty-eight, received the call in Venice. She had not added a sentence to her memoir about what she owed her daughter. But she filed a civil action against Rumney for murder and for criminal non-assistance to a person in danger. The Guardian, in Rumney’s 2002 obituary, called it months of persecution before the action was dropped, and described him as “unforgivably accused of murder.
” The accusation followed him for decades. After Pegeen’s death, Peggy lived twelve more years in Venice, surrounded by the collection she had pulled out of burning Europe. In 1979, she donated the palazzo and all 326 works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Around the same time, she said one sentence about her daughter unlike any other she had ever spoken: “Her death has left me quite bankrupt. ” She had written 493 pages of memoir and never written anything as true as those six words, and she said them after there was nothing left to do with the truth. Sinbad Vail, the son named for the sailor, was named sole heir to her fortune. She left him $1 million, with another million split among Pegeen’s four sons.
He had edited a literary magazine funded by his mother in 1950s Paris and then worked for years at an insurance company, an ordinary life lived alongside an extraordinary one. He survived his mother by seven years, dying of cancer in 1986 at sixty-three. Peggy Guggenheim died on December 23, 1979, at eighty-one. She is buried in the garden of the palazzo alongside her dogs.
The museum that carries her name draws half a million visitors a year. They walk past the Pollock and the Kandinsky and the Picasso. They walk past Pegeen’s paintings too, the bright scenes of families and dancing children, the world she painted into existence for thirty years because the one she lived in was not available to her. The World she made is still on the wall.
The museum does not put her name on the building.
