December 1941. The marble-floored gallery at 30 West 57th Street in New York. Peggy Guggenheim, art dealer and heiress to a copper-mining fortune, stands before her guests at the opening of her revolutionary gallery, Art of This Century. On her arm is Max Ernst, the 49-year-old German surrealist painter whose work covers the walls.

Champagne flows, the avant-garde applauds, and society photographers capture the moment. What they do not photograph is the young woman watching from the corner, pale and trembling. Pegeen Guggenheim, twenty-one years old, Peggy’s daughter, had been in love with this same man only months before. Her mother had just stolen her lover and married him.

The room glitters with wealth and scandal. Peggy wears a dress designed by her architect, Frederick Kiesler, an avant-garde creation that shocks even this bohemian crowd. Ernst wears a suit she bought him. The gallery itself represents $400,000 of her inheritance, the equivalent of roughly $15 million today.

The art on the walls represents another $2 million spent, part of a collection that would eventually number 14,000 pieces worth an estimated $75 million in modern value. Peggy Guggenheim, forty-three years old, was expected to be a quiet society wife and a gracious philanthropist. Instead, she had become the most sexually liberated woman in the Western world, a collector who slept with her artists, and a mother who competed with her own daughter. Within hours of the marriage announcement, the art world exploded.

The telephone at the Guggenheim family offices rang constantly. Solomon Guggenheim, her uncle and the head of his own museum, refused to take her calls. Her aunts discussed cutting her off entirely. The family lawyers reviewed trust documents searching for morality clauses.

Society columnists sharpened their pens, and one headline read, “Guggenheim heiress marries daughter’s beau. ” Pegeen moved out of her mother’s townhouse, taking nothing but her clothes and her grief. She would never fully forgive her mother. The surrealist community fractured as well.

André Breton, founder of the movement, sided with Pegeen. Marcel Duchamp, Peggy’s close friend and advisor, remained neutral. The New York art scene became operatic. The whispers intensified: she slept with half the artists she represented, she used her fortune to collect men like she collected paintings, she kept a documented list of every conquest with a goal of one thousand.

The gossip was not entirely unfair. Peggy had been candid about her sexual appetites, discussing her lovers with the same cataloging precision she applied to cubist paintings. Samuel Beckett, depressive but brilliant. Yves Tanguy, passionate but married.

John Holmes, the love of her life, dead from a fall. Each affair documented and assessed. Within weeks, the Ernst marriage settled into a pattern that shocked even those who thought they understood her. She continued her affairs.

He continued painting, using her money and connections. They lived in separate bedrooms. The marriage was less a union than a business arrangement wrapped in surrealist theater. It lasted four years before divorce, but the damage to her relationship with Pegeen lasted forever.

To understand how she arrived at that moment, it is necessary to go back to the beginning. Marguerite Guggenheim was born August 26, 1898, into the greatest family fortune in American history. Her grandfather, Meyer Guggenheim, arrived in Philadelphia in 1847, a Swiss immigrant of twenty with nothing but ambition. He sold stove polish door-to-door, then imported Swiss embroidery, then established a trading business.

The real fortune began in 1881 when a debtor offered Meyer shares in two Colorado silver mines as payment. Meyer took the shares, traveled to Leadville, and discovered the mines were worth far more than the debt. By 1887, he was earning over $1 million annually from mining operations. He brought all seven of his sons into the business.

Unlike the Vanderbilt sons who fought over their father’s railroad empire, the Guggenheim boys worked in coordinated ruthlessness, creating American Smelting and Refining Company and controlling copper mining across three continents. Benjamin Guggenheim, Peggy’s father, was son number five. Charming, cultured, and fond of luxury, he handled the lifestyle side of the family enterprise, occupying the Paris office and spending lavishly. By 1898, when Peggy was born, his personal fortune stood at $40 million, about $1 billion today.

The family collectively controlled an estimated 70 percent of global copper production. Benjamin married Florette Seligman in 1894, a woman from a banking family equal in wealth but superior in social standing. The wedding cost $50,000. The couple settled in a seven-story mansion at 15 East 72nd Street with a ballroom for 200 guests and a staff of 23.

Peggy arrived as the second daughter. Her father had wanted a son, and this disappointment shaped everything. She grew up wealthy but emotionally neglected. Florette was distant and more concerned with social position than maternal warmth.

Benjamin was often absent. Peggy developed what she called her Jewish nose and became convinced she was ugly. Her mother did not contradict this assessment. In 1908, ten-year-old Peggy discovered her father maintained a mistress, a French singer installed in an apartment on the Upper West Side.

The discovery taught her that marriage was performance and fidelity was fiction. She would remember this lesson. On April 14, 1912, Benjamin Guggenheim died on the Titanic, dressed in evening clothes. The famous story has him declaring that he and his valet had dressed in their best and were prepared to go down like gentlemen.

The quote appeared in newspapers worldwide. Benjamin’s death revealed the structure of Peggy’s financial future. His estate totaled $7 million, significantly less than expected, because he had spent lavishly, maintained expensive mistresses, and invested poorly. Each daughter received trust funds generating income, but not capital.

Peggy’s trust, administered by her uncles Solomon and Murray, produced annual income starting at $250,000 at age twenty-one, roughly $5 million a year in modern currency. She had enormous income but limited capital access. Her uncles disapproved of her independent and bohemian ways and made accessing money deliberately difficult. Peggy reached twenty-one in August 1919 with an income of approximately $20,000 monthly.

Her mother arranged for her to work at a bookstore on Fifth Avenue as a genteel occupation. She worked there for two years, meeting writers and artists, discovering people who valued ideas over money. She also lost her virginity at twenty-one, an experience that was perfunctory but liberating. She had escaped the virgin prison that confined her mother’s generation and began treating relationships casually.

In 1920, she met Laurence Vail, a handsome, intellectual, alcoholic, and violent American expatriate. They married in March 1922 in Paris, in a deliberately unconventional ceremony with no family and no fuss. The marriage proved catastrophic. Within months, Vail was throwing furniture and hitting her.

She stayed, partly from insecurity, partly from stubborn pride. They had two children, Sinbad and Péguine, born 1923 and 1925. Peggy was an indifferent mother, hiring nurses while preferring Parisian nightlife to maternal duty. She began collecting art, small pieces at first, a Kandinsky drawing, a Brancusi sculpture.

By 1927, the marriage had deteriorated completely. Vail was drunk daily and violent weekly. Peggy took lovers, including the writer John Holmes, whom she supported financially while still married. The divorce came in 1930, by which time she had spent approximately $1 million on the marriage.

The 1929 crash devastated Guggenheim wealth as copper prices collapsed, shrinking the family’s collective fortune by an estimated 60 percent. But the trust structure protected Peggy. Her income continued at a reduced but substantial rate. She saw that money was fragile and decided that the thing worth spending it on was art.

John Holmes died in 1934, falling drunk downstairs. The loss changed her. Sexual conquest became her primary hobby. She began documenting lovers and treating men as collectibles.

The thousand-lover goal emerged around this time, not as exaggeration but as actual intention. In January 1938, she opened Guggenheim Jeune at 30 Cork Street in London. She had educated herself, studying with critic Herbert Read and consulting with Marcel Duchamp, who taught her how to look at art and how to trust her own eye. She showed Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder, spending approximately $100,000 annually running the gallery.

It lost money consistently, but that was not the point. She was establishing herself as serious in the art world. She also began sleeping with her artists. The pattern emerged: she discovered a talent, supported their work, took them as lovers, moved on.

In 1939, war threatened Europe, and Peggy made a crucial decision. She would buy a painting a day before leaving Europe, moving through Paris systematically with a list of artists prepared by Duchamp and Read. Prices were low and artists were desperate. In six months, she spent $40,000 and acquired approximately 70 major works that would eventually be worth tens of millions.

By June 1940, the Nazis entered Paris. She listed her collection as household goods to avoid export restrictions, packing Kandinskys alongside pots and pans. The subterfuge worked. The art reached the Louvre depot for storage.

Peggy escaped France in July 1940 and arrived in New York in August. Back in New York, she began planning Art of This Century. She leased space at 30 West 57th Street and hired Frederick Kiesler, whose revolutionary design featured curved walls, unframed paintings on baseball bats, indirect lighting, and paintings on pulleys. The construction cost $80,000.

Opening night in October 1942 drew 1,000 guests. The art world was stunned. Nothing like this existed in America. Jackson Pollock, then unknown, had his first show there in 1943.

Peggy gave him a monthly stipend of $150 and paid $700 for paintings that would sell for hundreds of millions decades later. The Ernst affair began in 1941. He was married to Leonora Carrington, but Peggy pursued him aggressively, offering money, studio space, and gallery representation. Ernst left Carrington and moved in with Peggy.

The problem was that Pegeen, now twenty, had also fallen for Ernst. She was young and vulnerable, and she interpreted his kindness as love. When Peggy announced she was marrying Ernst in December 1941, Pegeen was devastated. This was the scandal that opened the story.

The marriage lasted until 1946, when Ernst fell for the younger surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Peggy did not fight the divorce. She had already moved on. During the war years, Art of This Century became the center of American modernism, showing Motherwell, Rothko, Still, and Hofmann.

By 1947, Peggy was tired of New York. The art world she created no longer needed her, and she decided to close the gallery and return to Europe. She purchased Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice for $60,000 and moved in with her dogs, her art, and her accumulating lovers. She continued collecting through the 1950s and 1960s, growing the collection to approximately 300 major works eventually valued at $75 million.

She never sold. The art was not an investment; it was her life’s achievement. Her romantic life continued at a frantic pace. She estimated having slept with roughly 1,000 men by her death.

Her relationship with Pegeen never recovered. The daughter married badly multiple times, struggled with alcoholism, and suffered mental illness. In 1967, Pegeen died of a drug overdose at forty-two. Whether it was suicide or accident remains unclear.

Peggy was devastated but not entirely surprised. She had failed as a mother and knew it. Peggy gave her collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1969, ensuring it stayed intact.

The Palazzo became a permanent museum. Tourists line up to see Pollocks and Picassos in the unfinished palace on the Grand Canal. She died in December 1979 at age eighty-one. Her ashes are buried in the Palazzo garden next to her dogs.

The great fortune was mostly spent, transformed from mining profits into modernist masterpieces. The scandal everyone remembers is the Max Ernst marriage, the maternal betrayal. But the fortune purchased a collection that survives her, assembled by a woman who collected men and art with equal compulsion, displayed in a museum that bears her name.