‘She was trying to find herself’: the untold story of Peggy Guggenheim, Hampshire homemaker

The socialite and collector prioritised art over family and claimed she had 1,000 lovers. But a new UK exhibition tells another tale – that of the five years she spent in Hampshire and Sussex leading a relatively ordinary life, as her granddaughter explains

Beside the Grand Canal, on a wall of the palazzo she called home for 30 years, a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim fizzes with her larger-than-life personality, a personality that once reverberated between these walls, and across Venice. In the painting, Peggy wears a pair of her signature outsize sunglasses, and clutches three of her beloved Lhasa Apsos terriers. Today, Peggy’s palazzo is a museum housing the art collection she amassed from the 1930s to the 1970s, featuring work by everyone from Picasso to Pollock, Ernst to Kandinsky, Duchamp to Tanguy, all of whom she knew and many of whom she slept with. The portrait hangs outside the office of the museum’s director, who happens also to be Peggy’s fiercest critic. She is Karole Vail, daughter of Peggy’s son, Sindbad.

Vail has been director of the Venice Guggenheim (there are related Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao) since 2017, and it’s fair to say that her take on her grandmother is mired in the belief that, while Peggy was a superlative art collector, she left much to be desired as a mother and grandmother. “She was obsessed with the men in her life: she never focused on her children in the way they needed,” says Vail.