Peggy Guggenheim’s granddaughter, Karole P.B. Vail, has been appointed as director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, replacing Philip Rylands who led the museum for 37 years. Vail, who has been a Guggenheim curator since 1997, takes up the post this month in Italy. She is currently based at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York where she organised exhibitions such as Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (2016).
Vail is co-organising a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti due to open in New York next year. She says in a statement: “I have known and loved Peggy’s collection, and the palazzo and garden that are its home, since I was a child. Now it is my privilege and honour to lead this exceptional institution, carrying forward Peggy’s vision and ensuring that it remains a vital part of today’s culture, as she would have wanted it to be.”
The appointment caps a turbulent period for the Guggenheim. Earlier this year, three great-grandchildren of Peggy Guggenheim accused the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York of defying the wishes of the late collector. The New York museum’s current exhibition, Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim (until 6 September), celebrates collectors who helped shape the foundation. It includes 21 works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The row followed a long-running legal dispute between the Guggenheim Foundation and the collector’s descendants.
Born in New York, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was 21 when she inherited her share of the mining fortune of her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, who died in the sinking of the Titanic. She moved to Paris a year later and lived among avant-garde artists and writers.
Between 1938 and 1942, she opened galleries in London and New York, where she helped establish the careers of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst (she was briefly married to the latter). By 1949, she was living in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she displayed her collection of Modern art.
