The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, room by room in Venice

In a nutshell: one of the finest 20th-century art collections anywhere, still hanging in Peggy Guggenheim's own palazzo - Pollock, Picasso, Magritte, Dalí and the Surrealists, room by room. Next door: the Accademia and the palaces of Dorsoduro; start from the district overview.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) - American-born heiress to the Guggenheim mining fortune and niece of Solomon Guggenheim, who founded New York's modern-art museum of the same name - left her stamp as friend, lover and benefactor of modern artists. As a gallery owner she carried Europe's avant-garde to a skeptical America; as a collector she conferred instant cachet on art too radical for the establishment; as a patron she kept starving painters such as Jackson Pollock fed; and as a personality she lived larger than life - unconventional, original, with a string of lovers that won her the reputation of a female Casanova. In 1948 she decamped to Venice, taking over a small, unfinished palazzo on the Grand Canal; today it is a delightful museum, still arranged much as it was in her day, holding one of the finest 20th-century art collections anywhere - and the only museum I can think of whose owner is buried in the garden. The museum overlooks the Grand Canal, a five-minute walk from the Accademia Bridge (vaporetto: Accademia) or from La Salute Church (vaporetto: Salute); a stylish way across the Grand Canal is the Santa Maria del Giglio traghetto. Tickets run €16, €9 for students under 26, free for children under 10; hours are Wednesday to Monday 10.00–18.00, closed Tuesday; audioguide €7. You can avoid the queue by reserving a timed-entry ticket online in advance - a wise move when Venice is packed. Free talks by museum staff are given several times daily in the galleries or the garden (check the website for times and topics), and the art interns supervising the works are glad to discuss individual pieces if you ask. Baggage check is free and mandatory for anything larger than a small purse; allow an hour. Contact: +39 041 240 5411, www.guggenheim-venice.it. There's a pricey café on the premises, but the Dorsoduro neighborhood offers far better options, especially around the Accademia; if contemporary art is your thing, this is your neighborhood - browse the galleries and call at the Punta della Dogana museum next to La Salute.

Begin in the sculpture-garden courtyard, scattered with statues - a wing to the left houses the café, a wing to the right the main collection, plus a modern annex. In the far corner, along a brick wall, lies Peggy's grave and those of her dogs: "Here Lie My Beloved Babies" marks the resting place of her small, long-haired Lhasa Apsos, her loyal companions as she aged - among the names, alongside Cappuccino and Baby, you'll see Pegeen, after her daughter, and Sir Herbert, honoring Herbert Read, the art critic who helped Peggy build her collection - while a plain plaque reads "Here Rests Peggy Guggenheim 1898-1979". Over your right shoulder, the flourishing olive tree is a gift from one of Peggy's old traveling companions, Yoko Ono. In the rebellious 1960s, Peggy's once-shocking art and unconventional lifestyle became more accepted, even ordinary; by the 1970s she was universally recognized as a major force in early modern art, finally honored by the Venetians with the nickname L'Ultima Dogaressa - the Last Dogaressa. The collection runs (very) roughly chronologically, from Cubism through the post-World War II generation; its strengths are Abstract, Surrealist and Abstract-Surrealist art. Hanging arrangements may change, so treat this as an orientation rather than a painting-by-painting itinerary - and remember that what makes this collection unique is that it hangs in Peggy's own home, much as it did in her lifetime, looked after by bright young art students rather than the weary civil servants of Venice's public museums.

Imagine Peggy welcoming guests in the entrance hall - posed before Alexander Calder's trembling-leaf mobile, flanked by Picassos and Magrittes, surrounded by her yapping dogs and meowing cats, and wearing her Calder-designed earrings, her Mondrian-patterned dress and her Catwoman sunglasses. During the 1950s and 60s this old palazzo on the Grand Canal was a shrine for the "Moderns": composer Igor Stravinsky, actor Marlon Brando, painter Mark Rothko, writer Truman Capote, choreographer George Balanchine, Beatle John Lennon and performance artist Yoko Ono all came to sip cocktails, tour the great art, trade ideas and meet the woman who had become a living legend. Of all her paintings, Peggy's favorite was Picasso's On the Beach (1937), with its odd balloon-animal women playing with a sailboat; beside it hangs Magritte's Empire of Light (1953–54), the surreal pairing of a daylight sky dotted with cumulus and a nighttime street in one canvas - exactly the sort of uncanny paradox the Surrealists adored. In the dining room, the slender table at the center is a reminder that this museum really was her home for the last 30 years of her life: here she entertained a stream of artists and celebrities, from actor Paul Newman to poet Allen Ginsberg, from sculptor Henry Moore to playwright Tennessee Williams, from James Bond creator Ian Fleming to glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. Much of the art dates from her childhood, raised in luxury in New York: her grandfather, Meyer Guggenheim, emigrated from Switzerland to America and had the luck to invest in the silver mines at Leadville, Colorado. In 1912 the Titanic went down, taking her playboy tycoon father with it - leaving his 14-year-old daughter a modest but comfortable trust fund and a man-sized void in her life. Coming of age, she spurned her conventional upbringing, began frequenting a radical bookstore, got a botched nose job, and set about planning a European escape; in 1920, 21-year-old Peggy landed in Paris, where an artistic revolution was erupting. In the dining room you'll also find Picasso's The Poet (1911), a vaguely recognizable Cubist portrait from the waist up - brown fragments of the Old World reassembled, tapering to a head at the top, smoking a pipe(?), and cradling the poet's traditional lyre; Duchamp's Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (1911–12), a self-portrait jiggled into a brown blur by the speeding train (Duchamp, of course, is remembered less for his paintings than for his audacious conceptual gestures: the urinal-as-sculpture Fountain and the mustached Mona Lisa titled L.H.O.O.Q. - and in a 2004 poll of British artists his urinal was voted the most influential modern artwork of all time); and Brancusi's Maiastra (c. 1912), a gleaming polished bronze bird that returns to the essential forms of "primitive" African art, in which even the simplest figures radiate power.

Next door, in the kitchen, Vassily Kandinsky's White Cross (1922) experiments with new harmonies of color and line, yielding something purely lovely even if it doesn't "mean" anything - as Kandinsky put it, his art was like "visual music - just open your eyes and look" - while Marc Chagall's Rain (1911) recasts scenes of his Russian homeland in a romantic, weightless, childlike joy: rain clouds mass over a farmhouse, the wind bends the trees and the people, and everyone braces for the downpour (quick, get the horse into the barn, grab an umbrella, and gather up the goats among the clouds). These are the years when trust-fund Peggy lived the bohemian life in Paris in the Roaring Twenties: days over coffee in cafés, trading ideas with activist Emma Goldman, writer Djuna Barnes and photographer Man Ray; nights dancing to jazz until all hours and talking about Freud and s-e-x. One evening, atop the Eiffel Tower, a dashing artist and intellectual nicknamed "The King of Bohemia" popped the question: Peggy and Laurence Vail were soon married and had two children, though the partying merely slackened a little. In the living room, Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red (1938–39) is a blueprint for Modernism: the T-square style distills painting to its fundamentals - black lines, white canvas and the three primary colors in orderly arrangements, and this stripped-down canvas even omits yellow and blue. For Mondrian, deeply immersed in Eastern mysticism, up vs. down and left vs. right stood for life's shifting dualities; the canvas is a bird's-eye view of his private landscape. Step onto the terrace: Marino Marini's equestrian statue, The Angel of the City (1948), faces the Grand Canal, arms spread wide and head thrown back in sheer ecstasy, with an eternal erection for the city of Venice. Marini originally gave his bronze rider a screw-off penis - less scandalous than it sounds - removable for prudish guests or curious ones; someone stole it for unknown reasons, so the present member is welded permanently in place. The palazzo - formally Palazzo Venier dei Leoni - looks modern but is old: construction began in 1748, yet only the ground floor was completed, legend has it because members of a rival family across the canal quashed the plans for the upper stories so their own home wouldn't be outshone. It stayed unfinished until Peggy bought it in 1948 and fixed it up, adding the annex in 1958; the lions (leoni) of the original palace still guard the waterfront entrance. Peggy's flamboyant and rather alien presence - drinking, dressing outrageously, sunbathing on her rooftop for all to see - was not immediately embraced by the Venetians, but for artists in the 1950s and 60s her palazzo was the place to be, especially when the Biennale brought the jet set: everyone from actor Alec Guinness to political satirist Art Buchwald to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper signed her guest book. Picture Peggy and her guests, in evening dress, boarding her custom-built gondola (nicknamed La Barchessa, after the doge's private boat) for a slow drift down the canal toward a martini or a Bellini at Harry's Bar.

Now enter the guest bedroom for a generous helping of Surrealism. In 1928 Peggy's marriage to Laurence Vail ended; in 1937 she began an on-again, off-again relationship with playwright Samuel Beckett, who steered her toward modern painting and sculpture; and she fell in with the French Surrealists - from Marcel Duchamp to writer André Breton to filmmaker Jean Cocteau - with Duchamp above all mentoring her to spend her money collecting and promoting modern art. Paul Delvaux's The Break of Day (1937) shows bare-breasted women with roots casting long shadows as they wake to a mysterious dawn; Yves Tanguy's The Sun in Its Jewel Case (1937) - exhibited in May 1938 at Guggenheim Jeune, the London gallery Peggy opened - fills a brooding, dreamlike landscape with strange, phallic, tissue-and-bone growths throwing long shadows across the terrain of the mind. Peggy said the picture "frightened" her, then added, "I got over my fear…and now I own it." She was drawn to Tanguy and had a brief but intense affair with the married man, who was, like his art, wild and impulsive - occasionally shocking friends by suddenly catching and gulping down a spider, washed down with white wine. The Surrealists cast themselves as spokesmen for Freud's "id", the untamed region of the psyche that thinks indecent thoughts while the "ego" sleeps. Salvador Dalí could draw superbly, and he painted "unreal" scenes with photographic precision, persuading us they could genuinely happen: in The Birth of Liquid Desires (1931–32), his men explore the caverns of the dream world and metamorphose before our eyes. Personally, Peggy disliked Dalí and his work, but she dutifully purchased this canvas, through his wife Gala, to round out her holdings. Max Ernst's The Antipope (c. 1942) presents a horse-headed nude in red - a portrait of Peggy, or so she believed when she saw it. She adored the painting and insisted that Ernst, whom she would later wed, give it to her as a wedding present, retitled The Mystic Marriage. Others read more into it: is the horse-headed warrior at the right Ernst himself, courted by one of his art students? Is that Peggy's daughter Pegeen at center, watching the scene sadly from a distance? And is Peggy turning toward her beloved Max, dimly suspicious of the young student who would, in fact, end up taking Max from her? Back in 1939 Peggy had moved to Paris, renting an apartment on the Ile St. Louis; with the Nazis approaching, she spent her days shopping for masterpieces, calling personally on artists in their studios - from Brancusi to Dalí to Giacometti - working from a list compiled by Duchamp and others and often negotiating directly with them. Picasso initially turned her away, dismissing her as a gauche bargain-hunting housewife: "Madame, you'll find the lingerie department on the second floor." But within a few short months she bought 37 of the paintings now in the collection, quite possibly saving them from a Nazi regime that branded such art "decadent". In 1941, with the Nazis occupying Paris and most of Europe, Peggy fled her adopted homeland, sailing from Lisbon to safety in New York with her stash of paintings and her new companion Max Ernst; she married Ernst, their home became a gathering place for exiled French Surrealists and young American artists, and in 1942 she opened a gallery/museum called Art of This Century that featured, well, essentially the collection we see here in Venice.

In the East Wing, the postwar years: a group of young American painters - from Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell to Robert De Niro Sr. (the actor's father) - were profoundly influenced by Peggy's collection and, adopting Kandinsky's abstraction, practiced surrealist spontaneity to "express" themselves through the physical act of laying paint on canvas: Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock's Enchanted Forest (1947) drips and splashes a dense web across the canvas - picture "Jack the Dripper" in his studio, jiving to the hi-fi, caroming off the walls, flinging paint in a flash of alcohol-fueled revelation. Peggy helped make Pollock a star: she bought his earliest works (which betray Abstract-Surrealist roots), showed him at her gallery, and even paid him a monthly stipend to keep experimenting. (By the way, if you haven't yet sampled the Venetian specialty spaghetti al nero di seppia - spaghetti with squid in its own ink - it looks rather like this.) In 1946 Peggy published her memoirs, Out of This Century, with the front cover designed by Max Ernst and the back by Pollock. In 1947, after a grand farewell exhibition by Pollock, she closed Art of This Century, crated her collection and shipped it to Venice; in 1948 she bought the palazzo and moved in. This was her bedroom: she painted it turquoise, commissioned the silver headboard by Alexander Calder for her canopy bed, used its silver frame to hang her collection of earrings handcrafted by the likes of Calder and Tanguy, hung Venetian mirrors on the walls beside a sentimental portrait of herself and her sister as children, and kept ex-husband Laurence Vail's collage-decorated bottles on the nightstand. The same year she moved in, Peggy showed her collection in its own pavilion at the Biennale, Venice's world's fair of art - it was the hit of the show, and Europeans were staggered, finally seeing the "degenerate" art banned under fascism plus the radical new work coming out of New York. In 1951 she met the last great love of her life, Raoul, an easygoing, blue-collar Italian with no interest whatsoever in art: she was 53, he was 30; when Raoul died in a car accident in 1954, Peggy consoled herself with her pets. The tiny corner room beside the bedroom displays paintings by her daughter Pegeen, who inherited some of Laurence Vail's artistic talent: childlike scenes of Venice peopled by skinny Barbie dolls with antennae. Pegeen married twice, had four children, suffered badly from depression, and died of a barbiturate overdose in 1967. The guest bedroom was a busy place: Pegeen and her brother Sinbad visited, as did Peggy's ex-husbands and their new loves, and overnight guests ranged from sculptor Alberto Giacometti (who honeymooned here) to writer Paul Bowles to artist Jean Arp. Beyond the core of Peggy's collection and home, the museum complex also houses the Schulhof Collection - some 80-odd works of post-WWII American art that extend the museum into the late 20th century, shown in the small wing set at right angles to the main house: vast, empty canvases by Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko; de Kooning's extremely thick piled paint; Dubuffet's and Tàpies's genuine dirt and organic matter; Fontana's punctured canvases where the hole itself is the subject; Warhol's Pop Art; Riley's mind-bending Op Art; and Cy Twombly's crayon scribbles suggesting handwritten messages - many of these artists, from Calder to Fontana to Chillida to Riley to Twombly, were first introduced to the world at the Venice Biennale. Peggy opened her formidable sculpture collection to the Venetian public for free in the garden, with first-rate works by all the greats from Brancusi to Giacometti - though after so much art, you may find the trees, so scarce in urban Venice, more compelling. The wing overlooking the garden, the Barchessa, has housed the Gianni Mattioli Collection since 1997, with numerous masterpieces of Italian Futurism. Across the garden, the long building facing the main palazzo hosts temporary exhibitions along with a café and shop: here you'll find paintings and sculptures by the postwar generation of Italian artists touched by Peggy's collection, a lone canvas by Modigliani, Futurist pieces, and fine sculptural works by the father of Futurism, Umberto Boccioni - his Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses (1915), assembled from wood, cardboard and metal (in fact, this statue was wrecked by the destructive energy of Boccioni's own children, who scattered the cardboard "houses" while riding it as a rocking horse), and his bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), the dynamic cyborg surging forward rippled by the winds of history - check your pocket for one of Italy's €0.20 coins and compare. Step into the café just to browse the fascinating black-and-white photographs of Peggy posed with her art, taken in the very rooms where the paintings now hang. And if, after your visit, you still don't care for modern art, consider what Peggy used to tell baffled visitors: "Come back again in 50 years."

Peggy's collection has kept growing since her day. A dedicated wing holds the Hannelore B and Rudolph Schulhof Collection, bequeathed after Hannelore's death in 2012 - postwar art from America and Europe by Cy Twombly, Barbara Hepworth, Mark Rothko, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, including Jean Buffet's unsettling 1950 Portrait of the Soldier Lucien Geominne and Willem de Kooning's raw 1963 Nude Figure – Woman on the Beach. Rotating early works include Picasso's A Poet (1911) and Mondrian's Ocean 5 (1915), while Jackson Pollock's Alchemy (1947) ranks among the first revolutionary 'poured' paintings, created after Peggy staged his first solo exhibition in New York back in 1943. She also championed Italian moderns sidelined after the war - Giorgio de Chirico, Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni, along with the home-grown Giuseppe Santomaso and Emilio Vedova. In Nasher Sculpture Garden, bronzes by Giacometti and Henry Moore mingle with granite works by Isamu Noguchi and Anish Kapoor, and Mario Merz's blue neon script trails along a wall smothered in ivy. The palazzo itself, commissioned by the Venier family in 1749, reputedly cost Peggy US$60,000; one earlier owner, Luisa Casati, kept a cheetah among her exotic pets. Free 10- to 15-minute talks on Peggy's life run throughout the day, and staff wearing 'Ask me about the Art' badges are interns happy to chat.