Peggy Guggenheim Quotes

I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it.

It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.

I look back on my life with great joy. I think it was a very successful life. I always did what I wanted and never cared what anyone thought. Women's lib? I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it.

I took advice from none but the best. I listened, how I listened! That's how I finally became my own expert.

[On amassing art for her collection:] My motto was 'Buy a picture a day' and I lived up to it.

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart.

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day.

[When asked how many husbands she had had:] My own, or other people's?

If anything can rival Venice in its beauty, it must be its reflection at sunset in the Grand Canal.

I was much more interested in literature than I was in art. I just got into art by mistake.

I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

Venice is not only a city of fantasy and freedom. It is also a city of joy and pleasure.

Peace was the one thing that Max (Ernst) needed in order to paint, and love was the one thing I needed in order to live. As neither of us gave the other what he most desired, our union was doomed to failure.

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing.

My knowledge of art ended at impressionism.

I don't collect anymore. Everything is so terribly expensive. I don't see anything I like anyhow.

I personally always hated Pop art.

[On John Tunnard:] One day a marvelous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked a little like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz-band leader, which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miró's.

My mother's one idea was to sacrifice her life to her children and she had done nothing else since the death of my father. We wished that she had married again instead.

I thought it would be nice to marry Virgil [Thomson] to have a musical background, but I never got far with the project.