Peggy Guggenheim’s life was never far from controversy. Born in 1898 in New York into the Guggenheim family, one of the world’s leading families in the business of silver, copper and lead mining, she was aged just thirteen when her father tragically died on the Titanic and as a young heiress lived in bohemian Paris at the height of the 1920s. Her friendships and relationships with influential artists and writers such as Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett, would come to engage her into the world of art collecting and from the 1930s up to the 1970s she amassed one of the most highly regarded modern art collections in the world, featuring works by Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. As a champion of modern art she represented artists at her galleries in New York and London, and provided crucial support to then unknown artists such as Jackson Pollock. In this lecture, Isabella Boorman explores the dazzling life of Guggenheim, a self-confessed ‘art addict’ and focuses on key artworks from her personal major modern art collection, which would come to form the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, one of Italy’s most visited and iconic museums.