Chronicles the life of the creator of one of America's most stunning museums-an American original whose own life was remade by art; includes archival photos of her world, museum and the art she collected.

A colorful character who was not only ahead of her time but helped to define it, Peggy Guggenheim was an heiress to her family fortune who became a central figure in the modern art movement. As she moved through the cultural upheaval of the 20th century, she collected not only art, but artists. Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp as well as countless others....

The life story of the bohemian socialite who rebelled against her famous family and became a renowned art collector. Peggy Guggenheim emerges in Mistress of Modernism as the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist...

"A picture-book biography of renowned art collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, who independently built one of the country's greatest art collections, then donated it to the National Gallery of Art"--

Sam Wagstaff, the legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, emerges as a cultural visionary in this groundbreaking biography in which Wagstaff's largely overlooked influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century, is portrayed.