Legendary art patron Peggy Guggenheim, whose Palazzo Venier dei Leoni home in Venice remains a living museum , once told WWD that “in art there is always a new movement waiting to be born.”

Peggy, as WWD referred to her, remains one of the 20th century’s most prolific collectors. An original in her own right, she advised, critiqued, collected and befriended many of the century’s greatest artists. Her early travels in the 1920s and 1930s blurred the lines between escapism and art acquisition.

In 1979, she told WWD that she couldn’t afford the Renaissance paintings she preferred, so she turned to lesser-known modern artists. Tutoring from painter Marcel Duchamp led to the opening of Jeune, her first gallery , in London in 1938. There, she introduced a reluctant audience to Henry Moore, Brancusi, Calder and Kandinsky.

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Three years later, she opened the landmark gallery Art of This Century in New York.…